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diff --git a/16424.txt b/16424.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..061eb5f --- /dev/null +++ b/16424.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4534 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Some Christian Convictions, by Henry Sloane Coffin + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Some Christian Convictions + A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking + +Author: Henry Sloane Coffin + +Release Date: August 3, 2005 [EBook #16424] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS *** + + + + +Produced by Eric Betts and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + + + +SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS + + + + + OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR + + THE CREED OF JESUS AND OTHER SERMONS + + SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS + + HYMNS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD EDITED BY H.S. COFFIN AND A.W. VERNON + _The Same for Use in Baptist Churches_ REV. CHARLES W. GILKEY, Co-editor + + IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING (Second printing) + + UNIVERSITY SERMONS (Second printing) + + THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH A CHRISTIAN APPLICATION TO PRESENT CONDITIONS + + + + +Some Christian Convictions + +A PRACTICAL RESTATEMENT IN TERMS OF PRESENT-DAY THINKING + +BY HENRY SLOANE COFFIN + +MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND ASSOCIATE +PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY + +_Non enim omnis qui cogitat credit sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et +credendo sogitat et cogitando credit_.--AUGUSTINE + +COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS + +First published, 1915 Second printing, 1915 Third printing, 1916 Fourth +printing, 1920 + + +TO D.P.C. + +SOCIAE REI HUMANAE ATQUE DIVINAE + + + + +PREFACE + +Bishop Burnet, in his _History of His Own Time_, writes of Sir Harry +Vane, that he belonged "to the sect called 'Seekers,' as being satisfied +with no form of opinion yet extant, but waiting for future discoveries." +The sect of Sir Harry Vane is extraordinarily numerous in our day; and +at various times I have been asked to address groups of its adherents, +both among college students and among thoughtful persons outside +university circles, upon the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Some +of my listeners had been trained in the Church, but had thrown off their +allegiance to it; others had been reared in Judaism or in agnosticism; +others considered themselves "honorary members" of various religious +communions--interested and sympathetic, but uncommitted and +irresponsible; more were would-be Christians somewhat restive +intellectually under the usual statements of Christian truths. It was +for minds of this type that the following lectures were prepared. They +are not an attempt at a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine, +but an effort to restate a few essential Christian convictions in terms +that are intelligible and persuasive to persons who have felt the force +of the various intellectual movements of recent years. They do not +pretend to make any contribution to scholarship; they aim at the less +difficult, but perhaps scarcely less necessary middleman's task of +bringing the results of the study of scholars to men and women who (to +borrow a phrase of Augustine's) "believe in thinking" and wish to "think +in believing." + +They may be criticised by those who, satisfied with the more traditional +ways of stating the historic Christian faith, will dislike their +discrimination between some elements in that faith as more, and others +as less, certain. I would reply that they are intentionally but a +partial presentation of the Gospel for a particular purpose; and further +I find my position entirely covered by the words of Richard Baxter in +his _Reliquiae_: "Among Truths certain in themselves, all are not equally +certain unto me; and even of the Mysteries of the Gospel, I must needs +say with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever men pretend, the subjective +Certainty cannot go beyond the objective Evidence: for it is caused +thereby as the print on the Wax is caused by that on the Seal. I am not +so foolish as to pretend my certainty to be greater than it is, merely +because it is a dishonour to be less certain. They that will begin all +their Certainty with that of the Truth of the Scripture, as the +_Principium Cognoscendi_, may meet me at the same end; but they must +give me leave to undertake to prove to a Heathen or Infidel, the Being +of God and the necessity of Holiness, even while he yet denieth the +Truth of Scripture, and in order to his believing it to be true." + +In preparing the lectures for publication I have allowed the spoken +style in which they were written to remain; several of the chapters, +however, have been somewhat enlarged. + +I am indebted to two of my colleagues, Professor James E. Frame and +Professor A.C. McGiffert, for valuable suggestions in two of the +chapters, and especially to my friend, the Rev. W. Russell Bowie, D.D., +of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Va., who kindly read over the +manuscript. + + + + +CONTENTS + +Introduction--Some Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Which +Have Affected Christian Beliefs 1 + +Chapter 1. Religion 23 + +Chapter 2. The Bible 49 + +Chapter 3. Jesus Christ 78 + +Chapter 4. God 118 + +Chapter 5. The Cross 140 + +Chapter 6. The New Life--Individual and Social 160 + +Chapter 7. The Church 181 + +Chapter 8. The Christian Life Everlasting 205 + + + + +SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS + + + + +INTRODUCTION + +SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED +CHRISTIAN BELIEFS + + +When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stone +was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe nor +any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectual +beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to house +their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of +materials they found already prepared by other movements of the human +mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of the +quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand the +construction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear in +many minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than a +century; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet been +exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but new +openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot be +certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear an +identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of the +principal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of the +temple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit of +the Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out of +the thought of each age. + +_Romanticism_ has been one rich source of material. This literary +movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the +opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by +the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English +Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer +expression to all the elements in human nature. It brought a new feeling +towards nature as alive with a spiritual Presence-- + + Something far more deeply interfused + Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, + And the round ocean, and the living air, + And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: + A motion and a spirit, that impels + All thinking things, all objects of all thought, + And rolls through all things. + +It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for them +miraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and sent +writers, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the pages +of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an inner +Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle, +who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken in +words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols of +the ineffable God. + +To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in +the structure of our present Christian thought: + +(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct, +that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in +feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and +express. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of this +movement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was like +finding names for your feelings." + +(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "from +within" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, but +penetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Him +as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to +us He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five +thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more +startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with +bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to speak +of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that were +joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of the +Almighty," and Christ is not so much God _and_ man, as God _in_ man. + +(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more +parts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnell +entitled an essay that still repays careful reading, _The Gospel a Gift +to the Imagination._ One of our chief complaints with the historic +creeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which +religious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose, +rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process. +Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or +sacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula +of logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in +geometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who have +experienced contact with the living God through Jesus. + +A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from +which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is +_Humanitarianism_. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its struggle +for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, setting +free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war and +cruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, and +devoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier. + +It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of +points. Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of +man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and +bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ. They were +teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with +its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human +justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God. They +proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ's death the +expiation of man's sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in +McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England, the +Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men's consciences, +as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates +a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God, +who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's +transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was +throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel's +enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by +vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and +Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good +than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of sensitive +conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the +Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral: +"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and +he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _Theaet_. +176c). + +From this movement of thought our chief gains have been: + +(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as +good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's +decrees; we speak oftener of His character. + +(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty +to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively +reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it +is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood +at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists. + +A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out +most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the +temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism, +not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings of +things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, _The Origin +of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself +appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominant +everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer +and miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into nature +exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the +things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances. +The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in +the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the +writers of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed a +constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many +attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle was +due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and a +religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either +attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I do +not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Both +physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" as +something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and +what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all the while to new +stimuli, and the title of a recent book, _Creative Evolution_, indicates +a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world. + +From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian +convictions, with much else, these items: + +(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of +insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of +the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the +mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole +creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they +made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate +districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the +supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to +truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response +to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it +must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our +labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of +working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal +fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding +His new and completer entrances into the world's life. + +(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which +religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and +grow in a changing world. + +(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and +attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find +in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now +is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God. + + And not from nature up to nature's God, + But down from nature's God look nature through. + +(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes +that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various +writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today. + +(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more +complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to +light. + +A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this +scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the +Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed, +but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church, +and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined +the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of +indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, +pronounced the _Books of the Chronicles_ less accurate historically than +the _Books of the Kings_, considered the present form of the books of +_Isaiah_, _Jeremiah_ and _Hosea_ probably due to later hands, and +distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less +moment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, and +suggested Barnabas as the writer of the _Epistle to the Hebrews_. But +the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the +Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to +which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery +of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the +Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of +the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they +profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written. + +We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian +thought to these scholarly investigations: + +(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that +falls in with the idea of development or evolution. + +(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history, +science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of +which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God. + +(3) An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin +(however we may end) with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of +God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him +reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from Humanitarianism. +Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antaeus, has always drawn fresh +strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the +Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His +figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in +the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces +are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact +with the Jesus of history. + +Still another opening in the scientific quarry is _Psychology_. The last +century saw great advances in the investigation of the mind of man, +which revolutionized educational methods, gave new tools to novelists +and historians, and threw new light on every aspect of the human spirit. +Psychologists turned their attention to religion, and have done much to +chart out the movements of man's nature in his response to his highest +inspirations. They have altered methods of Biblical education in our +Sunday Schools, have shown us helpful and harmful ways of presenting +religious appeals, and have given us scientific standards to test the +value of the materials employed in public worship. + +We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them: + +(1) The normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been +regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human +spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed +personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You +may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease +to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great +quantity of _Varieties of Religious Experience_, and he deals with all +of them respectfully. + +(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience. Man "wills to +live," and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are +dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any +he can find in his world. He "wills to believe," and discovers an +answer to his faith in the Unseen. This is a reaffirmation of the +definition, "faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test +of things not seen." And the student of religious psychology has now +vastly more material on which to work, because the last century opened +up still another quarry for investigation in _Comparative Religion_. An +Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and +false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less +developed. Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many +striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief. It is not possible +to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is +light, and within the rest all is darkness. Everything that grows out of +man's experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or +practice that has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human +being is without significance. Our own faith is often clarified by +comparing it with that of some supposedly unrelated religion. Many a +usage and conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to +something in our Bible. The development of theology or of ritual in +some other religion throws light on similar developments in +Christianity. The widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our +assurance of the reality of God. "To the philosopher," wrote Max Mueller, +"the existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of +the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought." Under +varied names, and with very differing success in their relations with +the Unseen, men have had fellowship with the one living God. It was this +unity of religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving +to express when they wrote, "Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; +sages name variously Him who is but One." + +This study of comparative religion has gained for us: + +(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity, +and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its +answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths. + +(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go +not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing +religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made +some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith +He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is +to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God +in Jesus Christ. + +A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value +to faith than any of those named, is the _Social Movement_. In the +closing years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on +as voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals, which +had not existed in the original "state of nature" where all men were +supposed to have been free and equal. The closing years of the +Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism, and +talking of "social evolution." This conception of society altered men's +theories of economics, of history, of government. Nor did these newer +theories remain in the classrooms of universities or the meetings of +scientists; they became the platforms of great political parties, like +the Socialists in Germany and France, and the Labor Party in Britain. +Men are thinking, and what is more _feeling_, today, in social terms; +they are revising legislation, producing plays and novels, and +organizing countless associations in the interest of social advance. We +are still too much in the thick of the movement to estimate its results, +and we can but tentatively appraise its contributions to our Christian +thought. + +(1) It has given men a new interest in religion. The intricacies of +social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such +prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, "nine-points of belief." The +social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its +ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts +have been touched with a passion for social righteousness. A recent +historian of the thought of the last century, after reviewing its +scientific and philosophic tendencies, makes the remark that "an +increasing number of thinkers of our age expect the next step in the +solution of the great problems of life to be taken by practical +religion." + +(2) It has made us realize that religion is essentially social. Men's +souls are born of the social religious consciousness; are nourished by +contact with the society of believers, in fellowship with whom they grow +"a larger soul," and find their destiny in a social religious +purpose--the Kingdom of God. + +(3) It has taught us that religious susceptibility is intimately +connected with social status. Spiritual movements have always found some +relatively unimpressionable classes. In primitive Christian times "not +many well-educated, not many influential, not many nobly born were +called"; and in our own age the two least responsive strata in society +are the topmost and the bottom-most--those so well off that they often +feel no pressure of social obligation, and those without the sense of +social responsibility because they have nothing. It is the interest of +spiritual religion to do away with both these strata, placing social +burdens on the former and imposing social privileges on the latter, for +responsibility proves to be the chief sacrament of religion. + +(4) It has brought the Church to a new place of prominence in Christian +thought. Men realize their indebtedness for their own spiritual life to +the collective religious experience of the past, represented in the +Church; their need of its fellowship for their growth in faith and +usefulness; and the necessity of organized religious effort, if society +is to be leavened with the Spirit of Christ. Church membership becomes a +duty for every socially minded Christian. And the social purpose renders +Church unity a pressing task for the existing Christian communions. John +Bunyan's pilgrim could make his progress from the City of Destruction to +the New Jerusalem with a few like-minded companions; but a Christian +whose aim is the transformation of the City of Destruction into the City +of God needs the cooeperation of every fellow believer. Denominational +exclusiveness becomes intolerable to the Christian who finds a whole +world's redemption laid on his conscience. + +(5) It demands a social reinterpretation of many of the Church's +doctrines, a reinterpretation which gives them richer meaning. The +vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, for example, becomes intelligible +and kindling to those who have a social conscience and know something of +bearing the guilt of others; and the New Testament teaching of the Holy +Spirit is much more real and clear to those who have felt the social +spirit of our day lifting them out of themselves into the life of the +community, quickening their consciences and sympathies, and giving them +a sense of brotherhood with men and women very unlike themselves. Vinet +wrote a generation ago, "_L'Esprit Saint c'est Dieu social_." + +We have by no means exhausted the list of quarries from which stones, +and stones already prepared for our purpose, can be and are taken for +the edifice of our Christian convictions. The life of men with Christ in +God preserves its continuity through the ages; it has to interpret +itself to every generation in new forms of thought. Under old monarchies +it was the custom on the accession of a sovereign to call in the coins +of his predecessor and remint them with the new king's effigy. The +silver and the gold remain, but the impress on them is different. The +reminting of our Christian convictions is a somewhat similar process: +the precious ore of the religious experience continues, but it bears the +stamp of the current ruling ideas in men's view of the world. But +lifeless metal, however valuable, cannot offer a parallel to the vital +experiences of the human spirit. The remolding of the forms of its +convictions does more than conserve the same quantity of experience; a +more commodious temple of thought enables the Spirit of faith to expand +the souls of men within. In theology by altering boundaries we often +gain territory. We not only make the map of our soul's life with God +clearer to ourselves, so that we live within its confines more +intelligently; we actually increase the size of the map, and possess a +larger life with God. + + + + +CHAPTER I + +RELIGION + + +Religion is experience. It is the response of man's nature to his +highest inspirations. It is his intercourse with Being above himself and +his world. + +Religion is _normal_ experience. Its enemies call it "an indelible +superstition," and its friends assert that man is born believing. That a +few persons, here and there, appear to lack the sense for the Invisible +no more argues against its naturalness than that occasionally a man is +found to be colorblind or without an ear for music. Mr. Lecky has +written, "That religious instincts are as truly part of our natures as +are our appetites and our nerves is a fact which all history +establishes, and which forms one of the strongest proofs of the reality +of that unseen world to which the soul of man continually tends." + +Some have sought to discredit religion as a surviving childishness. A +baby is dependent upon its parents; and babyish spirits, they say, +never outgrow this sense of dependence, but transfer that on which they +rely from the seen to the unseen. While, however, other childish things, +like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be "incurably +religious," and the most completely devout natures, although childlike +in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity. When +one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in +the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And +further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival +address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus. Although apparently +successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow. +On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain. +Again and again religion has been pronounced obsolete, but passing +through the midst of its detractors it serenely goes its way. When men +laboriously erect its sepulchre, faith, + + Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, + Will arise and unbuild it again. + +Its indestructible vitality is evidence that it is an inherent element +in human nature, that the unbeliever is a subnormal man. + +Religion is an affair of the _whole_ personality. Some have emphasized +the part feeling plays in it. Pascal describes faith as "God felt by the +heart," and Schleiermacher finds the essence of religion in the sense of +utter dependence. Many of us recognize ourselves as most consciously +religious in + + that serene and blessed mood + In which the affections gently lead us on. + +Our highest inspirations commonly come to us in a wistful yearning to be +like the Most High, in a sense of reconciliation with Him, in a glowing +enthusiasm for His cause, in the calm assurance of His guidance and +protection, in the enlargement of our natures as they become aware of +His indwelling. "We _feel_ that we are greater than we _know_." + +Others give prominence to the role of the intellect. God is the most +reasonable explanation of the facts of life. Religious truths and men's +minds harmonize as though they had been made for each other. The thought +of Deity gives them perfect mental satisfaction. Dante tells us: "The +life of my heart, that of my inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought +which went many times to the feet of God, that is to say in thought I +contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed." And a present-day English +thinker, Mr. F.H. Bradley, writes: "All of us, I presume, more or less +are led beyond the region of ordinary facts. Some in one way and some in +another, we seem to touch and have communion with what is beyond the +visible world. In various manners we find something higher which both +supports and humbles, both chastens and transports us. And, with various +persons, the intellectual effort to understand the universe is a +principal way of their experiencing the Deity." + +Still others lay the chief stress upon the will. Man wills to live; but +in a universe like ours where he is pitted against overwhelming forces, +he is driven to seek allies, and in his quest for them he wills to +believe in a God as good as the best in himself and better. Faith is an +adventure; Clement of Alexandria called it "an enterprise of noble +daring to take our way to God." We trust that the Supreme Power in the +world is akin to the highest within us, to the highest we discover +anywhere, and will be our confederate in enabling us to achieve that +highest. Kant found religion through response to the imperative voice of +conscience, in "the recognition of our duties as divine commands." +Pasteur, in the address which he delivered on taking his seat in the +Academie Francaise, declared: "Blessed is he who carries within himself +a God, an ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal +of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and +great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite." + +But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is +perilous to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight +others of equal moment. There is danger in being fractionally religious. +No man really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature. Some +persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at +the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out. +Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, "My head was with +Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An +unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without +fuel. A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both +warmth and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in +constant danger of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of +Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason +had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that +Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its +effervescence to stagnation." + +Others, at the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being +converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into +actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the +historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the +arguments of a priest and without the aesthetic enticements of the Mass, +was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself +baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753. By Christmas of 1754 he had +as thoughtfully read himself out of all sympathy with Rome. He was +undoubtedly sincere throughout, but his belief and subsequent unbelief +were purely matters of judgment. The bases of our faith lie deeper than +our intelligence. We reach God by a passionate compulsion. We seek Him +with our reason only because we have already been found of Him in our +intuitions. + +Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them +within carefully restricted limits. Outside these their faith is an +unreasoning assumption. Their mental activity spends itself on the +details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves +the foundations of their faith. They have keen eyes for theological +niceties, but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts. +Cardinal Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential +ingredient of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a +dream and a mockery. But he was so afraid of "the all-corroding, +all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries" that +he placed the safeguard of faith in "a right state of heart," and +refused to trust his mind to think its way through to God. Martineau +justly complained that "his certainties are on the surface, and his +uncertainties below." We are only safe as believers when, besides +keeping the heart clean, we + + press bold to the tether's end + Allotted to this life's intelligence. + +Those, again, who insist that in religion the willingness is all, forget +that it seems no more in our power to believe than it is to love. We +apparently "fall into" the one as we do into the other; we do not choose +to believe, we cannot help believing. And unless a man's mind is +satisfied with the reasonableness of faith, he cannot "make believe." +Romanes, who certainly wished for fellowship with the Christian God as +ardently as any man, confessed: "Even the simplest act of will in regard +to religion--that of prayer--has not been performed by me for at least a +quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible to +pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired to +be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt." Christianity has ever laid +stress upon its intellectual appeal. By the manifestation of the truth +its missionaries have, from Paul's day, tried to commend themselves. We +do not hear of "Evidence Societies" among non-Christian faiths. When the +Emperor Julian attempted to restore the ancient paganism, he did not +argue for its superior credibility, but contented himself with abusing +the creed of Christians and extolling the beauty of the rituals of the +religion it had supplanted. But the propaganda of the gospel of Jesus is +invariably one of persuasion, convincing and confirming men's minds with +its truth. + +It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man's willingness +has in his faith. To believe in the Christian God demands a severe moral +effort. It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the ultimate +wisdom and power in the universe. "The will to believe," if not +everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the +arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling +emotions. + +But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God with +"as much as in him is." Somebody has finely said that it does not take +much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An +early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God +with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture +of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious +with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to +engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being, +that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to +undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies: + + It shall go hard, + But I will delve one yard below their mines. + +As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for himself. +Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we can no more +distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we respect, than the +boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah from that of Eli. But +we gradually learn to "possess our possession," to respond to our own +highest inspirations, whether or not they inspire others. Pascal well +says: "It is the consent of yourself to yourself and the unchanging +voice of your own reason that ought to make you believe." So far only +as we repeat for ourselves the discoveries of earlier explorers of Him +who is invisible have we any religion of our own. And this personal +experience is the ground of our certainty; "as we have heard, so have we +seen in the city of our God." + +Religious experience, and even Christian experience, appears in a great +variety of forms; and there is always a danger lest those who are +personally familiar with one type should fail to acknowledge others as +genuine. The mystics are apt to disparage the rationalists; hard-headed, +conscientious saints look askance at seers of visions; and those whose +new life has broken forth with the energy and volume of a geyser hardly +recognize the same life when it develops like a spring-born stream from +a small trickle, increased by many tributaries, into a stately river. +The value of an experience is to be judged not by its form, but by its +results. Fortunately for Christianity the New Testament contains a +variety of types. With the first disciples the light dawns gradually; on +St. Paul it bursts in a flash brighter than noonday. The emotional +heights and depths of the seer on Patmos contrast with the steady level +disclosed in the practical temperament of the writer of the _Epistle of +James_. But underneath the diversity there is an essential unity of +experience: all conform to that which Luther (as Harnack summarizes his +position) considered the essence of Christian faith--"unwavering trust +of the heart in God who has given Himself to us in Christ as our +Father." + +Religious experience has been defined as man's _response_ to God; it +often appears rather his _search_ for Him. But that is characteristic +only of the beginning of the experience. The experienced know better +than to place the emphasis on their initiative in establishing +intercourse with the Divine. "We love, because He first loved us," they +say. The Apostle, who speaks of his readers as those who "have come to +know God," stops and corrects himself, "or rather _to be known of God_." +Believers discover that God was "long beforehand" with them. Their very +search is but an answer to His seeking; in their every movement towards +Him, they are aware of His drawing. The verse which begins, "My soul +followeth hard after Thee," continues "Thy right hand upholdeth me." + +Religious experience, like all other, is limited by a man's capacity for +it; and some men seem to have very scant capacity for God. It is not +easy to establish a point of contact between a Falstaff or a Becky Sharp +and the Father of Jesus Christ. There is no community of interest or +kinship of spirit. "Faith is assurance of things _hoped for_;" and where +there is no craving for God, He is likely to remain incredible. +Prepossession has almost everything to do with the commencement of +belief. It is only when circumstances force a man to feel that a God +would be desirable that he will risk himself to yield to his highest +inspirations, and give God the chance to disclose Himself to him. It is +a case of nothing venture, nothing have. Faith is always a going out +whither we know not, but in each venture we accumulate experience and +gradually come to "know Whom we have believed." Without the initial +eagerness for God which opens the door and sends us out we remain +debarred from ever knowing. As the _Theologia Germanica_ puts it, "We +are speaking of a certain Truth which it is possible to know by +experience, but which ye must believe in before ye know." + +The capacity for religious experience can be cultivated. Faith, like an +ear for music or taste in literature, is a developable instinct. It +grows by contagious contact with fellow believers; as "the sight of +lovers feedeth those in love," the man of faith is nourished by +fellowship with the believing Church. It is increased by familiarity +with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible +leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High. It +is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message +were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience. +Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service +upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting: + + These people have really felt, no doubt, + A something, the motion they style the Call of them; + And this is their method of bringing about, + By a mechanism of words and tones, + (So many texts in so many groans) + A sort of reviving and reproducing, + More or less perfectly (who can tell?), + The mood itself, which strengthens by using. + +An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies +experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's +Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all, +the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our +heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures +his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong +religious habit." Such people exclude themselves from the power and +peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living +God. + +Indeed it is not conceivable that a man can have really tasted +fellowship with the Most High without acquiring an appetite for more of +Him. The same psalmist who speaks of his soul as satisfied in God, at +once goes on, "My soul followeth hard after Thee." He who does not +become a confirmed seeker for God is not likely ever to have truly found +Him. There is something essentially irreligious in the attitude +portrayed in the biography of Horace Walpole, who, when Queen Caroline +tried to induce him to read Butler's _Analogy_, told her that his +religion was fixed, and that he had no desire either to change or to +improve it. A believer's heart is fixed; his soul is stayed on God; but +his experience is constantly expanding. + +Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man's intercourse +with the Invisible. Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this +intercourse is characterized by + + tidal movements of devoutest awe + Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt. + +And in the world's life there are ages of faith and ages of criticism. +Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary. Professor Royce +asserts that "a study of history shows that if there is anything that +human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an +occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt." And in +individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is +freed from folly and attains reasonableness. + +Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to +admit that its knowledge is but in part. Our knowledge of God, like the +knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but +no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and +earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are +constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack +what Keats calls "negative capability"--"that is, when a man is capable +of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable +reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a +fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, +from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have +to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far +as our minds will carry us. We have to accustom ourselves to look +uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light. +"They see not clearliest who see all things clear." + +But to many it seems all darkness, and the light is but a phantom of the +credulous. How do we know that we _know_, that the inference we draw +from our experience is correct, that we are in touch with a living God +who is to any extent what we fancy Him to be? Our experience consists of +emotions, impulses, aspirations, compunctions, resolves; we infer that +we are in communion with Another--the Christian God; but may not this +explanation of our experience be mistaken? + +Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious. God is as real +to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or +to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master. Men +are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights +and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the +Invisible. + + The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know. + +Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the +Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in +solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the +thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it +beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression. There are similar +moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or +suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the +incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in +acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the +supremely Loving--moments when "belief overmasters doubt, and we know +that we know." At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so +vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with +the living God. + +Such moments, however, are not abiding; and in the reaction that follows +them the mind will question whether it has not been the victim of +illusion. John Bunyan owns: "Though God has visited my soul with never +so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet afterwards I have been in my +spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once +conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I had been +refreshed." Many a Christian today knows the inspiration and calm and +reinforcement of religion, only to find himself wondering whether these +may not come from an idea in his own head, and not from a personal God. +May we not be in a subjective prison from whose walls words and prayers +rebound without outer effect? + +How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw +from it? The Christian thought of God is after all no more than an +hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life. May not our +experiences be accounted for in some other way? We must distinguish +between the adequacy of our thought of God and the fact that there is a +God more or less like our thought of Him. Our experience can never +guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child +experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents +are--their characters, position, abilities, etc. But the child's +experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living +parents. Is it likely that, were God a mere fancy, a fancy which we +should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be +what it is? An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that +experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation. Religion is +incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end +it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt +with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when +we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and +gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We +find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, +encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination compass such results? + +How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our +experience? + +One test is the satisfaction that it gives to _all_ elements in our +complex personality. One part of us may be deceived, but that which +contents the entire man is not likely to be unreal. Arthur Hallam +declared that he liked Christianity because "it fits into all the folds +of one's nature." Further, this satisfaction is not temporary but +persistent. In childhood, in youth, in middle age, at the gates of +death, in countless experiences, the God we infer from our spirit's +reactions to Him meets and answers our changing needs. Matthew Arnold +writes: "Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral +experience of mankind; to hit it in the critical points; to hit it +lastingly; and, when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it, +then to come out stronger than ever." Unless we are to distrust +ourselves altogether, that which appeals to our minds as reasonable, to +our hearts as lovable, to our consciences as commanding, and to our +souls as adorable, can hardly be "such stuff as dreams are made on." + +Nor are we looking at ourselves alone. We are confirmed by the completer +experiences of the generations who have preceded us. "They looked unto +Him and were radiant." Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in +each century, "lit with their loving and aflame with God," can scarcely +have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations. + + And all their minds transfigured so together, + More witnesseth than fancy's images, + And grows to something of great constancy. + +Religion has written its witness into the world's history, and we can +appeal to an eloquent past. + + Look at the generations of old, and see: + Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? + Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken? + Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him? + +And its witness comes from today as certainly, and more widely, than +from any believing yesterday. Ten thousand times ten thousand, and +thousands of thousands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation, +throughout the world, testify what the God and Father of Jesus Christ +means to them. Are we all self-deceived? + +Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as +partially religious. For the final confirmation of our faith we look to +the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than +any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us +farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of +faith. His life and death, His character and influence, remain the +world's most priceless possession. Was the faith which produced them, +the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination? There is contained in +that life more proof that God is, than in all other approach of God to +man, or of man to God. + +The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our +religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works +in life. "He that willeth to do His will shall know." Coleridge bursts +out indignantly: "'Evidences of Christianity'! I am weary of the word. +Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the +self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own +evidence." Religion approaches men saying, "O taste and see that the +Lord is good." He cannot be good unless He _is_. A fancied Deity, an +invention however beautiful of men's brain, supposed to be a living +Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse. +If our religion is a stained glass window we color to hide the void +beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a God +or not, let us smash the deceiving glass, and face the darkness or the +daylight outside. "Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its +workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of +science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an +hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself. +Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of +believers who have tried it and proved it. The God and Father of Jesus +is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let +God convince him. To commit one's self to God in Christ and be redeemed +from most real sins--turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to +freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and +find one's self empowered and enlightened;--is to discover that faith +works, and works gloriously. A man's idea of God may be, and cannot but +be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to +Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness +of the Reality behind it. + +Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is +a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of +establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with +another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him +with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most +effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as +David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its +genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however +cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are +spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of +One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those +who prove wholeheartedly loyal. + +For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory +of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together. +But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated +by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work +tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE BIBLE + + +In terms of the definition of religion given in the last chapter, we may +describe the Bible as the record of the progressive religious experience +of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, a record selected by the +experience of the Jewish and Christian Church, and approving itself to +Christian experience today as the Self-revelation of the living God. + +The Bible is a _literary_ record. It is not so much a book as a library, +containing a great variety of literary forms--legends, laws, maxims, +hymns, sermons, visions, biographies, letters, etc. Judged solely as +literature its writings have never been equalled in their kind, much +less surpassed. Goethe declared, "Let the world progress as much as it +likes, let all branches of human research develop to their utmost, +nothing will take the place of the Bible--that foundation of all culture +and all education." Happily for the English-speaking world the +translation into our tongue, standardized in the King James' Bible, is +a universally acknowledged classic; and scarcely a man of letters has +failed to bear witness to its charm and power. While most translations +lose something of the beauty and meaning of the original, there are some +parts of the English Bible which, as literature and as religion, excel +the Hebrew or Greek they attempt to render. + +The Bible is a record of _religious experience_. It has but one central +figure from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_--God. But God is primarily in the +experience, only secondarily in the record. All thought succeeds in +grasping but a fraction of consciousness; thought is well symbolized in +Rodin's statue, where out of a huge block of rough stone a small finely +chiselled head emerges. With all their skill we cannot credit the men of +faith who are behind the Bible pages with making clear to themselves but +a small part of God's Self-disclosure to them. And when they came to +wreak thought upon expression, so clear and well-trained a mind as +Paul's cannot adequately utter what he feels and thinks. His sentences +strain and sometimes break; he ends with such expressions as "the love +of Christ which passeth knowledge," and God's "unspeakable gift." + +The divine revelation which is in the experience has been at times +identified with the thought that interprets it, or even with the words +which attempt to describe it. "Faith in the thing grows faith in the +report"; and fantastic doctrines of the verbal inerrancy of the Bible +have been held by numbers of earnest Christians. Certain recent +scholars, acknowledging that no version of the Bible now existing is +free from error, have put forward the theory that the original +manuscripts of these books, as they came from their authors' hands, were +so completely controlled by God as to be without mistake. Since no man +can ever hope to have access to these autographs, and would not be sure +that he had them in his hands if he actually found them, this theory +amounts to saying with the nursery rhyme: + + Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows, + Where you, nor I, nor nobody knows. + +We have not only to collate the manuscripts we possess and try to +reconstruct the likeliest text, but when we know what the authors +probably wrote, we must press back of their language and ideas to the +religious experience they attempt to express. + +As writers the Biblical authors do not claim a special divine +assistance. Luke, in his preface to his gospel, merely asserts that he +has taken the pains of a careful historian, and Paul and his various +amanuenses did their best with a language in which they were not +literary experts. The Bible reader often has the impression that its +authors' religious experience, like Milton's sculptured lion, half +appears "pawing to get free his hinder parts." Or, to change the +metaphor, now one portion of their communion with God is brought to view +and now another, as one might stand before a sea that was illuminated +from moment to moment by flashes of lightning. + +The Bible is the record of an _historic_ religious experience--that of +Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His +followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown +that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic +peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's +faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its +God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the +greater the difference appears. The same legend in Babylonia and in +Israel has such unlike spiritual content; the identical rite among the +Hebrews and among their neighbors developed such different religious +meaning. This particular stream of religious life has a unity and a +character of its own. Its record brings into the succeeding centuries, +and still produces in our world, a distinctive relationship with God. + +The Bible is a record of _progressive_ religious experience. As every +poet with a new message has to create his own public, so it would seem +that God had slowly to evolve men who would respond to His ever higher +inspirations. When scholars arrange for us the Biblical material in its +historical order, the advance becomes much more apparent. Its God grows +from a tribal deity to the God of the whole world; from a localized +divinity dwelling on Sinai or at Jerusalem, as the Greeks placed their +gods on Olympus, into the Spirit who fills heaven and earth; from "a +man of war" and a tribal lawgiver into the God whose nature is love. "By +experience," said Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long +wandering," and it took at least ten centuries to pass from the God of +Moses to the Father of Jesus Christ. + +Obviously we must interpret, and at times correct, the less developed by +the more perfect consciousness of God. The Scriptures, like the land in +which their scenes are laid, are a land of hills and valleys, of lofty +peaks of spiritual elevation and of dark ravines of human passion and +doubt and cruelty; and to view it as a level plain of religious equality +is to make serious mistakes. _Ecclesiastes_ is by no means on the same +level with _Isaiah_, nor _Proverbs_ with the _Sermon on the Mount_. +Doctrines and principles that are drawn from texts chosen at random from +all parts of the Bible are sure to be unworthy statements of the highest +fellowship with God. + +Nor does mere chronological rearrangement of the material do justice to +the progress; there was loss as well as gain. All mountain roads on +their way to the summit go down as well as up; and their advance must +be judged not from their elevation at any particular point, but from +their successful approach towards their destination. The experiences of +Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate +followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him. In form the +Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends. +Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by +its approximation to the faith and purpose of Jesus. + +The Bible is a _selected_ record of religious experience. Old Testament +historians often refer to other books which have not been preserved; and +there were letters of St. Paul which were allowed to perish, and +gospels, other than our four, which failed to gain a place in the Canon. +A discriminating instinct was at work, judging between writings and +writings. We know little of the details of the process by which it +compiled the Old Testament. The Jewish Church spoke of its Scriptures as +"the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings"; and it is probable that in +this order it made collections of those books which it found expressed +and reproduced its faith. In the time of Jesus the Old Testament, as we +know it, was practically complete, although there still lingered some +discussion whether _Esther, Ecclesiastes_ and the _Song of Songs_ were +sacred books. We should like to know far more than students have yet +discovered of the reasons which Jewish scholars gave for admitting some +and rejecting other writings; but, whatever their alleged reasons, the +books underwent a struggle for recognition, and the fittest, according +to the judgment of the corporate religious experience of the devout, +survived. + +The first Christians found the Jewish Bible in use as containing "the +oracles of God"; and as it had been their Lord's Bible it became theirs. +No one of the first generation of Christians thought of adding other +Scriptures. In that age the Coming of the Messiah and His Kingdom in +power were daily expected, and there seemed no need of writing anything +for succeeding times. Paul's letters were penned to meet current needs +in the churches, and were naturally kept, reread and passed from church +to church. As the years went by and disciples were added who had never +known the Lord in the days of His flesh, a demand arose for collections +of His sayings. Then gospels were written, and the New Testament +literature came into existence, although no one yet thought of these +writings as Holy Scripture. + +Three factors, however, combined to give these books an authoritative +position. In the Church services _reading_ was a part of worship. What +should be read? A letter of an apostle, a selection of Jesus' sayings, a +memoir of His life, an account of the earliest days of the Church. +Certain books became favorites because they were most helpful in +creating and stimulating Christian faith and life; and they won their +own position of respect and authority. + +Some books by reason of their _authorship_--Paul or Peter, for +instance--or because they contained the life and teaching of Jesus, +naturally held a place of reverence. This eventually led to the +ascription to well-known names of books that were found helpful which +had in fact been written by others. For example, the _Epistle to the +Hebrews_ was ultimately credited to Paul, and the _Second Epistle of +Peter_ to the Apostle Peter. + +And, again, _controversies_ arose in which it was all important to agree +what were the sources to which appeal should be made. The first +collection of Christian writings, of which we know, consisting of ten +letters of Paul and an abridged version of the _Gospel according to +Luke_, was put forth by Marcion in the Second Century to defend his +interpretation of Christianity--an interpretation which the majority of +Christians did not accept. It was inevitable that a fuller collection of +writings should be made to refute those whose faith appeared incomplete +or incorrect. + +In the last quarter of the Second Century we find established the +conception of the Bible as consisting of two parts--the Old and the New +Covenant. This meant that the Christian writings so acknowledged would +be given at least the same authority as was then accorded to the Jewish +Bible. Early in the Fourth Century the historian, Eusebius, tells us how +the New Testament stood in his day. He divides the books into three +classes--those acknowledged, those disputed, and those rejected. In the +second division he places the epistles of _James_ and _Jude_, the +_Second Epistle of Peter_ and the _Second_ and _Third_ of _John_; in the +first all our other books, but he says of the _Revelation of John_, that +some think that it should be put in the third division; in the third he +names a number of books which are of interest to us as showing what some +churches regarded as worthy of a place in the New Testament, and used as +they did our familiar gospels and epistles. By the end of that century, +under the influence of Athanasius and the Church in Rome, the New +Testament as it now stands became almost everywhere recognized. + +The reason given for the acceptance or rejection of a book was its +_apostolic authorship_. Only books that could claim to have been written +by an apostle or an apostolic man were considered authoritative. We now +know that not all the books could meet this requirement; but the +Church's real reason was its own discriminating spiritual experience +which approved some books and refused others. Canon Sanday sums up the +selective process by saying: "In the fixing of the Canon, as in the +fixing of doctrine, the decisive influence proceeded from the bishops +and theologians of the period 325-450. But behind them was the practice +of the greater churches; and behind that again was not only the lead of +a few distinguished individuals, but the instinctive judgment of the +main body of the faithful. It was really this instinct that told in the +end more than any process of quasi-scientific criticism. And it was well +that it should be so, because the methods of criticism are apt to be, +and certainly would have been when the Canon was formed, both faulty and +inadequate, whereas instinct brings into play the religious sense as a +whole. Even this is not infallible; and it cannot be claimed that the +Canon of the Christian Sacred Books is infallible. But experience has +shown that the mistakes, so far as there have been mistakes, are +unimportant; and in practice even these are rectified by the natural +gravitation of the mind of man to that which it finds most nourishing +and most elevating." + +In their attitude towards the Canon all Christians agree that the books +deemed authoritative must record the historic revelation which +culminated in Jesus and the founding of the Christian Church. A Roman +Catholic may derive more religious stimulus from the _Spiritual +Exercises_ of Ignatius Loyola than from the _Book of Lamentations_, and +a Protestant from Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ than from the _Second +Epistle of John_; but neither would think of inserting these books in +the Canon. He who finds as much religious inspiration in some modern +poet or essayist as in a book of the Bible, may be correctly reporting +his own experience; but he is confusing the purpose of the Bible if he +suggests the substitution of these later prophets for those of ancient +Israel. The Bible is the spiritually selected record of a particular +Self-disclosure of God in a national history which reached its religious +goal in Jesus Christ. + +Romanists and Protestants differ as to how many books constitute the +Canon, the former including the so-called _Apocrypha_--books in the +Greek translation but not in the original Hebrew Bible. And they differ +more fundamentally in the principle underlying the selection of the +books. The Roman Catholic holds that it is the Church which officially +has made the Bible, while the Protestant insists that the books possess +spiritual qualities of their own which gave them their place in the +authoritative volume, a place which the Church merely recognized. +Luther, in his celebrated dispute with Dr. Eck, asserted: "The Church +cannot give more authority or force to a book than it has in itself. A +Council cannot make that be Scripture which in its own nature is not +Scripture." The Council of Trent, answering the Reformers, in 1546, +issued an official decree defining what is Scripture: "The holy, +ecumenical and general Synod of Trent, legitimately convened in the Holy +Ghost ...receives and venerates with an equal piety and reverence all the +books as well of the Old as of the New Testament ...together with the +traditions pertaining both to faith and to morals, as proceeding from +the mouth of Christ, or dictated by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in +the Church Catholic by continuous succession." Then follows a catalogue +of the books, and an anathema on all who shall not receive them "as they +are contained in the old vulgate Latin version." + +Over against this the Protestant takes the position that the books of +the Scripture came to be recognized as authoritative exactly as +Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth have been accorded their place in +English literature. It was the inherent merit of _Hamlet_ and _Paradise +Lost_ and the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ that led to their +acknowledgment. No official body has made Shakespeare a classic; his +works have won their own place. No company of men of letters officially +organized keeps him in his eminent position; his plays keep themselves. +The books of the Bible have gained their positions because they could +not be barred from them; they possess power to recanonize themselves. +Some are much less valuable than others, and it is, perhaps, a debatable +question whether one or two of the apocryphal books--_First Maccabees_, +or _Ecclesiasticus_, for instance--are not as spiritually useful as the +_Song of Solomon_ or _Esther_; but of the chief books we may +confidentially affirm that, if one of them were dug up for the first +time today, it would gradually win a commanding place in Christian +thought. And it is a similar social experience of the Church--Jewish +and Christian--which has recognized their worth. The modernist Tyrrell +has written: "It cannot be denied that in the life of that formless +Church, which underlies the hierarchic organization, God's Spirit +exercises a silent but sovereign criticism, that His resistlessly +effectual judgment is made known, not in the precise language of +definition and decree, but in the slow manifestation of practical +results; in the survival of what has proved itself life-giving; in the +decay and oblivion of all whose value was but relative and temporary." + +In a sense each Protestant Christian is entitled to make up a Bible of +his own out of the books which record the historical discoveries of God. +He is not bound by the opinions of others, however many and venerable; +and unless a book commends itself to his own spiritual judgment, he is +under no obligation to receive it as the word of God to him. As a matter +of fact every Christian does make such a Bible of his own; the +particular passages which "grip" him and reproduce their experiences in +him, they, and they alone, are his Bible. Luther was quickened into +life by the epistles of Paul, but spoke slightingly of _James_; many +socially active Christians in our day live in the prophets and the first +three gospels, and almost ignore the rest of the Bible. But individual +taste, while it has preferred authors and favorite works, does not think +of denying to Milton, or Wordsworth, or Shelley, their place among +English classics; a social judgment has assigned them that. A man who is +not hopelessly conceited will regret his inability to appreciate a +single one of the great authors, and will try to enlarge his sympathies. +The Christian will, with entire naturalness, be loyal to so much of the +Bible as "finds him," and humbly hope and endeavor to be led into ampler +ranges of spiritual life, that he may "apprehend with all saints" the +breadth, length, depth and height of the historic Self-revelation of +God. + +The Bible is thus _a standard of religious experience_. If there is any +question as to what man's life with God ought to be, it can be referred +to the life recorded in these books. But men have often made the Bible +much more; confusing experience with its interpretation in some +particular epoch, they used the Bible as a treasury of proof texts for +doctrines, or of laws for conduct, or of specific provisos for Church +government and worship. They forgot that the writers of the early +chapters of _Genesis_, in describing their faith in God's relationship +to His world and to man and to history, had to express that faith in +terms of the existing traditions concerning the creation, the fall, the +deluge, the patriarchs. Their faith in God is one thing; the scientific +and historic accuracy of the stories in which they utter it is quite +another thing. They did not distinguish between Paul's life with God in +Christ, and the philosophy he had learned in Gamaliel's classroom, or +picked up in the thought of the Roman world of his day. Paul's religious +life is one thing, his theology in which he tries to explain and state +it is another thing. They read the plans that were made for the +organization of the first churches, and hastily concluded that these +were intended to govern churches in all ages. The chief divisions of the +Church claim for their form of government--papal, episcopal, +presbyterian, congregational--a Biblical authority. The religious life +of the early churches is one thing; their faith and hope and love ought +to abide in the Church throughout all generations; the method of their +organization may have been admirable for their circumstances, but there +is no reason we should consider it binding upon us in the totally +different circumstances of our day. Latterly social reformers have been +attempting to show that the Bible teaches some form of economic theory, +like socialism or communism. It lays down fundamental principles of +brotherhood, of justice, of peaceableness, but the economic or political +systems in which these shall be embodied, we must discover for ourselves +in each age. It is the norm of our life with God; but it is not a +standard fixing our scientific views, our theological opinions, our +ecclesiastical polity, our economic or political theories. It shows +forth the spirit we should manifest towards God and towards one another +as individuals, and families, and nations; "and where the Spirit of the +Lord is, there is liberty." + +This brings us to the question of the _authority_ of the Bible. There +are two views of its authority; one that it contains mysteries beyond +our reason, which are revealed to us, and guaranteed to us as true, +either by marvellous signs such as miracles and fulfilled prophecies, or +by the infallible pronouncement of the official Church; the other is +that the Bible is the revelation of self-evidencing truth. The test of a +revelation is simply that it reveals. The evidence of daylight lies in +the fact that it enables us to see, and as we live in the light we are +more and more assured that we really do see. Advocates of the former +position say: "If anything is in the Bible, it must not be questioned; +it must simply be accepted and obeyed." Advocates of the latter view +say: "If it is in the Bible, it has been tried and found valuable by a +great many people; question it as searchingly as you can, and try it for +yourself, and see whether it proves itself true or not." + +These two views came into collision in the struggle for a larger faith +which we call the Reformation. Augustine had stated the position which +became traditional when he wrote, "I would not believe in the Gospel +without the authority of the Church." But Luther insisted on the +contrary: "Thou must not place thy decision on the Pope, or any other; +thou must thyself be so skilful that thou can'st say, 'God says this, +not that.' Thou must bring conscience into play, that thou may'st boldly +and defiantly say, 'That is God's word; on that will I risk body and +life, and a hundred thousand necks if I had them.' Therefore no one +shall turn me from the word which God teaches me, and that must I know +as certainly as that two and three make five, that an ell is longer than +a half. That is certain, and though all the world speak to the contrary, +still I know that it is not otherwise. Who decides me there? No man, but +only _the Truth_ which is so perfectly certain that nobody can deny it." +And Calvin took the same ground: "As to their question, How are we to +know that the Scriptures came from God, if we cannot refer to the decree +of the Church, we might as well ask, How are we to distinguish light +from darkness, white from black, bitter from sweet." + +The truth of the religious experiences recorded in the Bible is +self-evidencing to him who shares these experiences, and to no one else. +The Bible has, in a sense, to create or evoke the capacities by which +it is appreciated and verified. It is inspired only to those who are +themselves willing to be controlled by similar inspirations; it is the +word of God only to those who have ears for God's voice. There is a +difference between the phrases: "It is certain," and "I am certain." In +other matters we appeal to the collective opinion of sane people; but +such knowledge does not suffice in religion. Our fellowship with God +must be our own response to our highest inspirations. The Bible is +authoritative for us only in so far as we can say: "I have entered into +the friendship of the God, whose earlier friendship with men it records, +and know Him, who speaks as personally to my conscience through its +pages, as He spake to its writers. The Spirit that ruled them, the +Spirit of trust and service, controls me." This is John Calvin's +position. "It is acting a preposterous part," he writes in his +_Institutes_, "to endeavor to produce sound faith in the Scriptures by +disputations. Religion appearing to profane men to consist wholly in +opinion, in order that they may not believe anything on foolish or +slight grounds, they wish and expect it to be proved that Moses and the +prophets spake by divine inspiration; but as God alone is a sufficient +witness of Himself in His own word, so also the word will never gain +credit in the hearts of men, till it is confirmed by the testimony of +the Spirit." + +If, then, the authority of the Bible depends upon the witness of the +Spirit within our own souls, its authority has definite limits. We can +verify spiritually the truth of a religious experience by repeating that +experience; but we cannot verify spiritually the correctness of the +report of some alleged event, or the accuracy of some opinion. We can +bear witness to the truthfulness of the record of the consciousness of +shame and separation from God in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve; +we must leave the question of the historicity of the narrative and the +scientific view of the origin of the race in a single pair to the +investigations of scholars. Our own knowledge of Jesus Christ as a +living Factor in our careers confirms the experience His disciples had +of His continued intercourse with them subsequent to His crucifixion; +but the manner of His resurrection and the mode in which _post mortem_ +He communicated with them must be left to the untrammelled study of +historical students. The religious message of a miraculous happening, +like the story of Jonah or of the raising of Lazarus, we can test and +prove: disobedience brings disaster, repentance leads to restoration; +faith in Christ gives Him the chance to be to us the resurrection and +the life. The reported events must be tested by the judgments of +historic probability which are applied to all similar narratives, past +or present. The Bible's authority is strictly _religious_; it has to do +solely with God and man's life with man in Him; and, when read in the +light of its culmination in Christ, it approves itself to the Spirit of +Christ within Christians as a correct record of their experiences of +God, and the mighty inspiration to such experiences. Surely it is no +belittling limitation to say of this unique book that it is an authority +_only on God_. Every fundamental question of life is answered, every +essential need of the soul is met, when God is found, and becomes our +Life, our Home. + +And with such _self-evidencing_ authority in the books of the Bible, it +is a question of minor importance who were their authors and when they +were written--the questions which the literary historical criticism +undertakes to answer. Luther put the matter conclusively when he said in +his vigorous fashion: "That which does not teach Christ is not +apostolic, though Peter or Paul should have said it; on the contrary +that which preaches Christ is apostolic, even if it should come from +Judas, Annas, Pilate and Herod." Some persons have been greatly troubled +in the last generation by being told that scholars did not consider the +conventionally received authorships of many of the books of the Bible +correct, but thought that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or David +the _Psalms_, or Solomon the _Proverbs_ or _Ecclesiastes_, or Isaiah and +Jeremiah more than parts of the books that bear their names, or John and +Peter all the writings ascribed to them. We are not to judge of writings +by their authors, but by their intrinsic value. Suppose Shakespeare did +not write more than a fraction of the plays associated with his name, or +that he wrote none of them at all; the plays themselves remain as +valuable as ever; their interpretation of life in its tragedy and +humor, its heights and its depths, is as true as it ever was. Whatever +views of their composition or authorship may be reached by literary +experts, the Scriptures possess exactly the same spiritual power they +have always possessed. The Lord has been "our dwelling-place in all +generations," whether Moses or some other psalmist penned that line; and +Jesus is the bread of life, whether the apostle John or some other +disciple whom Jesus loved records that experience. Scholars may make the +meaning of the Scriptures much plainer by their searching studies; and +they must be encouraged to investigate as minutely and rigorously as +they can. To be fearful that the Bible cannot stand the test of the +keenest study, is to lack faith in its divine vitality. To found a +"Bible Defence League" is as unbelieving as to inaugurate a society for +the protection of the sun. Like the sun the Bible defends itself by +proving a light to the path of all who walk by it. The only defence it +needs is to be used; and the only attack it dreads is to be left unread. + +And in speaking of the authority of the Bible we cannot forget that it +is not for Christians the supreme authority. "One is your Master, even +Christ." We must be cautious in speaking of the Bible, as we commonly +do, as "the word of God." That title belongs to Jesus. The Bible +contains the word of God; He is for us _the_ Word of God. We dare not +overlook His untrammelled attitude towards the Scriptures of His people, +who let His own spiritual discernment determine whether a Scripture was +His Father's living voice to Him, or only something said to men of old +time, and given temporarily for the hardness of hearts that could +respond to no higher ideal. As His followers, we dare not use less +freedom ourselves. We test every Scripture by the Spirit of Christ in +us: whatever is to us unchristlike in Joshua or in Paul, in a psalmist +or in the seer on Patmos, is not for us the word of our God: whatever +breathes the Spirit of Jesus from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_ is to us our +Father's Self-revealing speech. + +Nor do we think that God ceased speaking when the Canon of the Bible was +complete. How could He, if He be the living God? "Truth," said Milton, +"is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow +not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of +conformity and tradition." The fountain of God's Self-revealing still +streams. Religious truth comes to us from all quarters--from events of +today and contemporaneous prophets, from living epistles at our side and +the still small voice within; but as a simple matter of fact, its main +flow is still through this book. When we want God--want Him for our +guidance, our encouragement, our correction, our comfort, our +inspiration--we find Him in the record of these ancient experiences of +His Self-unveiling. When near his death, after years of agony on his +bed, when he himself had become a changed man, Heinrich Heine wrote: "I +attribute my enlightenment entirely and simply to the reading of a book. +Of a book? Yes! and it is an old homely book, modest as nature--a book +which has a look modest as the sun which warms us, as the bread which +nourishes us--a book as full of love and blessing as the old mother who +reads in it with her trembling lips, and this book is _the_ Book, the +Bible. With right is it named the Holy Scriptures. He who has lost his +God can find Him again in this book; and he who has never known Him, is +here struck by the breath of the Divine Word." + + + + +CHAPTER III + +JESUS CHRIST + + +Three elements enter into every Christian's conception of his +Lord--history, experience and reflection. Jesus is to him a figure out +of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the +universe. Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene +theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the +memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the +flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal +loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the +mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His +figure in its mental world. + +The Jesus of the primitive Church was One whom believers worshipped as +the Christ of God, in whose person and mission they saw the fulfilment +of Israel's prophecy and the inauguration of a new religious era. They +represent their conception of Him as corresponding to and created by His +own consciousness of Himself. He was aware of a unique relationship to +God--He is His Son, _the_ Son. And because of this divine sonship He is +the Messiah, commissioned to usher in the Kingdom of God, and to bring +forgiveness and eternal life to men. This He does by becoming their +Teacher and their lowly Servant, laying down His life for them in +suffering and death, and rising and returning to them as their Lord. He +appeals to them for faith in God, for loyalty to Himself as God's +Servant and Son, and for trust in His divine power to save them. + +This conception of Jesus is given us in documents which must be +investigated and appraised as sources of historical knowledge. The four +gospels are our principal informants, and no other writings in existence +have been so often and so minutely examined. Among scholars at present +it is a common hypothesis that Mark's is the earliest narrative; that +this was combined with a _Collection of Sayings_ (compiled, perhaps, by +Matthew) and other material in our first gospel, and by another editor +(probably Luke) with the same or a similar _Collection of Sayings_ and +still other material in our third gospel. Later yet, a fourth evangelist +interpreted for the world of his day the Jesus of the first three +gospels in the light of his own and the Church's spiritual experience. + +The earlier sources, as is usually and naturally the case with literary +records of the past, are considered historically more reliable than the +later. The words of Jesus in the form in which they are given in the +Synoptists are more nearly as Jesus spoke them, than in the form in +which they are recorded in _John_. There is a tendency, often found in +kindred documents, to make events more marvellous as the tradition is +handed on. In _Mark_, for instance, the Spirit descends upon Jesus "as a +dove," symbolizing the quietness with which the Divine Power possessed +Him; in _Luke_, the symbol is materialized, and the Holy Spirit descends +"in _bodily form_ as a dove." The writers interpret the narrative for +their readers: _Matthew_ takes Jesus' ideal of the indissoluble +marriage-tie, as it is given in _Mark_, and allows, in the practical +application of the ideal, divorce for adultery; he adds to Jesus' word +about telling one's brother his fault "between thee and him alone" +further advice as to what shall be done if the brother be obdurate, +ending with "Tell it unto the Church." _John_ substitutes for the many +sayings of Jesus in the earlier gospels, in which He appears to look +forward to a speedy and sudden coming of His Kingdom in power, other +sayings, in which He promises to come again spiritually and dwell in His +followers. On the other hand, in some particulars scholars think that +the later writers had more accurate information, and used it to correct +misunderstandings conveyed by their predecessors; the length of our +Lord's ministry, the procedure followed at the trial, the date of the +crucifixion, are by many supposed to be more exactly given in _John_ +than in the Synoptists. In general there is no reason for questioning +the data in the later sources, save as they seem to come from an +interest of the Church of their day, unrelated with the Jesus of the +earlier records. + +In such documents we must expect some events to be supported by more +historic proof than others. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection (to +take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a +virgin-mother. There is probably no scrap of primitive Christian +literature which does not assume the risen Christ; and the origin of the +Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be +explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord's victory over death +and presence with His people in power. The virgin-birth rests on but two +records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier +strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with +the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an +ancestry traced through Joseph). But in discussing the historicity of +the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main +purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of +material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically) +designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of +Jesus Christ. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the +Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His +name." They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence +they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did +not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible +to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is +chronologically arranged. But they spare themselves no pains to give +_the truth of the religious impression of Jesus_ which they had +received. + +And when one compares all our documents, it is significant that they do +not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus. The +meaning for faith of the Christ of _John_ is not at variance with the +meaning for faith of the Christ of _Mark_ or of the Christ of the +supposed _Collection of Sayings_. The Church put the four gospels side +by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for +centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious +portrait of its Lord. This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be +found in the _Acts_ and the epistles. The Christ of the entire New +Testament makes upon us _a consistent religious impression_; and the +unity of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because +of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture +Him. Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so +stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that, +amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of +theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains. We, +whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for +purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent +conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a +portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the +historic Jesus. + +Two diametrically opposed classes of scholars have denied that in the +Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few +have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all, +but describe a Saviour-God who existed in the faith of the Church of the +First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to +definite historical associations connected with Jesus are sufficient to +confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, +the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much, +are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and +religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would +have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists' +story. + +A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their +philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend +usual human experience, have for several generations sought to +reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis. +Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, +Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, +who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such +reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even +the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They +fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique +relation to God, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically +investigated documents disclose it. Historically, they do not give us a +Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian +Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory, +and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and +religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to +explain their own life in Christ. + +It is not surprising that these attempts have failed. The historic Jesus +did not make the same impression upon everybody who met Him; men's +judgments of Him varied with their spiritual capacities, and their +spiritual capacities affected what He could do for them. There is enough +historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever +their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that +He was conscious of a relationship to God and a significance for men +which transcend anything in ordinary human experience. It requires +something more than sound historic judgment to see in Jesus what He saw +in Himself, or what Peter saw in Him when he called Him "the Christ of +God." We can never prove to any man on the basis of historical research +alone that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels correctly represents the +_religious_ impression of the historic Jesus. When we deal with +anything religious, a subjective element enters and determines the +conclusion, exactly as the artistic spirit alone can appreciate that +which has to do with art. The gospels as appreciations appeal only to +the similarly appreciative. We can show that the earliest stratum of the +gospel tradition, according to the most rigorous methods of critical +analysis, gives us a Jesus who possessed a meaning for His followers +akin to the meaning the Jesus of our four gospels possessed for the +Church of the First Century, and possesses for the Church of our day. +Only as Jesus comes to have a supreme worth to any man can he believe +that the estimate of their Master in the minds of the first disciples +can be the accurate impression of a real man. + +When, then, we speak of the Christ of history, we mean not the figure of +Jesus as reproduced by scientific research apart from Christian faith, +but the Christ of the four gospels, whose figure corresponds to the +religious impression received from the historic Jesus by His earliest +followers. _Lives of Christ_ by historical students have their value +when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is +poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of +Christ's followers. The humblest reader of the New Testament has the +same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge +of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely +wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told +narratives of the evangelists. + +Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and +various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the +succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself +religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record +of His life: + +(1) _His singular religious experience._ His first followers were +impressed with His unique relation to God when they saw in Him the +awaited Messiah. The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting, +loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth. +His sayings lay special stress on God's tender personal interest in +every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His +Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the +evil. While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to +discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus' thought of God which +He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own +contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most +earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the God to whom he had +been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; God was to +him "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Deity Paul +worshipped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen +which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to +man from the unseen which produced Jesus. Men who had not been atheists +before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as +"through Jesus believers in God." It is not enough to say that in Jesus' +experience God was Father; others before Him, both within and without +Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood. It was the fatherliness in God +which evoked and corresponded to Jesus' sonship, that formed His new and +distinctive contribution. A mutual relationship is expressed in the +saying: "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know +the Father, save the Son." Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus +did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to +offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with +the Most High--"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." In +the words of the late Professor G.W. Knox, "Jesus set forth communion +with God as the most certain fact of man's experience, and in simple +reality made it accessible to everyone." + +His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not "a +lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His +soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of +the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a +long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to +invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words +through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His +originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His +inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power. +Madame de Stael said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything +on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with +God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown +before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, +with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns +about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely +supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout +the world. + +(2) _A singular character._ More striking than anything Jesus said or +did is what He _was_. That which He worshipped in the God He trusted, He +Himself embodied. We can estimate His character best, not by trying to +inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to +others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on +those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them, +awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him +is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no +incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have +been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and +destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to +place Him at the right hand of God; but there was the place where He +seemed to them to belong. None have ever conceived God more highly than +they who said, "God is love," and these men set Jesus side by side with +God. The evangelists do not attempt to describe what He was like; they +let us hear Him and watch Him, as He lived in the memories of those who +had been with Him; and He makes His own impression. The crowning tribute +is that we have no loftier adjective in our vocabulary than +"Christlike." + +(3) _A singular victory_--a victory over the world and sin and death. + +Jesus believed in and proclaimed a new order of things in the world--the +Kingdom of God--in which His Father's will should be realized. It was an +order in which men should live in love with one another and with God, in +which justice, kindness and faithfulness should prevail in all +relationships, and in which all God's children's needs should be +supplied, their maladies healed, their wrongs righted, their lives made +full. This Kingdom was already in the earth in Himself and in the new +life He succeeded in creating in those who followed Him. It found itself +opposed by physical forces that were injurious to humanity; and these He +met fearlessly, sleeping in a storm so violent as to terrify His +fisherman companions; and, what is more, He commanded these forces for +His Father's purpose in a way that amazed His first followers and is +still amazing to us. The reports of His mighty works have to be +carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the +historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of +others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a +prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for +the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough +remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be +limited by our usual standards of human ability. Judged by past or +present conceptions of what is natural, His works were supernatural; He +Himself regarded them as the breaking into the world through Him of the +new order that was to be. He discouraged men's craving for the +physically miraculous, and thought little of the faith in Him produced +by its display; but there can be no question of His extraordinary +control of physical forces for the aims of His Kingdom. It was, however, +in the moral conflict between the Divine Order and things as they were, +that He saw the decisive collision, and faced it with heroic faith in +His Father's victory. When the dominant authorities in Church and State +were about to crush Him, He looked forward undismayed, and in the +glowing pictures of fervent Jewish men of hope He imaged the Divine Rule +He proclaimed coming in power. + +He was to His followers the Conqueror of sin. He went forth to wage war +with evil in the world, because He was conscious that He had first bound +the strong man, and could spoil his house. In an autobiographical +parable He seems to have told them something of His own battle with +temptation and of His victory. They found in Him One who both shamed +and transformed them; they saw Him forgiving and altering sinners; and, +above all, His cross, from the earliest days when they began to ask +themselves what it meant, had for them redemptive force. + +He was to them the Victor of death. However the historian may deal with +the details of the narratives of the appearances of the risen Jesus to +His disciples, he cannot fail to recognize the conviction of Jesus' +followers that their Lord had returned to them and was alive with power. +We must remember that it was to faith alone that the risen Jesus showed +Himself, and that no one outside the circle of believers (unless we +except Saul of Tarsus) saw Him after His death. Historical research, +independent of Christian faith, may not be able positively to affirm the +correctness of the Easter faith of the disciples, for the data lie, in +part at least, outside the range of such research. But the historian +must leave the door open for faith; and he may go further and point out +that faith's explanation best fits the facts. Present faith finds itself +prepared to receive the witness of the men of faith centuries ago. The +attempt to banish Jesus from our world signally failed; He was a more +living and potent force in it after, than before, His death. + +This singular religious experience, character and victory we ascribe to +the Jesus of history through the tradition which preserves for us His +religious impression upon His immediate followers. There are some who +lay little stress upon the events of the past; like Shelley's Skylark, +they are "scorners of the ground." Why, they ask, should we care what +took place in Palestine centuries ago? The answer is that it is the +roots which go down into historic fact which give the whole tree of +Christian faith its stability and vigor. A tree gathers nourishment and +grows by its leaves; and Christianity has undoubtedly taken into itself +many enriching elements from the life about it in every age; but a tree +without roots is neither sturdy nor alive. A Christianity which +disregards its origin in the Jesus of genuine memory may label anything +"Christian" that it fancies, and end by losing its own identity; and a +Christianity which does not constantly keep learning of the Jesus of the +New Testament, and renewing its convictions, ideals and purposes from +Him, ceases to be vital. We do not think of Christianity as a fixed +quantity or an unchanging essence, but as a life; and life is ever +growing and changing. But with all its growth and change it keeps true +to type, and the type is Jesus Christ. The gospels, which conserve the +impress of that Life upon men of faith, are anchors in the actual amid +windy storms of speculation. We are not constructing a Christ out of our +spiritual experiences, but letting Him who gave life to these early +followers, through their memories of Him, recreate us into His and their +fellowship with God and man. + +Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and +kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience +is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which +this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for +ourselves. Unless a man's soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced +with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected. "We +needs must love the highest when we see it," and to millions +throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration. For them He +ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant +Contemporary. They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their +present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves +possessed of a new life. + +In a previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest +inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in +responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the +characteristically Christian experience of the Divine--an experience +which involves two main elements: communion through Jesus with God, and +communion with Jesus in God. + +_Communion through Jesus with God_. His singular religious experience +they find themselves sharing to some degree. They repeat His discoveries +in the unseen and corroborate them. God, the God and Father of Jesus +Christ, becomes their God and Father, with whom they live in the trust +and love and obedience of children. And for them Jesus' consciousness of +God becomes _authoritative_. It is not that they consider Him in +possession of secret sources of information inaccessible to them, but +that, incomparably more expert, He has penetrated farther and more +surely into the unseen, and they trustfully follow Him. He does not lord +it over them as servants, but leads them as His friends. "Man," says +Keats, in a remark which illustrates Jesus' method with His disciples, +"Man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbor." +He, who of old did not strive nor cry aloud, still so quietly gives +those who obey Him His attitude towards God, that they scarcely realize +how much they owe Him. Only here and there a discerning follower, like +Luther, is aware how all-important is the contribution that comes +through a conscious sharing of Christ's revelation, "Whosoever loses +Christ, all faiths (of the Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common rabble) +become one faith." + +And when once Jesus is authoritative for a man, He is the _supreme_ +religious authority. A tolerant Roman, like Alexander Severus, set +statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, "and others of that +sort," in his lararium; and many today are inclined to make a similar +religious combination. Where Christ is concerned, there can be for His +followers no other "of that sort." We cherish every discovery of the +Divine by any saint of any faith which does not conflict with the +revelation of Jesus; but to those who have found Him the Way to the +Father, His consciousness of God is decisive. In the margin of his copy +of Bacon's _Essays_, William Blake wrote opposite some statement of that +worldly-wiseman, "This is certain: if what Bacon says is true, what +Christ says is false." A loyal Christian must set every opinion he meets +as clearly in the light of his Lord's mind, and choose accordingly his +course in the seen and in the unseen. + +When through Jesus we are in fellowship with His God, Jesus Himself +becomes to us _the revelation of God_. The Deity to whom we are led +through His faith discloses Himself to us in Jesus' character. What we +call Divine, as we worship it in One whom we picture in the heavens or +indwelling within us, we discover at our side in Jesus; and if we are +impelled to speak of the Deity of the Father, when we characterize our +highest inspirations from the unseen, we cannot do less than speak of +the Deity of the Son, through whom in the seen these same inspirations +pass to us. Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response. We +instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a +confidence as complete as we repose in God. We are either idolaters, or +Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us God +manifest in the flesh. + +And Jesus is also _the revelation of what man may become_. None ever had +a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect +as their Father is perfect. He did not close His eyes to men's glaring +unlikeness to God; He said to His auditors, "ye being evil"; He believed +in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance. +But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance +they would be able to go. He did not warn them that they must stop at +the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not +go with Him in His intimacy with the Father. Some Christians, out of +reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him +and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpass it; but He drew no +such line. He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed +men. As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him, +and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between +us seems to become. But He is as confident that He can conform us to His +likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father. + +It is worth emphasizing that this Personality in whom we find the +revelation of God and the ideal of manhood is a figure in history. When +an apostle was speaking of "the one Mediator between God and men," he +laid stress on the fact that He was "Himself _man_." When a distinction +is drawn between the Christ of experience and the Christ of history, we +must not be confused. The content of the name "Jesus" was given once for +all in the impression made by the Man of Nazareth, One made "in all +points" like ourselves. We may understand Him better than those who knew +Him in the flesh; we may see the bearing of His life on many situations +that were entirely beyond even His ken; and so we may have "a larger +Christ," exactly as succeeding generations sometimes form truer +estimates of men than contemporaries; but all that is authentic in our +"larger Christ" was implicit in the Man of Galilee. That to which we +respond as to God is the historic Jesus mirrored in His disciples' +faith. We agree with the eloquent words of Tertullian: "We say, and +before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we cry +out, 'We worship God through Christ. Count Christ a man, if you please; +by Him and in Him God would be known and adored.'" And our assurance +that we can become like Jesus rests on the fact that this life has been +already lived. A mountain top, however lofty, we can hope to scale, for +it is part of the same earth on which we stand; but a star, however +alluring, we have no confidence of reaching. Jesus' worth as an example +to us lies in our finding in Him "ideal manhood closed in real man." + +In fellowship through Jesus with God we discover that His victory is +vicarious; He conquered for Himself _and for us_ the world and sin and +death. + +He imparts His faith in the coming of the Divine Order in the world. +His followers share His fearless and masterful attitude towards physical +forces; when they appear opposed to God's purpose of love, the Christian +is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it: "to them +that love God all things work together for good." What is called +"nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be +conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus. A pestilential +Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be +brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God. +The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must +both be awaited patiently--for it will require advances in men's +consciences and knowledge to control physical forces in the interest of +love--and striven for believingly. And even when bitter circumstances +seem, whether only for the present or permanently, inescapable, when +pain and disaster and death must be borne, the Christian accepts them as +part of the loving and wise will of God, as his Lord acquiesced in His +own suffering: "The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not +drink it?" And Jesus confers His confidence in the alterability of the +world of human relations. Christians believe in the superiority of moral +over material forces, in the wisdom and might of love. A life like +Christ's is pronounced in every generation unpractical, until under His +inspiration some follower lives it; and slowly, as in His own case, its +success is acclaimed. His principles, as applied to an economic +institution such as slavery, or to the treatment of the criminal, are +counted visionary, until, constrained by His Spirit, men put them into +practice, and their results gradually speak for themselves. His +followers in every age have seemed fools to many, if not to most, of +their judicious contemporaries; but cheered by His confidence, they +venture on apparently hopeless undertakings, and find that He has +overcome the world. + +Jesus' victory over sin works in true disciples a similar conquest. +Christians label any unchristlikeness sin, and they vastly darken the +world with a new sense of its evil, and are themselves most painfully +aware of their own sinfulness. Jesus' conscience has creative power, and +reproduces its sensitiveness in theirs; they are born into a life of +new sympathies and obligations and penitences. By His faith, and +supremely by His cross, He communicates to His followers the assurance +of God's forgiveness which reestablishes their intercourse with Him, and +releases His life in them; and Jesus lays them under a new and more +potent compulsion to live no longer unto themselves, but unto their +brethren. + +Jesus' conquest of death is to His followers the vindication of His +faith in God, and God's attestation of Him; and with such a God Lord of +heaven and earth, death has neither sting nor victory; it cannot +separate from God's love; and it is itemized among a Christian's assets. +The face of death has been transfigured. Aristides, explaining the +Christian faith about the year 125 A.D., writes, "And if any righteous +man among them passes from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to +God; and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place +to another near." Christians speak of their dead as "in Christ"--under +His all-sufficient control. + +_Communion with Jesus in God._ When the Christian through Jesus finds +himself in fellowship with His God and Father, he does not leave Jesus +behind as One whose work is done. He discovers that he can maintain this +fellowship only as he constantly places himself in such contact with the +historic Figure that God can through Him renew the experience. It is by +going back to Jesus that we go up to the Father; or rather, it is +through the abiding memory of Jesus in the world that God reaches down +and lifts us to Himself. And at such times no Christian thinks of Jesus +as a memory, but as a living Friend. To Him he addresses himself +directly in prayer and praise, which would be meaningless were there no +present communication between Jesus and His disciples. + +We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which +is distinguishable from our experience of communion with God; we respond +through Jesus to God. But if our God be the God of Jesus, we cannot +think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellowship with Him. +His God would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the +fellowship between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves +as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with +the Other. It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian +experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellowship is +with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." In communion with God +we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and +daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him. +They are ours in God; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of +our life with God, is ours in His and our Father. + +We have already passed over into the division of our subject which we +called _the Christ of reflection_. All experience contains an +intellectual element, and we never experience "facts" apart from the +ideas in which we represent them to ourselves. But there is a further +mental process when we attempt to combine what we think we have +experienced in some relationship with all else that we know, and reach a +unified view of existence. For example, when Paul took the gospel out of +its local setting in Palestine, and carried it into the Roman world, he +had to interpret the figure of Jesus to set it in the minds of men who +thought in terms very different from those of the fishermen of Galilee +or the scribes at Jerusalem. Similarly John, who wrote his gospel for +Gentile readers, could not introduce Jesus to them as the Messiah, and +catch their interest; he took an idea, as common in the thought of that +day as Evolution is in our own--the Logos or Word, in whom God expresses +Himself and through whom He acts upon the world--and used that as a +point of contact with the minds of his readers. We have to connect the +Christ of our experience with our thought of God and of the universe. +Three chief questions suggest themselves to us: How shall we picture +Jesus' present life? How shall we account for His singular personality? +How shall we conceive the union in Him of the Divine and the human, +which we have discovered? + +The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no +longer with them in the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their +sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still +in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with +God and with them. They used their current symbol for God--the Most High +enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the +right hand of the throne of God. Or they took some vivid metaphor of +personal friendship--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat +with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience. +These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and +ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize +heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our +literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New +Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith. + +The second question was asked even during Jesus' lifetime--"Whence hath +this Man these things?" The New Testament writers deal with the question +of Jesus' origin in a variety of ways. The earliest of our present +gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as +He answers John's summons to baptism. It seems to explain His +uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in +manhood. The first and third gospels contain besides this two other +traditions: they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout +progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the +other still further through Adam to God. They bring forward His +spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him. Side by side with +this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of +Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a +virgin-mother. This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage +which brought Him into the world. In Paul and John and the _Epistle to +the Hebrews_, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly +Being--the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with +God, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a +Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New +Testament writer with a virgin-birth. When our New Testament books were +put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and +combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its +account of Jesus' origin. + +Historical scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but +the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest +period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of +thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of +their Lord. Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern +believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible. We must +beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in +Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity +in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all +its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every +man's conception of his Lord. And on the other hand, we must point out +that it is a tribute to Jesus' greatness that so many circumstances were +appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual +value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in God, and that in Jesus +we find the Divine in the human. All four--a spiritual endowment, a +spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in +Man--may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if +we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which +these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus' +origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its +antecedents, but by its results--"By their fruits ye shall know them." +No man, today, should be hindered from believing in Christ, because he +does not find a particular statement in connection with His origin +credible. Christ is here in our world, however He entered it, and can be +tested for what He _is_. To know Him is not to know how He came to be, +but what He can do for us. "To know Christ," Melancthon well said, "is +to know His benefits." + +The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and +humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and +Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all +others. The theologians of those times worked out (and fought out) the +theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the +official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek, +Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures" +and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and +while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians, and +may recognize that an Athanasius and his orthodox allies were contending +for a vital element in Christian experience, their formulations do not +satisfy our minds. + +In the last century some divines advanced a modification of this ancient +theory, naming it the Kenotic or Self-emptying Theory, from the Greek +word used by St. Paul in the phrase, "He _emptied_ Himself." The eternal +Son of God is represented as laying aside whatever attributes of +Deity--omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--could not be +manifested in an entirely human life. The Jesus of history _reveals_ so +much of God as man can contain, but _is_ Himself more. But we know of no +personality which can lay aside memory, knowledge, etc. The theory +begins with a conception of Deity apart from Jesus, and then proceeds to +treat Him as partially disclosing this Deity in His human life; but the +Christian has his experience of the Divine through Jesus, and his +reflection must start with Deity as revealed in Him. + +Still later in the century, Albrecht Ritschl gave another interpretation +of Christ's Person. He began with the completely human Figure of +history, and pointed out that it is through Him we experience communion +with God, so that to His followers Jesus is divine; His humanity is the +medium through which God reveals Himself to us. This affirmation of His +Deity is an estimate, made by believers, of Jesus' worth to them; they +cannot prove it to any who are without a sense of Christ's value as +their Saviour. Any further explanation of how the human and the Divine +are joined in Jesus, he deemed beyond the sphere of religious knowledge. + +Our modern thought of God as immanent in His world and in men enables +us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure +of Christ into our minds. The discovery of the Divine in the human does +not surprise us. We think of God as everywhere manifesting Himself, but +His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized. He +reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as +much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man +as He is capable of manifesting. Nor does this Self-revelation of God in +Jesus do away for us with Jesus' own attainment of His character. +Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality. Jesus was no +merely passive medium through which God worked, but an active Will who +by constant cooeperation with the Father "was perfected." If there was an +"emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the +fulness of God. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the +Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate +riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably +himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better +explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery +of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved. + +While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in +impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ's worth can advance +to ever greater certainty. We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the +Truth and the Life. We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the +uttermost. We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New +Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul's, admits +its inadequacy by calling Him God's "_unspeakable_ gift." We see the +light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face; He is to us the +Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the +world. Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how +God and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the God who redeems us and +the Man we aspire to be. Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot +Andrewes') "God's as much as He can send; ours as much as we can +desire." + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +GOD + + +The word "God" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His +part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the +assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "God" is the +name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in +that which inspires them. One man's god is his belly, another's his +reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the +God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he +bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially +minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified +humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy +heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy +God." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one +who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth. And a +glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even +among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of God. + +A principal fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of +God. Men began with what was termed "Natural Religion." They studied the +universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it. It was +intricately and wisely designed; its God must be omniscient. It was +vast; He must be omnipotent. It displayed the same orderliness +everywhere; He must be omnipresent. In epochs when men emphasized the +beneficence of nature--its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom--they +concluded that its Creator was good. In an epoch, like the latter part +of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion. +Charles Darwin wrote, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the +clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature." + +Christians never stopped with the view of God drawn from "Natural +Religion." They made this their basis, and then added to it the God of +"Revealed Religion," contained in the Bible. They selected all the +texts that spoke of God, drawing them from _Leviticus_ and +_Ecclesiastes_ as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and +constructed a Biblical doctrine of God, which they added to the +omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from +Nature. The God and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various, +often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further +obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature. +It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian +view of God. + +Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are +not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one +path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of +Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust +and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fashion an image of +Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave +it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God's +disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as +faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "God," writes +Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not +man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest +inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God's +Self-unveiling to us, God's "Frankness," His Word made flesh. + +Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover: + +First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus +experienced His love and Himself was love. + +Second, that God is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether +He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us +to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His +children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But +trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is +sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His +will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the +servant of man,--to control disease, to harness electricity, to +understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature +and conform it to the likeness of His Son. God's complete lordship waits +until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present +we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men +defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work +together for good unto them that love Him. + +And third, that God is the indwelling Spirit. The Christlike Father +Lord, whom we find outside ourselves through the faith and character of +Jesus, becomes as we enter into fellowship with Him, a Force within us. +He is the Conscience of our consciences, the Wellspring of motives and +impulses and sympathies. We repeat, today, in some degree, the +experience of the first disciples at Pentecost; we recognize within +ourselves the inspiring, guiding and energizing Spirit of love. + +While we find God primarily through Jesus, He reveals Himself to us in +many other ways: in the Scriptures, where the generations before us have +garnered their experiences of Him; in living epistles in Christian men +and women, and in some who do not call themselves by the Christian name, +but whose lives disclose the Spirit of God who was in Jesus; in +non-Christian faiths, where God has always given some glimpse of Himself +in answer to men's search. Christ is not for us confining but defining; +He gives us in Himself the test to assay the Divine. + +Nor do experiences which we label religious exhaust the list of our +contacts with God. Our sense of duty, whether we connect it with God or +not, brings us in touch with Him. Many persons are unconsciously serving +God through their obedience to conscience. It was said of the French +_savant_, Littre, that he was a saint who did not believe in God. He +made the motto of his life, "To love, to know, to serve"; and no +intelligent follower of Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of +My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me," will fail to admit +that in such a life there is a genuine, though unrecognized communion +with God. In our own day when conscience is erecting new standards of +responsibility, rendering intolerable many things good people have put +up with, demonstrating the horror and hatefulness of war and forcing us +to probe its causes and motives, discontenting us with our industrial +arrangements, our business practices, our social order, God is giving us +a larger and better Ideal, a fuller vision of Himself. We know what our +Christlike Father is in Jesus; but we shall appreciate and understand +Him infinitely better as He becomes embodied in the principles and +ideals that dominate every home, and trade, and nation. + +Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God. The Greeks +embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the +satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls +were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and +majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed, +strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian +Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, +having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands +before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and +woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us +that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by +such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon +the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so +lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true +beauty." Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our +response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes +a response to God. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had +stamped its views upon his memory: + + Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din + Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, + In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, + Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; + And passing even into my purer mind + With tranquil restoration:--feelings too + Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, + As have no slight or trivial influence + On that best portion of a good man's life, + His little, nameless, unremembered acts + Of kindness and of love. + +Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted +religion, finds himself adoring + + that Beauty + Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world, + Scarce visible for extreme loveliness. + +Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know +it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from +the highest Beauty, which is God." They who begin with the cult of +Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with, +or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is +supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our +thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown." + +Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is +over all and through all and in all. Truth is one, and scientific +investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the +one Reality faith names God. Science of itself can never lead us beyond +visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith +many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all. Present-day +science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a God who is +no occasional visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception +of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a +Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that +He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces, +like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the +water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of God, +and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of God +always did, in love's cause. + +Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as "our more or +less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," helps us to +make clear our idea of God. A philosopher is just a thoughtful person +who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, aesthetic, +scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all +he knows of truth, beauty, right, God. + +In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of God, Christian +thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It was, +first, an attempt to hold fast to the great foundation truth of the Old +Testament that God is One. The world in which Christianity found itself +had a host of deities--a god for the sea and another for the wind, a god +of the hearth and a god of the empire, and so on. Today it is only too +easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one's business, to +follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and +to be polytheists again. Christian faith insists that "there is one God, +the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him." We adore One who is +Christlike love, and we will serve no other. We trust Christlike love as +the divine basis for a happy family life, and also for successful +commerce, for statesmanlike international dealings, for the effective +treatment of every political and social question. The inspirations that +come to us from a glorious piece of music or from an heroic act of +self-sacrifice, from some new discovery or from a novel sensitiveness of +conscience, are all inspirations from the one God. At every moment and +in every situation we must keep the same fundamental attitude towards +life--trustful, hopeful, serving--because in every experience, bitter or +sweet, we are always in touch with the one Lord of all, our Christlike +Father. + +In this Unity Christians have spoken of a Trinity. Paul summing up the +blessing of God, speaks of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the +love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit." He says, "through +Jesus we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father." He and his +fellow believers had been redeemed from selfishness to love, from +slavery to freedom; and they accounted for their new life by saying +that, through the grace of Jesus, they had come to experience the +fatherly love of God, and to find His Spirit binding them in a +brotherhood of service for one another and the world. The New Testament +goes no further: it states these experiences of Jesus, of God, of the +Spirit; but it does not tell us the exact relations of the Three--how +God is related to the Spirit, or Jesus distinct and at the same time one +with the Father. So acute a thinker as Paul never seems to have worked +this out. At one time he compares God's relation to His Spirit to man's +relation to his spirit ("Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save +the spirit of the man which is in him? even so the things of God none +knoweth, save the Spirit of God"); and once he identifies the Spirit +with the glorified Christ ("The Lord is the Spirit"). + +But while Paul and other New Testament writers did not feel the need of +thinking out what their threefold experience of God implied as to His +Being, later Christians did; and using the terms of the current Greek +philosophy, they elaborated the conception of three "Persons" in one +Godhead. We have no exact equivalent in English for the Greek word which +is translated "person" in this definition. It is not the same as "a +person" for that would give us three gods; nor is it something +impersonal, a mode or aspect of God. It is something in between a +personality and a personification. + +Let us remember that this doctrine is not in the New Testament, but is +an attempt to explain certain experiences that are ascribed in the New +Testament to Jesus, the Father, the Holy Spirit. Even the hardiest +thinkers caution us that our knowledge of God is limited to a knowledge +of His relations to us: Augustine says, "the workings of the Trinity +are inseparable," and Calvin, commenting on a passage whose "aim is +shortly to sum up all that is lawful for men to know of God," notes that +it is "a description, not of what He is in Himself, but of what He is to +us, that our knowledge of Him may stand rather in a lively perception, +than in a vain and airy speculation." But let us also recall that in +this doctrine generations of Christians have conserved indispensable +elements in their thought of God:--His fatherhood, His Self-disclosure +in Christ, His spiritual indwelling in the Christian community. Wherever +it has been cast aside, something vitalizing to Christian life has gone +with it. But at present it is not a doctrine of much practical help to +many religious people; and it often constitutes a hindrance to Jews and +Mohammedans, and to some born within the Church in their endeavor to +understand and have fellowship with the Christian God. + +We may adopt one of two attitudes towards it: we may accept it blindly +as "a mystery" on the authority of the long centuries of Christian +thought, which have used it to express their faith in God--hardly a +Protestant or truly Christian position which bids us "Prove all things; +hold fast that which is good"; or we may consider it reverently as the +attempt of the Christian Church of the past to interpret its discovery +of God as the Father Lord, revealed in Christ, and active within us as +the Spirit of love; and use it in so far as it makes our experience +richer and clearer, remembering that it is only a man-made attempt to +interpret Him who passeth understanding. The important matter is not the +orthodoxy of our doctrine, but the richness of our personal experience +of God. Dr. Samuel Johnson said: "We all _know_ what light is; but it is +not so easy to _tell_ what it is." Christians know, at least in part, +what God is; but it is far from easy to state what He is; and each age +must revise and say in its own words what God means to it. Here is a +statement in which generations of believers have summed up their +intercourse with the Divine. Have we entered into the fulness of their +fellowship with God? + +Do we know Him as our Father? This does not mean merely that we accept +the idea of His kinship with our spirits and trust His kindly +disposition towards us; but that we let Him establish a direct line of +paternity with us and father our impulses, our thoughts, our ideals, our +resolves. Jesus' sonship was not a relation due to a past contact, but +to a present connection. He kept taking His Being, so to speak, again +and again from God, saying, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." His every +wish and motive had its heredity in the Father whom He trusted with +childlike confidence, and served with a grown son's intelligent and +willing comradeship. Fatherhood meant to Jesus authority and affection; +obedience and devotion on His part maintained and perfected His sonship. + +Further, we cannot, according to Jesus, be in sonship with this Father +save as we are in true brotherhood with all His children. God is (to +employ a colloquial phrase) "wrapped up" in His sons and daughters, and +only as we love and serve them, are we loving and serving Him. In Jesus' +summary of the Law He combined two apparently conflicting obligations, +when He said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with _all_ thy heart, +_and_ thou shalt love thy neighbor." If a man loves God with his all, +how can there be any remainder of love to devote to someone else? What +we do for any man--the least, the last, the lost,--we do for God. We do +not know Him as Father, until we possess the obligating sense of our +kinship with all mankind, and say, "_Our_ Father." + +Do we know God in the Son? There is a sense in which Jesus is the "First +Person" in the Christian Trinity. Our approach to God begins with Him. +In St. Paul's familiar benediction, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ +precedes the love of God. We know God's love only as we experience the +grace of Jesus. We cannot experience that grace except as we let Jesus +be Lord. Absolute and entire self-commitment to Him allows Him to renew +us after His own likeness and equip us for service in His cause. He +cannot transform a partially devoted life, nor use a half-dedicated man. +Those who yield Him lordship, treating Him as God by giving Him their +adoring trust and complete obedience, discover His Godhood. To them He +proves Himself, by all that He accomplishes in and through them, worthy +of their fullest devotion and reverence. He becomes to them God +manifest in a human life. + +While in the order of our experience Jesus comes first, as we follow +Him, He makes Himself always second. He points us from Himself to the +Father, like Himself and greater; "My Father is greater than I." There +is a remoteness, as well as a nearness, in God; it is His "greaterness" +which gives worth to His likeness. To use a philosophical phrase, only +the transcendent God can be truly immanent. We prize Immanuel--God +_with_ us, because through Him we climb to God _above_ us. Jesus is the +Way; but no one wishes to remain forever en route; he arrives; and home +is the Father. Jesus is the image of the invisible God; but the image on +the retina of our eye is not something on which we dwell; we see through +it the person with whom we are face to face. We know God our Father in +His Son. Every aspect of Jesus' character unveils for us an aspect of +the character of the Lord of heaven and earth. Every experience through +which Jesus passed in His life with men suggests to us an experience +through which our Father is passing with us His children. The cross on +Calvary is a picture of the age-long and present sacrifice of our God as +He suffers with and for us. The open grave is for us the symbol of His +unconquerable love, stronger than the world and sin and death. God's +embodiment of Himself in this Son, made in all points like ourselves, +attests the essential kinship between Him and us--God's humanity and our +potential divinity. + +Do we know God in the Spirit? His incarnation in Jesus evidences His +"incarnability," and His eagerness to have His fulness dwell in every +son who will receive Him. To know God in the Spirit is so to follow +Jesus that we share His sonship with the Father and have Him abiding in +us, working through us His works, manifesting Himself in our mortal +lives. + +Our Father is the great public Spirit of the universe, the most +responsible and responsive Being in existence. The needs of all are +claims on His service, their sins are burdens of guilt on His +conscience, their joys and woes enlist His sympathy. He has His life in +the lives of His children. The Spirit is God's Life in men, God living +in them. To possess His will to serve, His sense of obligation, His +interest and compassion, is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling and regnant +in us. It was so that the Father's Spirit possessed Jesus and made His +abode in Him; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the +Son in the Christian community. + +And what a difference it makes whether we feel that the responsibilities +our consciences force us to assume, the sympathies in which our hearts +go out, the interests we are impelled to take, the resolves and longings +and purposes within us, are just our own, or are God's inspirations! If +they are simply ours, who knows what will come of them? If they are His, +we can yield to them assured that it is God who worketh in us to will +and to do of His good pleasure. + +Our faith in God as Self-imparting by His Spirit makes possible our +confident expectation that He can and will incarnate Himself socially in +the whole family of His children, as once He was incarnate in Jesus. +Christians who devote themselves to fashioning social relations after +the mind of Christ, and inspiring their brethren with His faith and +purpose, are conscious that through them the Spirit of God is entering +more and more into His world, revealing the Father in the new community +of love, which is being born. Sir Edward Burne-Jones once wrote: "That +was an awful word of Ruskin's, that artists paint God for the world. +There's a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo's +hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there +is something there, that all men with eyes recognize as Divine. Think +what it means: it is the power of bringing God into the world--making +God manifest!" Men and women who are molding homes and industries, towns +and nations, so that they embody love, and influencing for righteousness +the least and lowest of the children of men, are putting before a whole +world's eyes the Divine, are helping build the habitation of God in the +Spirit. Through them God imparts Himself to mankind. + +God over all--the Father to whom we look up with utter trust, and from +whom moment by moment we take our lives in obedient devotion; God +through all--through Jesus supremely, and through every child who opens +his life to Him with the willingness of Jesus; God in all--the +directing, empowering, sanctifying Spirit, producing in us characters +like Christ's, employing and equipping us for the work of His Kingdom, +and revealing Himself in a community more and more controlled by love: +this is our Christian thought of the Divine--"one God and Father of all, +who is over all and through all and in all." + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE CROSS + + +The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture +of God ended in a bloody tragedy. It was a catastrophe which all but +wrecked the loyalty of Jesus' little group of followers; it was an event +which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen +to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great mass of outsiders in +the Roman world. It was a most baffling circumstance for them to explain +either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the +control of their Lord's Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for +them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and +ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian +faith. It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament; +and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries. We +are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to +interpreting it with their thoughts. We are enriched as we try to share +their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for +ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts, +and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us. + +Its first and most obvious disclosure is the unchristlikeness, and that +means for us the ungodlikeness, of our world. We study the chief actors +in this event, and conclude that had we known personally Caiaphas, Annas +and Pilate, and even Herod and Judas Iscariot, we should have found them +very like men we meet every day, very like ourselves, with a great deal +in them to interest, admire and attract. And behind them we scan a crowd +of inconspicuous and unnamed persons whose collective feelings and +opinions and consciences were quite as responsible for this occurrence, +as were the men whose names are linked with it; and they impress us as +surprisingly like the public of our own day. It was by no means the +lowest elements in the society of that age who took Jesus to the cross; +they were among the most devout and conscientious and thoughtful people +of their time. Nor was it the worst elements in them which impelled +them to class Him as an undesirable, of whom their world ought to be +rid; their loyalties and convictions were involved in that judgment. +They acted in accord with what was considered the most enlightened and +earnest public opinion. We can think of no more high-minded person in +Jerusalem than young Saul of Tarsus, the student of Gamaliel; and we +know how cordially he approved the course the leaders of Israel had +taken in putting Jesus out of the way. + +The cross is the point where God and His children, even the best of +them, clash. At Calvary we see the rocky coast-line of men's thoughts +and feelings against which the incoming tide of God's mind and heart +broke; and we hear the moaning of the resisted waves. The crucifixion is +the exposure of the motives and impulses, the aspirations and +traditions, of human society. Its ungodlikeness is made plain. We get +our definition of sin from Calvary; sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit +of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The +lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of +the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus +completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the +inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live +in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in +men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it +tears the veil from each hostile thought and feeling that enacts this +tragedy and exposes the God-murdering character of our sin. Sin is +deicidal. When that Life of light is extinguished, we find a world about +us and within us so dark that its darkness can be felt. The fateful +reality of the battle between love and selfishness, knowledge and +ignorance, between God and whatever thwarts His purpose, is made plain +to us in that pierced and blood-stained Figure on the cross. In the +sense of being the victim of the ungodlike forces in human life, Jesus +bore sin in His own body on the tree. + +A second and equally clear disclosure is that of a marvellous +conscience. What takes Jesus Christ to that tragic death? It is +perfectly evident that He need not have come up to Jerusalem and +hazarded this issue; He came of His own accord; and we can think of +dozens of reasons that might have induced Him to remain in Galilee, +going about quietly and accomplishing all manner of good. Why did He +give up the opportunities of a life that was so incalculably +serviceable, and apparently court death? Jesus was always conscientious +in what He did; He felt Himself bound to the lives about Him by the +firmest cords of obligation, and whatever He attempted He deemed He owed +men. If there was a Zacchaeus whose honesty and generosity had given way +under the faulty system of revenue-collecting then in vogue, Jesus +considered Himself involved in his moral ruin and obliged to do what He +could to restore him: "I _must_ abide at thy house." If there were sick +folk, their diseases were to Him, in part at least, morally wrong, +devil-caused (to use His First Century way of explaining what we ascribe +to inherited weakness or to blameworthy conditions); and demoniacal +control over lives in God's world was something for which He felt +Himself socially accountable: "_Ought_ not this woman, whom Satan hath +bound, to have been loosed?" If the Church of His day was unable to +reach large sections of the population with its appeal, if it succeeded +very imperfectly in making children of the Most High out of those whom +it did reach, if with its narrowness and bigotry it made of its converts +"children of hell," as Jesus Himself put it, if it exaggerated trifles +and laid too little stress on justice, mercy and fidelity, He, as a +member of that Church, was chargeable with its failures, and must strive +to put a new conscience into God's people: "I _must_ preach the good +tidings of the Kingdom of God." Ibsen, the dramatist, wrote to his +German translator, Ludwig Passarge, "In every new poem or play I have +aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification--for a man +shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he +belongs." Jesus felt implicated in all that was not as it should be +among the children of men, and cleared Himself from complicity with it +by setting Himself resolutely to change it. He considered that the human +brotherhood in its sinfulness exacted nothing less of Him. + +It is commonly taught that the Lord's Prayer is a form that was +suggested by Jesus to His disciples, but that it could not have been a +prayer which He Himself used with them, because of its plea for +forgiveness. It is true that it is introduced in our Gospels as provided +by the Master for His followers, "When _ye_ pray, say." But millions of +Christians instinctively associate it with Jesus' own utterances to the +Father. And may they not be correct? "Forgive us _our_ debts," is a +social confession of sin, in which our Lord may well have joined, just +as He underwent John's baptism of repentance, though Himself sinless, in +order to fulfil all righteousness. He regarded Himself as indebted; His +work, His teaching, His suffering, His death, were not to Him a gift +which He was at liberty to make or to withhold. In the "must" so often +on His lips we cannot miss the sense of social obligation. He was (to +borrow suggestive lines of Shelley's) + + a nerve o'er which do creep + The else unfelt oppressions of the earth. + +They came home to His conscience, and He could not shake them off. They +were so many claims on Him; He felt He owed the world a life, and He +was ready to pay the debt to the last drop of His blood. "The Son of man +_must_ suffer and be killed." To the end He cast about for some less +awful way of meeting His obligations. "My Father, if it be possible, let +this cup pass away from Me." But when no other alternative seemed +conscientiously possible to Him, He went to Golgotha with a sense of +moral satisfaction. "_Ought_ not the Christ to have suffered these +things?" Without any disturbing consciousness of having personally added +to the world's evil, with no plea for pardon for His own sins on His +lips but only for those of others, His conscience was burdened with the +injustice and disloyalties, the brutalities and failures, of the family +of God, in which He was a Son, and He bore His brothers' sins on His +spirit, and gave Himself to the utmost to end them. + +A third disclosure of the cross is the incomparable sympathy of the +Victim. How shall we account for His recoil from the thought of dying, +for His shrinking from this death as from something which sickened Him, +for the darkness and anguish of His soul in Gethsemane at the prospect, +and for the abysmal sense of forsakenness on the cross? His +sensitiveness of heart made Him feel the pain and shame of other men, a +pain and shame they were frequently too stolid and obtuse to feel. He +could not see able-bodied and willing workmen standing idle in the +marketplace because no man had hired them, without sharing their +discouragement and bitterness, nor prodigals making fools of themselves +without feeling the disgrace of their unfilial folly. His parables are +so vivid because He has Himself lived in the experiences of others. +"_Cor cordium_" is the inscription placed upon Shelley's grave; and it +is infinitely more appropriate for the Man of Nazareth. In His sensitive +sympathy we are aware of + + Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish + Forc'd through the channels of a single heart. + +We cannot account for His recoil from the cross, save as we remember His +sense of kinship with those who were reddening their hands with the +blood of the Representative of their God. If we have ever stood beside a +devoted wife in the hour when her husband is disgraced, or been in a +home where sons and daughters are overwhelmed with a mother's shame, we +have some faint idea of how Jesus felt the guilt of His relatives when +they slew Him. He was the conscience of His less conscientious brethren: +"the reproaches of them that reproached Thee, fell on Me." He realized, +as they did not, the enormity of what they were doing. The utter and +hideous ungodlikeness of the world was expressed for Him in those who +would have none of Him, and cried: "Away with Him! Crucify, crucify +Him." His keenness of conscience and His acute sympathy brought to His +lips the final cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The +sinless Sufferer on the cross, in His oneness with His brethren, felt +their wrongdoing His own; acknowledged in His forsakenness that God +could have nothing to do with it, for it was anti-God; confessed that it +inevitably separated from Him and He felt Himself in such kinship and +sympathy with sinning men that He was actually away from God. "That was +hell," said old Rabbi Duncan, "and He tasted it." + +But our minds revolt. We do not believe that God deserted His Son; on +the contrary we are certain that He was never closer to Him. Shall we +question the correctness of Jesus' personal experience, and call Him +mistaken? We seem compelled either to do violence to His authority in +the life of the spirit with God, or to our conviction of God's +character. Perhaps there is another alternative. A century ago the +physicist, Thomas Young, discovered the principle of the interference of +light. Under certain conditions light added to light produces darkness; +the light waves interfere with and neutralize each other. Is there not +something analogous to this in the sphere of the spirit? Is not every +new unveiling of God accompanied by unsettlements and seeming darkenings +of the soul, temporary obscurations of the Divine Face? In all our +advances in religious knowledge are we not liable to undergo + + Fallings from us, vanishings, + Blank misgivings of the creature? + +And may it not have been God's coming closer than ever to the Son of His +love, or rather the Son's coming closer to the Father, as He entirely +shared and expressed God's own sympathy and conscience, and was made +perfect by the things which He suffered, that wrought in His sinless +soul the awful blackness of the feeling of abandonment? + +In the sense of suffering sin's force, of conscientiously accepting its +burden, of sensitively sympathizing with the guilty, Jesus bore sin in +His own body on the tree. + +And, as we stand facing the Crucified, we cannot escape a sense of +personal connection with that tragedy. The solidarity of the human +family in all its generations has been brought home to us in countless +ways by modern teachers; we are members one of another, and as we scan +the cross this is a family catastrophe in which the actors are our +kinsmen, and the blood of the Victim stains us as sharers of our +brothers' crime. And, further, as we look into the motives of Christ's +murderers--devout Pharisee and conservative Sadducee, Roman politician +and false friend, bawling rabble and undiscriminating soldiery, the host +of indifferent or approving faces of the public behind them--they seem +strangely familiar to us. They have been, they are still, alive by turns +in us. The harmless spark of electricity that greets the touch of one's +hand on a metal knob on a winter's day is one with the bolt of lightning +that wrecks a giant oak. The selfish impulse, the narrow prejudice, the +ignorant suspicion, the callous indifference, the self-satisfied +respectability, which frequently dominate us and determine our +decisions, are one with that cruel combination of motives which drove +the nails in the hands and feet of the Son of God. Still further, the +suffering of Jesus never seems to an acute conscience something that +happened once, but is over now. The Figure that hung and bled on the +tree centuries ago becomes indissolubly joined in our thought with every +life today that is the victim of similar misunderstanding and neglect, +injustice and brutality; and, while our sense of social responsibility +charges us with complicity in all the wrong and woe of our brethren, +that haunting Form on Calvary hangs before our eyes, and + + Makes me feel it was my sin, + As though no other sin there were, + That was to Him who bears the world + A load that He could scarcely bear. + +We may say to ourselves that this is fanciful, that we were not the +Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus, nor the Roman procurator who ordered His +execution, nor the scoffing soldiers who carried out his command; but +the conscience which the cross itself creates charges us with +participation in the murder of the Son of God. That cross becomes an +inescapable fact in our moral world, an element in our outlook upon +duty, a factor tingeing life with tragic somberness. It forces upon us +the conviction that it is all too possible for us to reenact Golgotha, +and by doing or failing to do, directly or indirectly, for one of the +least of Christ's brethren to crucify Him afresh, and put Him to an open +shame. + +But if the cross seems to color life somberly, it also gilds it with +glory. As we follow Christ, we discover more and more clearly that all +which we possess of greatest worth has come to us, and keeps coming to +us, through Him. What he endured centuries ago on that hill without the +city wall is a wellspring of inspiration flowing up in the purest and +finest motives in the life of today. There is a direct line of ancestry +from the best principles in the lives of nations, and of men and women +about us, running back to Calvary. Day after day we find ourselves and +the whole world made different because of that tragic occurrence of the +past, shamed out of the motives that caused it, and lifted into the life +of the Crucified. A recent dramatist makes the centurion, in the +darkness at the foot of the cross, say to Mary: "I tell you, woman, this +dead Son of yours, disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built a Kingdom +this day that can never die. The living glory of Him rules it. The earth +is _His_ and He made it. He and His brothers have been molding and +making it through the long ages; they are the only ones who ever really +did possess it: not the proud; not the idle; not the vaunting empires of +the world. Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake +all our kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust. The earth is His, the +earth is theirs, and they made it. The meek, the terrible meek, the +fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter into their inheritance." + +Nor is this all of which that cross convinces us. We find ourselves +giving that crucified Man our supreme adoration; He is for us that +which we cannot but worship. Instinctively and irresistibly we yield Him +our highest reverence, trust and devotion. As we think out what is +involved in the impression He makes upon us, we come to our conception +of His deity; and through Him we discover ourselves in touch with the +Highest there is in the universe, with the Most High. Calvary becomes, +for those who look trustingly at the Crucified, a window through which +we see into the life of the Lord of heaven and earth. Jesus' sin-bearing +is for us a revelation of the eternal sin-bearing of the God and Father +of us all. Behind the cross of wood outside the gate of Jerusalem we +catch sight of a vast, age-enduring cross in the heart of the Eternal, +forced on Him generation after generation by His children's unlikeness +to their Father--forced, but borne by Him, in conscientious devotion to +them, as willingly as Jesus went to Golgotha. If at Calvary we find the +rocky coast-line of human thought and feeling opposing the inflow of +God, the incoming waters break into the silver spray of speech, and +their one word is Love. + +In this revelation of our Father is the assurance of our forgiveness. +Such a God is not one who may or may not be gracious, as He wills; it is +"His property always to have mercy." He would not be just in His own +eyes, were He unmerciful; He is just to forgive us our sins and to +cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Like His Son, He owes us Himself; +and His forgiveness is freely ours in the measure that we are able to +receive it, that is, in the measure in which we have forgiven others. + +Jesus at Calvary proves Himself both our Substitute and our Exemplar. He +who finds and opens a trail to a mountain-top encounters and removes +obstacles, which none of those who come after him need to meet; he makes +the path _for them_. When the sinless Jesus found Himself socially +involved with His brethren in the low valley of the world's sinfulness, +and looked off to the summit of His Father's perfectness, He felt a +separation between the whole world and God; and He gave Himself to end +it. We shall never know the uncertainties that shrouded Him and the +temptations He faced, from the experience in the wilderness at the +outset to the anguish of His spirit in Gethsemane and the consciousness +of dereliction on the cross. The "if it be possible" of His prayer +suggests the alternative routes He sought to find, before He resigned +Himself to opening the path by His blood. Since His death there is "a +new and living way" for those who know Him, which stretches from the +lowest point of their abasement to the very peak of God's holiness. Up +that way they can pass by repentance and trust, and down it the mercy of +God hastens to meet and lead them. They are forever delivered from the +sense of exclusion from God; the way lies open. But he who knows a path +must himself walk it, if he would reach its goal; and no one is profited +by Christ's sacrifice who does not give himself in a like sacrificial +service; only so does he ever reach fellowship with the Father. + +The cross convinces us that we must love one another in the family of +God as our Father in Christ has loved us; and it further pledges us +God's gift of Himself, that is His Holy Spirit, to fulfil this debt of +love. It speaks to us of One who offers nothing less than Himself, and +nothing less will do, to be the Conscience of our consciences, the +Heart of our hearts, the Life of our lives. We are lifted by the cross +into a great redemptive fellowship, a society of redeemers--the +redeeming Father, the redeeming Son and a whole company inspired by the +redeeming Spirit. We fill up on our part as individuals and as Christian +social groups--churches, nations, families--that which is lacking in the +sufferings of Christ for His Kingdom's sake. The more Christian our +human society becomes, the more it will manifest the vicarious +conscience of its Lord, and feel burdened with the guilt of every +wrong-doer, and bound to make its law-courts and prisons, its public +opinion and international policies and all its social contacts, +redemptive. Through every touch of life with life, in trade, in +government, in friendship, in the family, men will feel self-giving love +akin to, because fathered by, the love of God commended to the world +when Christ died for sinners. + +While in a sense men will become all of them redeemers one of another, +behind them all will ever lie the unique sacrifice of Jesus. The +singularity of that sacrifice lies not in the act but in the Actor: +"_He_ is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also +for the whole world." Every member of the redeemed society, however much +he may owe to the sacrificial service of his brethren, will feel himself +personally indebted to Christ, who loved him and gave Himself up for +him. As the Originator of the redemptive fellowship, the Creator of the +new conscience, the Captain of our salvation who opened up the way +through His death into the holiest of all, we give to Jesus and to no +other the title, "The Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the +world." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE NEW LIFE--INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL + + +The health department of a modern city is charged with a double duty: it +has to care for cases of disease, and it has to suggest and enforce laws +to keep the city sanitary. The former task--the treatment of +sickness--is much more widely recognized as the proper function of the +medical profession; the latter--the prevention of the causes of +illness--is a newer, but a more far-reaching, undertaking. When Pasteur +was carrying on his investigations into the origins of certain diseases, +most of the leading physicians and surgeons made light of his work: "How +should this chemist, who cannot treat the simplest case of sickness nor +perform the most trifling operation, have anything to contribute to +medical science?" But Pasteur's discovery of the part played by bacilli +not only altered profoundly the work of physicians and surgeons, but +opened up the larger task of preventive medicine. + +The Gospel of Christ, in its endeavor to make and keep men whole, faces +a similarly double labor. It has its ministry of rescue and healing for +sinning men and women; it has its plan of spiritual health for society. +It comes to every man with its offer of rebirth into newness of life: +"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." It comes to society +with its offer of a regenesis, a paradise of love on earth. The life of +God enters our world by two paths--personally, through individuals whom +it recreates, and by whom it remakes society; socially, through a new +communal order which reshapes the men and women who live under it. The +New Testament speaks of both entrances of the Spirit of God into human +life: it pictures "_one_ born from above," and "the holy _city_ coming +down from God out of heaven." The two processes supplement each other. +Consecrated man and wife make their home Christian; a Christian home +renders the conversion of its children unnecessary; they know themselves +children of God as soon as they know themselves anything at all. Saved +souls save society, and a saved society saves souls. + +Religion must always be personal; each must respond for himself to his +highest inspirations. A child may confuse the divine voice with that of +its parents, through whom the divine message comes; but a day arrives +when he learns that God speaks directly to him, perhaps differently from +the way in which his parents understand His voice, and he must listen +for himself alone. A Job may take at second-hand the conventional views +of God current in his day, and through them have some touch with the +Divine; but this will seem mere hearsay when the stress of life compels +him to fight his way past the opinions of his most devout friends to a +personal vision of God. Religious experience is hardly worthy the name +until one can say, "O God, Thou art _my_ God." There is no sphere of +life in which a man is so conscious of his isolation as in his dealings +with his Highest. The most serious decisions of his life--his +apprehension of Truth, his obedience to Right, his response to Love--he +must settle for himself. + + Space is but narrow--east and west--There + is not room for two abreast. + +"Each one of us shall give account of himself to God." In our +consciousness of sin, in our penitence, in our faith, others may +stimulate and inspire us, may point the way saying, "Behold the Lamb of +God," may go with us in a common confession of guilt and a common +aspiration towards the Most High, but we are hardly conscious of their +fellowship; it is the living God with whom we personally have to do. + + Points have we all of us within our souls + Where all stand single. + +The Gospel comes as a summons to men one by one. Christ knocks at each +man's door, offering the most complete personal friendship with him. +Were there but a single child of God astray, the Good Shepherd would +adventure His life for him, and there is joy in the presence of the +angels over _one_ sinner that repenteth. + +The Evangel has always been good news to sinning people who wished to be +different. In _Adam Bede_ Mrs. Poyser says of Mr. Craig, "It was a pity +he couldna' be hatched o'er again, and hatched different." The Gospel +claims to be the power of God which can make the worst and lowest of +men--an Iago or a Caliban--into sons of the Most High in the measure of +the stature of the fulness of Christ. + +This has seemed incredible to most outsiders. Celsus in the Second +Century, in his attack on Christianity, wrote, "It must be clear to +everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and +training, none could change, not even by punishment--to say nothing of +doing it by pity." Dickens' Pecksniff "always said of what was very bad +that it was very natural." But it has been the glory of the Gospel that +it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its +adherents: "such _were_ some of you." Individual regeneration will ever +remain a large part of God's work through His Church. Unless we can +raise the dead in sin to life in Christ, we have lost the quickening +Spirit of God; so long as the world lieth in wickedness, every follower +of Jesus must go with Him after men one by one, to seek and to save that +which was lost. + +But a man's religious experience is vitally affected by social +conditions. Moses' protest against the slavery of the Israelites in +Egypt sprang from his feeling that it hindered their fellowship with +God. "Let My people go," he felt God saying, "_that they may serve Me_." +Mencius, the Chinese sage, wrote: "If the people have not a certain +livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a +fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of +self-abandonment. An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of +the people, so as to make sure that, above, they have sufficient +wherewith to serve their parents, and, below, sufficient wherewith to +support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always +be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the +danger of perishing. After this he may urge them, and they will proceed +to what is good." Christian workers, today, know well how all but +impossible it is to get a man to live as a Christian, until he is given +at least the chance to earn a decent living. + +But we have to be on our guard lest we overemphasize the force of +circumstances either to foster or hamper a man's fellowship with God. +The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord's song may +be sung in a strange land. It is always possible to be a Christian +under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not +shirk the inevitable cross. But the social order under which men live +shapes their characters. Ibsen calls it "the moral water supply," and +religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their +ideals. + +A glance over a few typical forms of social order will illustrate its +influence on character: + +Perhaps the noblest society of antiquity was the Greek city state. It +expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen, +legislators, judges. It set a premium upon the virtues of courage, +self-control, justice and public spirit. It delivered its citizens from +that "greasy domesticity" which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman +of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded. But its ideal was +within the attainment of but a fraction of the population. The slaves +had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in +the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens. +The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in +order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty +ideals. And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind +were classed as "barbarians," to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying +his ideals. + +Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal +System a different type of society. A vast hierarchy in Church and +State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many +gradations to the serf at the bottom. It was an improvement on the +little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and +bound them together with common faith and standards. It prized not the +civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience, +honor, chivalry. Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good +knight without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is +manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to +the soil, and the trader--often the despised Jew confined to the +Ghetto--had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the +Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than +converted. + +Under the revival of classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new +emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the +rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of +kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the +Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed, +and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are +initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. As its _beau ideal_ it +substitutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man. It +sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable +circumstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were +accessible to practically every white inhabitant. The Comte de Segur, +one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of +Independence, wrote: "An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and +the airs of our young men of fashion--who has compared the luxury of our +upper classes with the coarse dress of our peasants and the rags of our +innumerable poor,--is surprised on reaching the United States, by the +entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery. All +Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material. Their free and +frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and +from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own +rights and respected those of others." But under other conditions its +ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks +capital, or to the man with so large an assured income that he desires +no more. It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society--those +so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and +those so lightened that they do not feel them. It looks upon the +so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials +needed for its factories--its rubber, ivory, jute,--or engage cheap +labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products. It +has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its +missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been +almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government +agents, and the exported vices of civilization. + +Christianity has a social order of its own--the Kingdom of God. It is +not an economic system, nor a plan of government, but a religious +ideal--society organized under the love of God revealed in Christ. This +ideal it holds up in contrast with the existing social order in any age +as a protest, a program and a promise. + +The Kingdom _protests_ against any features in prevailing conditions +that do not disclose Christlike love. It scans the industrial world of +today, and finds three fundamental evils in it: competition as a motive, +arraying man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in +unbrotherly strife; gain-seeking as the stimulus to effort, inducing men +to invest capital, or to labor, primarily for the sake of the returns to +themselves; and selfish ownership as the reward of success, letting men +feel that they can do as they please with their own. Certain callings, +upon which the Christian Spirit has exerted a stronger influence, have +already been raised above the level of the commercial world. It is not +good form professionally for physicians, or ministers, or college +professors to compete with each other and seek to draw away patients, +parishioners or pupils; to exercise their callings mainly for the sake +of financial gains; nor to regard as their own their skill, or +inspiration, or learning. But as yet the butcher, the baker, the grocer, +the banker, the manufacturer, the promoter, are not supposed to be on +this plane. They are urged to compete, even to the extent of putting +their rivals out of business, in defiance of an old Jewish maxim, "He +that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him," and in face of the +Lord's Prayer in which we ask not for "my daily cake," but for "_our_ +daily bread." They are expected to consider profits, dividends, wages, +as the chief end in their callings; and if out of their gains they +devote a portion to public uses, that is charity on their part. A few +individuals are undoubtedly superior to the ideal set before them, and +are as truly dedicated servants of the community as any physician or +minister of the gospel, but they are a small minority; and the false +ideal ruins characters, and renders the commercial world a battlefield, +instead of a household of co-working children of God. + +It scans international relations, and finds patriotism still a pagan +virtue. Mr. Lecky calls it "in relation to foreigners a spirit of +constant and jealous self-assertion." When a tariff is under discussion, +high, low or no duties are advocated as beneficial for the industries of +one's own country, regardless of the welfare of those of other lands. +The scramble for colonies with their advantages to trade, the +imperialistic spirit that seizes possessions without respect to the +wishes of their inhabitants, the endeavor to secure in other countries +special concessions or large business orders at an extraordinary profit, +are all sanctified under the name of patriotism. The peace of the world +is supposed to be maintained by keeping nations armed to the teeth, so +that rival powers will be afraid to fight, and huge armies and navies +are labelled insurance against war. A sentence in a letter of Erasmus +has a singularly modern sound: "There is a project to have a congress of +kings at Cambrai, to enter into mutual engagements to preserve peace +with each other and through Europe. But certain persons, who get +nothing by peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles in the way." +The armament argument for peace has been given its _reductio ad +absurdum;_ but it is by no means clear that the world-wide war will free +the nations from the burdensome folly of keeping enormous armies and +navies. As Christians we must protest without ceasing that international +relations, based on mutual fear and maintained by the use of brute +force, can never furnish the peace of Christ. + +It scans the system of justice in its treatment of the wrong-doer, and +declares that the crude attempt to fit the punishment to the crime, and +to protect society by deterrent penalties, is not the justice of Him who +is "faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all +unrighteousness." Divine justice is redemptive; and society, if it +wishes to be Christian, must pay the heavy cost of making all its +contacts with the imperfect transforming. + +It scans the educational institutions of our land, and sees many +students viewing learning only with reference to its immediate +commercial availability, spurning all studies as "unpractical" which do +not supply knowledge that can be coined into financial returns; and it +sees many others without intellectual interest, prizing schools and +colleges merely for their social pleasures, lazily choosing courses +which require a minimum of labor, and disesteeming the great +opportunities of culture and enrichment provided by the sacrificial +studies and labors of the past. It insists that a moral revival is +needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized +with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind +and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The +blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the +higher educational institutions of our country. + +So the Christian social order contrasts itself with every phase and +aspect of our present life, and exposes the impoverishing absence of the +Spirit of God. Its protest is reinforced by widespread social +restlessness and the feeling that the existing state of things has gone +into moral bankruptcy. + +But the Kingdom of God is no mere protest; it is a _program_ of social +redemption. Some thinkers flatly deny that Christianity can provide a +constructive plan for society. Mr. Lowes Dickinson makes his imaginary +Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus: "Enunciated +centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, +inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and +touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or +indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of +Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and +destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could +not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic +by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course +of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, +to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the +prosperity of the state. The production and distribution of wealth, the +disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade, +these were matters as remote from his interests, as they were beyond his +comprehension. Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious +sect; never one worse to found and direct a commonwealth." + +Jesus' teaching concerning the Kingdom of God is contained in a handful +of parables and picturesque sayings. It attempts no detailed account of +a Utopia; it lays down no laws; it offers the world a spirit, which in +every age must find a body of its own. But this indefiniteness does not +fit it the less, but the better, as the inspiration to social +reconstruction. It affords scope for variety and endless progress. It +can take up the social ideals of other ages and of other civilizations, +and incorporate whatever in them is congruous with the Christian social +order. The ideals of Greece and Medieval Europe and of our present +commercialism, and the ideals of China, India and Japan, are not to be +thrown aside as rubbish, but reshaped and "fulfilled" by Christlike +love. It does not stultify human development by establishing a rigid +system; but entrusts to thoughtful and conscientious children of God the +duty of constantly readjusting social relations, so that they are +adequate expressions of their Father's Spirit. In every age Christians +are compelled not only to voice their protest against the existing +order, but to point out precisely what the Spirit of Christ demands, and +try practically to embody it. The fact that our directions are not +explicit is proof that God deals with us not as little children but as +sons and daughters, not as servants but as friends. We have to think out +for ourselves the economic system, the policies of government, the +disciplinary methods, the educational ideals, that will incarnate the +Spirit of our Father. The all-sufficient answer to the charge of the +inadequacy of Jesus as a guide to social welfare is the fact, that only +in so far as we are able to express His mind in our social relations, do +they satisfy us. The advances made in our generation are conspicuous +instances of progress not away from, but up to Him. The crash of our +present commercial order in industrial strife, now scarcely heard in the +greater confusion of a world at war, gives us the chance to come forward +with the principles of Jesus, and ask that they be given a trial in +business enterprises that are based on cooeperation, the joy of service +as the incentive to toil, responsible trusteeship of that which each +controls for the benefit of all the rest; in international relations +where every nation comes not to be ministered unto but to minister, and +loves its neighbors as itself--to ask that we seriously try the social +order of love. John Bright, unveiling the statue to Cobden in the +Bradford Exchange, said, "We tried to put Holy Writ into an act of +Parliament." We want the mind of Christ put into commerce, laws, +pleasures and the whole of human life. + +And we come forward with confidence, because the Kingdom we advocate is +not merely a protest and a program, but also a divine _promise_. The +ideal of the Kingdom of heaven to which our consciences respond is for +us a religious inspiration, and has behind it a faithful God who would +not deceitfully lure us to follow an illusive phantom. "According to His +promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth +righteousness." The city of our hope has not been designed by us, but +has been already thought out in God's mind and comes down out of heaven. +In our attack upon existing injustices and follies we raise again the +believing watchword of the Crusaders, "_Deus vult_" In our attempt to +rear the order of love, which cynics pronounce unpractical, we fortify +ourselves in the assurance that it is God's plan for His world, and that +we shall discover a preestablished harmony between the Kingdom of heaven +and the earth which we with Him must conform to it. We encourage +ourselves by recalling that, in the hearts of men everywhere and in the +very fabric and structure of things, we have countless confederates. + +On one of Motley's most glowing pages, we are told how, after the +frightful siege and fall of Haarlem, and with Alkmaar closely invested +by the Duke of Alva, when the cause of the Netherlands seemed in direst +straits, Diedrich Sonoy, the lieutenant governor of North Holland, wrote +the Prince of Orange, inquiring whether he had arranged some foreign +alliance, and received the reply: "You ask if I have entered into a firm +treaty with any great king or potentate; to which I answer, that before +I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces, +I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings; and I am +firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by +His almighty hand. The God of armies will raise up armies for us to do +battle with our enemies and His own." And the opening of the dykes +brought the very sea itself to the assistance of the brave contestants +for truth and liberty. + +The prayer on our lips, "Thy Kingdom come," we believe to be of God's +own inspiring. The social order which we seek is His eternal purpose; +and it has sworn confederates in sun and moon and stars of light, and in +every human heart. We wait patiently and we work confidently, in the +assurance that the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven +and earth, will not fail nor be discouraged, until He has set His loving +justice in the earth, and His will is done among all the children of +men, as it was once done by His well-beloved Son. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE CHURCH + + +No man's spiritual life starts with himself; there is no Melchizedek +soul--without father or mother. As our bodies are born of the bodies of +others, as our minds are formed from the mental heritage of the race, +our faith is the offspring of the faith of others; and we owe a filial +debt to the Christian society from which we derive our life with God. + +Nor is any man's spiritual experience self-sustaining. Our mental +vitality diminishes if we do not keep in touch with thinking people; and +brilliant men often lose their lustre for want of intellectual +companionship. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the +countenance of his friend." A Christian's religious experience requires +fellowship for its enrichment, and no large soul was ever grown or +maintained in isolation. We are enlarged by sharing the wealthier +spiritual life of the whole believing community. + +Nor can a religious man contribute his spiritual endowment to the world +without joining with kindred souls in an organized effort. Edward +Rowland Sill, speaking of his spiritual isolation, wrote to a friend: +"For my part I long to 'fall in' with somebody. This picket duty is +monotonous. I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other." The +intellectual life of the community organizes itself in schools and +colleges, in newspapers and publishing-houses and campaigns of lectures. +A learned man may do something by himself for his children or his +friends; but he can do incomparably more for a larger public if he is +associated with other learned men in a faculty, assisted by the +publications of the press, and receives pupils already prepared by other +teachers to appreciate his particular contribution. An earnest believer +can accomplish something by himself for the immediate circle of lives +about him; but he is immeasurably more influential when he invests his +inspired personality in the Church, where he finds his efforts for the +Kingdom supplemented by the work of countless fellow toilers, where the +missionary enterprise bears the impetus of his consecration to +thousands he can never see face to face, and where a lasting institution +carries on his life-work and conserves its results long after he has +passed from earth. + +The Christian is dependent upon the Church for his birth, his growth, +his usefulness; and this Christian community, or Church, like the +intellectual community, instinctively organizes itself to spread its +life. There is an unorganized Church, in the sense of the spiritual +community, which shares the life of Christ with God and man, as there is +an unorganized intellectual community of more or less educated persons +who possess the mental acquisitions of the race. But this intellectual +community would lose its vitality without its educational agencies; and +the spiritual community would all but die were it not for its +institutions. The spiritual community is the Church; it is organized in +the churches. + +As Christians we look back to discover Jesus' conception of the Church. +We find it implicit in His life rather than explicit in His teaching. He +was born into the Jewish Church which in His day was organized with its +Temple and priesthood at Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin settling its law +and doctrine, with its synagogues with their worship and instruction in +every town and a ministry of trained scribes, and with a wider +missionary undertaking that was spreading the Jewish faith through the +Roman world. It was a community with its sectarian divisions of +Sadducees, Pharisees and the like, but unified by a common devotion to +the one God of Israel and His law. Jesus' personal faith was born of +this Church, grew and kept vigorous by continuous contact with it, and +sought to work through its organization, for He taught in the synagogues +and the Temple. + +Jesus does not seem to have been primarily interested either in the +constitution, or the worship, or the doctrine of the Jewish Church. He +criticised the spirit of its leaders, but did not discuss their official +positions. He must have felt that much of the Temple ritual was +obsolete, and that many parts of the synagogue services were crude and +dull, but He entered into their worship that He might share with fellow +believers His expression of trust in His and their God. He did not +invent a new theology, but used the old terms to voice His fuller life +with God. He was primarily interested in the religious experience that +lay back of government, worship and creed; and gave Himself to develop +it, apparently trusting a vigorous life with God to find forms of its +own. So He never broke formally with the Jewish Church; and even after +it had crucified their Master, His disciples are found worshipping in +its Temple, keeping its festivals, and observing its law. + +But within this Church Jesus had gathered a group about Himself, to whom +He imparted His faith and purpose, and into whom He breathed His Spirit. +He taught them to think of themselves as salt and light to season and +illumine the community about them. As leaders, He bade them become like +Himself servants of all. One was their Master, they all were brethren. +Soon they developed a corporate feeling that separated them from their +fellow Jews, a corporate feeling Jesus had to rebuke because of its +exclusiveness: "Master, we saw one casting out demons in Thy name; and +we forbade him because he followed not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him +not, for he that is not against us is for us." On the eve of His death +He kept a Supper with them, which pictured to them His sustaining +fellowship with them and their comradeship with one another in Him. And +He left them with the consciousness that they were to carry forward His +work, were possessed of His inspiring Spirit and had His presence with +them always. Not by Jesus' prescribed plans, but by His spiritual +prompting the Church came to be. "Like some tall palm the noiseless +fabric sprang." + +It was not, then, organization, or ritual, or creed, that made the +Christian Church, but oneness of purpose with Christ. In the picture of +its earliest days we see it maintaining Jesus' intercourse with God by +prayer; continuing to learn of Him through those who had been closest to +Him; breaking the bread of fellowship with Him and one another; +expressing that fellowship in a mutually helpful community life; and all +of its members trying to bear witness to others of the supreme worth of +Jesus. We get at what they think of themselves by the names they use: +they are "disciples," pupils of the Divine Teacher; "believers," +trusting His God; "brethren," embodying His spirit toward each other; +"saints," men and women set apart to the one purpose of forwarding the +Kingdom; "of the Way," with a distinctive mode of life in the unseen and +the seen, following Jesus, _the_ Way. They called themselves the +Ecclesia--the called out for God's service; the Household of +Faith--insiders in God's family, sharers of His plans; the Temple of +God--those in whose life with each other and the world God's Spirit can +be seen and felt; the Body of Christ--the organism alive with His faith +and hope and love, through which He still works in the earth; the Israel +of God, the holy nation continuing the spiritual life and mission of +God's people of old--no new Church but the reformed and reborn Church of +God. + +The main point for them was that in this new community the Spirit of God +was alive and at work, producing in its members Christlike characters +and equipping them for Christlike usefulness. A body without life is a +corpse; and the Church fairly throbbed with vitality. It naturally +organized itself for work, but in organizing it was not conscious of +conforming to some fixed plan already laid down, but of allowing the +Spirit freely to lead from day to day. Christians found among themselves +specially gifted men--apostles (of whom there were many beside the +Twelve), with talents for leadership and missionary +enterprise--prophets, teachers; and they instinctively held these men +highly in love for their works' sake. One thinks of a figure like Paul, +who claimed no human appointment or ordination, but whose divine +authority was recognized by those who owed their spiritual lives to him. +And beside this informal leadership of gifted individuals, a more formal +chosen leadership came into existence. God's Spirit used the materials +at hand; and Christians in various parts of the Roman world had been +accustomed to different types of organization in their respective +localities, and these types suggested similar offices in the Church. +Some had been accustomed to the town government of a Palestinian village +by seven village elders; and this may have suggested "the Seven" chosen +in Jerusalem to care for the poor. Some were brought up with the +Oriental idea of succession through the next oldest brother, and this +may account for the position of eminence held by James, "the brother of +the Lord." Some in Gentile cities had been members of artisan societies, +guilds with benefits in case of sickness or death, not unlike lodges +among ourselves; and many hints, and perhaps offices (the overseer or +bishop, for instance) were taken from them. Some had been familiar with +the Roman relationship of patron and client, and when the little groups +of converts were gathered together in a wealthier Christian's house, he +would be given something of the position of the Roman _patronus_. Still +others had been trained in the synagogue, either as Jews or as +proselytes, and would naturally follow its organization in their +Christian synagogues. There seems to have been variety of form, and +along with this variety a felt and expressed unity, with freest +intercommunion and hearty cooeperation for the evangelization of the +world. Throughout there was democracy, so that even a leader so +conscious of divine authority as Paul appeals to the rank and file, "I +speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say." + +In worship, the Church from its early days had the two fixed rites of +Baptism and the Lord's Supper; but beside them were most informal +meetings for mutual inspiration. "What is it then, brethren: When ye +come together, each one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a +revelation, hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things be +done unto edifying." Here was room for variety to suit the needs of many +temperaments. + +And in doctrine there is a similar freedom. One can see in all the +Christian speakers and writers in the New Testament an underlying unity +in great convictions:--the God and Father of Jesus Christ is their one +God; Jesus is their one Lord; they are possessed and controlled by the +one Spirit of love; they are confident in a victorious hope; they draw +inspiration from the historic facts of Jesus' birth, life, death and +resurrection. But they interpret their inspirations in forms that fit in +with their mental habits. The fisherman Peter does not think with the +mind of the theologically trained Paul, nor does the unspeculative James +phrase his beliefs in terms identical with those of the writer to the +Hebrews. + +Jesus left His Spirit in a group of men; that group gradually was forced +out of the national Jewish Church, and became the Church of Christ, +dominated by His living Spirit and organizing itself for work, worship +and teaching, out of the materials at hand among the peoples where it +spread. + +We have taken this brief retrospect over the origin of the Church not +because it is important for us to discover the precise forms the Church +took at the start and reproduce them. It is nowhere hinted in the New +Testament that the leaders of these little communities are laying down +methods to be followed for all time. Indeed, they had no such thought, +for they expected Jesus to return in their lifetime and set up His +Kingdom; and they gave scant attention to forms of organization and +doctrine that would last but a few years. Nor is it reasonable to +suppose that forms which were suited to little groups of people meeting +in somebody's house, waiting for their Lord's return, will answer for +great bodies of Christians organizing themselves to Christianize the +world. No institution can remain changeless in a changing world. "The +one immutable factor in institutions," writes Professor Pollard, "is +their infinite mutability." Almost all the divisive factors in +Christendom are taken out of the past, by those who claim that a certain +polity or creed or practice is that authoritatively prescribed for all +time, by Christ Himself, or by His Spirit through His personally +appointed apostles. The chief question for the Church to decide, when it +considers its organization, is--What must we carry on from the past, and +what can we profitably leave behind? + +The Church of Christ has always been and is one undivided living +organism, composed of those who are so vitally joined to Jesus Christ +that they share His life with God and men. Our bodies are continually +changing in their constituent elements, but remain the same bodies; the +spirit of life assimilates and builds into its living structure that +which enters the body. The Church of Christ in the world is constantly +changing its components as the generations come and go; each new +generation is in some respects unlike its predecessor in thought, in +usage, in feeling; but the continuity of the Spirit maintains the +identity of the Body of Christ. We must carry forward the Spirit of +Christ, and keep unbroken the apostolic succession of spiritual men and +women, all of whom are divinely appointed priests unto God. We must +realize that, as members in the Body of Christ, each of us must fulfil +some function for the Kingdom, or we are not living members, but +paralyzed or atrophied. There is a continuity of life in the Church that +cannot be interrupted; we must inherit this life from the past, and we +must pass it on to those who come after us. Just as the first Christians +felt themselves the Israel of God, so today we are conscious of being +the heirs of patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, churchmen +and scholars and missionaries, leaders of spiritual awakenings like +Francis of Assisi, Luther and Wesley, theologians like Clement, +Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and of +countless humble and devoted believers who have been ruled by the Spirit +of the Master. They have bequeathed to us a solemn trust; they have +enriched us with a priceless heritage; they have transmitted to us +their life with Christ in God. The Church comes to us saying: + + I am like a stream that flows, + Full of the cold springs that arose + In morning lands, in distant hills; + And down the plain my channel fills, + With melting of forgotten snows. + +But the historic succession of Christians through the centuries is not +our sole connection with Christ; we not only look _back_ to Him, we also +look _up_ and look _in_ to Him, for He lives above and in us. The Church +is not a widow, but a bride; and shares its Lord's life in the world +today. The same Spirit who lived and ruled in the Church of the first +days has been breathed on us, through the long line of +apostolic-spirited men and women who reach back to Jesus, and lives and +rules in us. We must keep the unity of the Spirit with the believers of +the past, and with all who are Spirit-led in the world today; and we +must remember that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." +We are not bound by the precedents of bygone centuries in our +organization; we are free to take from the past what is of worth to us, +and we are free to let the rest go. Is not the Spirit of God as able to +take materials at hand in our own age, and to use them for the +government, the worship, the creed, the methods of the living Church of +Christ? + +We cannot, of course, be content with an unrealized unity of the Church. +Every little group of Christians, in the first age, felt itself the +embodiment in its locality of the whole Church, and it was at one in +effort with followers of Jesus everywhere. It exercised hospitality +towards every Christian who came within its neighborhood, welcoming him +to its fellowship and expecting him to use his gifts in its communion. +We want the whole Body of Christ organized, so that it is vividly +conscious of its unity, so that it does not waste its energy in +maintaining needlessly separate churches, so that followers of Christ +feel themselves welcome at every Table of the Lord, and every gifted +leader, accredited in any part of the Church, is accepted as accredited +in every other where he can be profitably used. The practical problem in +Church reorganization is identical with that which confronts society in +politics and in industry--how to secure efficient administration while +safeguarding liberty, how to combine the solidarity of the group with +the full expression of its members' individualities. To be effective the +Church must work as a compactly ordered whole. Individuals must +surrender personal preferences in order that the Church may have +collective force. Teamwork often demands the suppression of +individuality. There will have to be sufficient authority lodged in +those who exercise oversight to enable them to lead the Christian forces +and administer their resources. But we dare not curtail the freedom of +conscience, or impede liberty of prophesying, or turn flexibility of +organization into rigidity, lest we hamper the Spirit, who divideth to +every man severally even as He will. We do not want "metallic beliefs +and regimental devotions," but the personal convictions of thinking sons +and daughters of the living God, the spontaneous and congenial +fellowship of children with their Father in heaven, and methods +sufficiently flexible to be adaptable to all needs. We look for an +organization of the Church of Christ that shall exclude no one who +shares His Spirit, and that shall provide an outlet for every gift the +Spirit bestows, that shall bind all followers of Christ together in +effort for the one purpose--the Kingdom of God--enabling them to feel +their corporate oneness, and that shall give them liberty to think, to +worship, to labor, as they are led by the Spirit of God. + +Meanwhile there are some immediate personal obligations which rest upon +us. We cannot be factors in the organized Church of Christ, save as we +are members of one of the existing churches. A Christian should enroll +himself either in that communion in which he was born and to which he +owes his spiritual vitality, or else in that with which he finds he can +work most helpfully. A Christian who is not a Church member is like a +citizen who is not a voter--he is shirking his responsibility. + +We must free our minds from prejudice against those whose ways of +stating their beliefs, whose modes of worship, whose methods of working, +differ from our own. We are not to argue with them which of us is nearer +the customs of the New Testament; that is not to the point. Wherever we +see the Spirit of Christ, there we are to recognize fellow churchmen in +the one Church of God. We do not wish uniformity, but variety in unity; +for only a Church with a most varied ministry can bring the life of God +to the endlessly diverse temperaments of men and women. We are not +seeking for the maximum common denominator, and insisting that every +communion shall give up all its distinctive doctrines, ritual, customs +and activities. We do not want any communion to be "unclothed," but +"clothed upon," that what is partial may be swallowed up of fuller life. +Dogmatists, be they radicals or conservatives, who insist on a +particular interpretation of Christianity, ecclesiastics who arrogantly +consider their "orders" superior to those of other servants of Christ as +spiritually gifted and as publicly accredited, sectarians so satisfied +with the life of their particular segment of the Church that they do not +covet a wider enriching fellowship, and churchmen whose conception of +the task of the Church is so petty that they fail to feel the imperative +necessity of articulating all its forces in one harmoniously functioning +organization, are the chief postponers of the effective unity of the +Body of Christ. + +We have to consider the particular communion to which we ourselves +belong, and ask whether there are any barriers in it that exclude from +its membership or from its working force those who possess the Spirit of +Christ, and so are divinely called into the Church and divinely endowed +for service. We must make our own communion as inclusive as we believe +the Church to be, or we are not attempting to organize the Church of +Christ, but to create some exclusive club or sect of Christians of a +particular variety. + +We must study sympathetically the ways of other communions, and be +prepared to borrow freely from them whatever approves itself as +inspiring to Christian character and work. A Presbyterian will often +refuse to avail himself of the great historic prayers, simply because he +thinks he would be copying Lutherans or Episcopalians, forgetting that +he is heir of the whole inheritance of the Church, and that his own +direct ecclesiastical forbears freely used a liturgy, and even composed +some of the most beautiful parts of the Book of Common Prayer; and an +Episcopalian will not cultivate the gift of expressing himself in prayer +in words of his own because this is the practice of other communions. +As every communion employs in its hymnal the compositions of men and +women who in life were members of almost every branch of the Church of +Christ, so each should as freely use methods of propaganda, or worship, +or education, that have been found valuable in any communion. The more +freely we borrow from one another, the more highly we shall prize one +another, and the more completely we share the same life, the more +quickly will our corporate oneness be felt. + +We must set our faces against allowing congregations to embrace but one +social class, or several easily combined social strata in the community. +In our American towns the Protestant communions are separated more by +social caste than by religious conviction. People attend the church +where they find "their kind." Poor people do not feel themselves at +home, even spiritually, among the well-to-do, and the children of +comfortable homes are not permitted to go to the same Sunday School with +the children of the tenements. Class lines are as apparent, and almost +as divisive, in our churches as anywhere else. The Church of Christ +under such circumstances ceases to be a unifying factor in society; its +teaching of brotherhood becomes a mockery. In every community there will +be found some entirely unchurched social group; and the churches +themselves will be impoverished by the absence of the spiritual +appreciations to be found most developed in persons of that stratum. Our +denominational divisions tend to accentuate our social divisions. Church +unity, lessening the number of congregations in a locality, would help +to make the churches that remained more socially inclusive. Meanwhile +the "one class church," in any but the very rare homogeneous community, +ought to realize that, whatever Christian service it may render, it is +all the while doing the cause of Christ a great disservice, and is in +need of a radical reorganization and an equally radical spiritual +renewal into its Lord's wider sympathies. + +Personally we must rigidly examine ourselves and test our right to be +considered members of the Body of Christ. There are some New Testament +evidences of the Spirit that we must still demand of ourselves. One is +loyal obedience to Jesus: "No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the +Holy Spirit." A second is filial trust in God: "Because ye are sons, God +sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father." +A third is self-devoting love akin to that shown on Calvary: "The fruit +of the Spirit is love;" "By this shall all men know that ye are My +disciples, if ye have love one to another." And if the Spirit is within +us, He is eager to work through us. We may be quenching Him by laziness, +by timidity, by preoccupation. We are of the Body of Christ only as we +are "members each in his part." + +Above all we must constantly remind ourselves of the Church's adequacy +in God for its work. When we speak of the Church we are apt to think +first of its limitations; when Paul spoke of the Church its divine +resources were uppermost in his mind--"the Church which is His Body, the +fulness of Him that filleth all in all." Perhaps the Church's greatest +weakness is unbelief in its own divine sufficiency. We confront the +indifference, the worldliness, the wickedness of men; we face an earth +hideous with war and hateful with selfishness. We think of the Church's +often absurdly needless divisions, the backwardness of its thought, the +coldness of its devotion, the inefficiency of many of its methods, the +want of consecration in a host of its members, the imperfections and +limitations of the best and most earnest of them; and we do not really +expect any marked advance; we hardly anticipate that the Church will +hold its own. Would not our Lord chide us, "O ye of little faith! all +power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore and make +disciples of all nations"? "There are diversities of workings, but the +same God who worketh all in all." + +The Church exists to make the world the Kingdom of God. In the holy city +of John's vision there is no temple, for its whole life is radiant with +the presence of God and of the Lamb. In the final order there will be no +Church, for its task is finished when God is all in all. Meanwhile the +Church has no excuse for being except as it continually renders itself +less and less necessary. It has to lose itself in sacrificial service in +order to save itself. It must never ask itself, "Will the community +support me?" but "Can I inspire the community?" As it seeks to do God's +will, it can count on Him for daily bread; a more luxurious diet would +not be wholesome for its spiritual life. It exists only to spend and be +spent in bringing the children of God everywhere one by one under the +sway of His love and presenting them perfect in Christ, and in putting +His Spirit in control of homes, industry, amusements, education, +government, and the whole life of human society, until we live in +"realms where the air we breathe is love." + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE CHRISTIAN LIFE EVERLASTING + + +Various factors combine to make it hard for men today to believe vividly +in life beyond the grave. Our science has emphasized the closeness of +the connection between our spiritual life and our bodies. If there be an +abnormal pressure upon some part of the brain, we lose our minds; an +operation upon a man's skull may transform him from a criminal into a +reputable member of society. It is not easy for us to conceive how life +can continue after the body dies. Diderot put the difficulty more than a +century ago: "If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing +without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a +heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere and be something +without extension, then we might indulge this hope of a future life." + +Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven +and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older +generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they +walked and the houses in which they lived. One goes into such a burying +place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante's _Divina Comedia_, and +the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future +abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually +travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as +keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns. We lack a +definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our +sight. + +Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously +experience can give no certain knowledge of things future. We are +disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible +or out of it, as the projections of men's hopes. They are such stuff as +dreams are made on. + +And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of _our_ +world's life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of some +golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting +earth-wide peace that shall render impossible such awful orgies of death +as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar. Men +think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they +themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social +order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of +the social order of the celestial country. + +Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is +always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without +regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us +under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more +than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful +person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?" + +What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question? + +He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to +the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely +rich it is, He kindled in us the passion for the second life, and +rendered immortality indispensable for Christians. + +Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean +so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean +infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man +feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it +hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is +when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor +trifles he cares for--his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his +newspaper--that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined, +that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or +sublime--immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and +looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God, +then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this +uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second +Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes +Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look +upon each day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new +reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of +producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden, +where we feel + + Pison and Euphrates roll + Round the great garden of a kingly soul. + +But is this emparadised life to be some day thrown aside? G.J. Romanes, +whose Christian upbringing had instilled in him the distinctively +Christian appreciation of the value of his own life, when his scientific +opinions robbed him of the hope of immortality, wrote: "Although from +henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain +an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words +that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, +as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed +glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of +existence as I now find it, at such times I shall ever feel it +impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my instinct is +susceptible." + +And Jesus increases the significance of people for each other. He +possessed and conveys the genius for appreciation. He came that life +might become more abundant, and every human relation deeper, tenderer, +richer. It is to love that death is intolerable. Professor Palmer of +Harvard, a few years ago, delivered a lecture upon _Intimations of +Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakespere_, in which he showed that, when +a man finds himself truly in love, mortality becomes unthinkable to him. +And for Christians love and friendship contain more than they do for +other men. Christ takes us more completely out of ourselves and wraps us +up in those to whom we feel ourselves bound. He makes life touch life at +more points, life draw from life more copious inspirations, life cling +to life with more affectionate tenacity. He roots and grounds us in +love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear +them from us irrevocably--parents, children, husband, wife, lover, +beloved, friend,--is to leave us of all men most pitiable. + + Love--the prisoned God in man-- + Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free, + Cries like a captain for eternity. + +Again, Christ gives men an ideal for themselves which in their +threescore years and ten, more or less, they cannot hope to achieve: "Be +ye perfect as your Father." Jesus Himself, in whom we see the Father, is +for us that which we feel we must be, yet which we never are. +Immortality becomes a necessity to any man who seriously sets himself to +become like Jesus. Our mistakes and follies, the false starts we make, +the tasks we attempt for which we discover ourselves unfit, the waste of +time and energy we cannot repair, the tangled snarls into which we wind +ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life +absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative +beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a +gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal +hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out +on its quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor. + + The fiend that man harries + Is love of the best. + +We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory +is forever impossible for sheer want of time. + +Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order--the Kingdom of +God--a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its +accomplishment. We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where +hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for +brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by +a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is +redemptive. But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more +heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and +brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to +realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order +appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest +improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means +folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly. Things as they are +have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with +curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give +anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, and +then--! + +Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though +without a Christian's faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached, +"The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as +one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags." But the allusion to death +set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued: "It is a +curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction +increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at +all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no +more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a +good deal--at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate +and company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this +way." He was repeating the experience of the old Greeks as it is +expressed in Pindar's _Fourth Pythian_: "Now this, they say, is of all +griefs the sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide +without lot therein." It is glorious to hold up before ourselves the +splendors of the age that is to be, to dream of our cities made over in +ideals, of our land as a world-wide servant of righteousness and peace, +of a whole earth filled with truth and beauty and goodwill; and glorious +to give ourselves unremittingly to bring this consummation nearer. But +can we be content with no personal share in it? Are our lives merely +fertilizer for generations yet unborn? + + Oh, dreadful thought, if all our sires and we + Are but foundations of a race to be,-- + Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon + A white delight, a Parian Parthenon, + And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid + Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade, + And in processions' pomp together bent + Still interchange their sweet words innocent,-- + Not caring that those mighty columns rest + Each on the ruin of a human breast,-- + That to the shrine the victor's chariot rolls + Across the anguish of ten thousand souls! + +Tennyson once said to Professor Tyndall that, if he believed he were +here simply to usher in something higher than himself in which he could +have no personal part or lot, he should feel that a liberty had been +taken with him. And when that something higher is the Kingdom Jesus +proclaimed, its devotees cannot forego their longing to share in its +perfected life. + +And, above all, Jesus opens up for us an intimacy with God which is both +unbearable and incredible without the hope of its continuation beyond +the grave. To enter with Jesus into sonship with the Father, to share +God's interests and sympathies and purposes, to become the partner of +His plans and labors, and then to think of God as living on while we +drop out of existence, is the crowning misery, or rather the supreme +confusion. Jesus would have pointed to some heartbroken man or woman, +like Jairus or the widow of Nain or the sisters at Bethany, and said, +"If ye then, being evil, know how to care so intensely for your kindred, +and would give your all to keep them with you forever, how much more +shall your heavenly Father insist on having His own with Him eternally?" + +At Professor Huxley's own request three lines from a poem by his wife +are inscribed upon his tombstone: + + Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; + For still He giveth His beloved sleep, + And if an endless sleep He wills, so best. + +But in such a sentence what possible meaning can be put into the +expression "His beloved"? Can we conceive of God as really loving us, +taking us into His secrets, using us in His purposes, letting us spend +and be spent in the fulfilment of His will, and then putting us to an +endless sleep? If Jesus leads us into the life with God which we +Christians know, He renders immortality indispensable if God is to +maintain His own Self-respect. + +Others may do without everlasting life; to some an endless sleep may +seem welcome; life has been to them such a mistake and a failure, that +they would gladly be quit of it forever; but to followers of Jesus its +continuance is a passionate and logical longing. Ibsen puts into +Brindel's mouth the words: "I am going homewards. I am homesick for the +mighty Void; the dark night is best." Jesus acclimatizes man's spirit to +a far different home, and sets in his heart an altogether different +eternity. So insistent are the demands of our souls for the persistence +of life with our God in Christ, that "if we have only hoped in Christ in +this life, we are of all men most pitiable." + +Already we have passed into Jesus' second great contribution toward +answering our question of the second life. He assures us of it because +of the character of the Father we come to know through Him. Jesus' faith +in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God. The +words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an +utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating: + + Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave, + Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption. + Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life; + Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence. + +Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love. It was this +which made Him "the God of the living." Jesus could not imagine Him +linking Himself with men, becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of +Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite +grave. His love would hold them in union with Him forever. Jesus +"abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light _through the +gospel_"--through the good news concerning God. When He succeeds in +convincing us that the universe is our Father's house, it requires no +further argument to assure us of its "many mansions." The unending +fellowship with Jesus' God of all His true children is an inevitable +inference from what we know His and our God to be. We do not base our +confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of +Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the +report of His own resurrection from the grave; these are too slight +foundations for our assured expectation. We rest it firmly upon what we +know of His and our Father. Immortality is not a mere guess nor a +fervent wish; we have solid and substantial experience of what God is +from all that He has done for His children and for ourselves. And +experience worketh hope. Faith looks both backwards and forwards, to +what God has done and to what He consistently must do; and all the while +faith looks upwards, and in His face reads a love that will not let us +go. + +The Easter victory of Jesus is the vindication of His own faith. God, as +Lord of heaven and earth, is involved in our world's history; He has +been responsible for its outcome from the beginning. If He let the +truest Son He ever had end His career in defeat and failure, He is a +faithless and untrustworthy God. Calvary was the supreme venture of +faith; Jesus staked everything on the responsiveness of the universe to +love, in the trust that the God of the universe is love. "If Christ hath +not been raised, your faith is vain." But if the seeming triumph of +wrong over right, of ignorance over truth, of selfishness over +sacrifice, which took place at Golgotha be but the prelude to a vaster +victory, then the Lord of earth has cleared Himself, and proved Himself +worthy of the confidence of His children. + +And of the fact of that victory not only the first disciples are +witnesses, but every man and woman since in whose life Christ has been +and is a present force. Explain as we may the details of the +resurrection narratives, conceive as we please of the manner in which +Christ made Himself known to His followers in His post-resurrection +appearances long ago, we know that He is "no dead fact stranded on the +shore of the oblivious years," but a living force in our world today, +and that Easter triumphs are reenacted wherever His Spirit animates the +lives of men. History again and again has demonstrated that His labor +has not been vain in God; that the whole structure and fabric of things +responds to trust and love; that careers such as His cannot be holden of +death, but find an ally in the universe itself, which sends them on +through the years conquering and to conquer. That demonstration in +history confirms Jesus' trust in God, sets a public seal which the whole +world can see to the correctness of His testimony to Him whom He found +in the unseen, and in whose cause He laid down His life. + +And Jesus has made still another contribution to the answer of our +question: it is through Him that we form our pictures of the life to +which we look forward so certainly. The New Testament expectations +center about Jesus Himself: "With Me in paradise;" "Where I am, there +also shall my servant be;" "I go to prepare a place for you;" "So shall +we ever be with the Lord." Men who had experienced Christ's hold upon +them, through all the divisive circumstances of life, had no doubt of +His continuing grasp upon them through death; they spoke of the +Christian dead as "the dead in Christ"--the dead under His transforming +control. Not death nor life could separate them from His love. + +Since we see God, the Lord of heaven, in Jesus, the only and +all-satisfying knowledge we have of the future life is that it will +accord with the will of the Father of Jesus Christ. Of its details we +can merely say, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered +into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that +love Him." But we know God in Christ: we are certain of many things that +cannot be included in a life where His heart has its way; the city of +our hope has walls; but it has also gates on all sides and several gates +on every side, and we are certain of its hospitability to all that +accords with the mind of Christ. That which renders the life within the +veil not all dark to us is the fact that "the Lamb is the light +thereof." There is a connection between it and our life today; the one +Lord rules earth and heaven; and Him we know through Jesus. Humbly +acknowledging that we know but in part, glad that the future has in +store for us glorious surprises, we are convinced that for us there +waits a life in God, in which His children shall attain their Christlike +selves in Christlike fellowship one with another and with Him, their +Christlike Father. More than this who cares to know? More than this, for +what can Christians wish? + + + + +_Adhoesi testimoniis tuis, Domine_. + +Psalm, cxviii (119): 31, Vulgate. + + + +PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Some Christian Convictions, by Henry Sloane Coffin + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS *** + +***** This file should be named 16424.txt or 16424.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/4/2/16424/ + +Produced by Eric Betts and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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