Preface
These chapters need to have it said that they
were given as extempore lectures from rough notes to a gathering, largely of
young ministers, in connection with Rev. Dr. Campbell Morgan's annual
conference at Mundesley, Norfolk. They were taken down in shorthand and then
carefully revised. They took place in July, 1909, immediately after the
delivery of my Congregational Lecture on the Person and Place of Christ,
which they supplement - especially when taken with my Cruciality of the
Cross a few months before. It will be seen from the conditions that the
book cannot pretend to be more than a higher kind of popularisation, though
this is less true of the two last chapters, which have been more worked over.
The style approaches in parts a conversational familiarity which would have
been out of place in addressing theological experts. And as some of the ideas
are unfamiliar I have not been too careful to avoid repetition. My hope is to
be of some use to those ministers who are still at a stage when they are
seeking more footing on such matters than they have been provided with in mere
Biblical or Historical Theology. There is no region where religion becomes so
quickly theology as in dealing with the work of Christ. No doctrine takes us
so straight to the heart of things, or so forces on us a discussion of the
merits of the case, the dogmatic of it, as distinct from its scriptural or its
ecclesiastical career. No doctrine draws so directly on the personal religion
of sinful men, and none, therefore, is open to so much change in the course of
the Church's thought upon its growing faith and life. Thus when we consider
that here we are at once where the form may change most in time and yet the
feet be most firmly set for eternity, we realize how difficult and delicate our
task must be. And we are made to feel as if the due book on such a theme could
only be written from behind the veil with the most precious blood that ever
flowed in human veins.
We are in a time when a spirituality without
positive content seems attractive to many minds. And the numbers may grow of
those favouring an undogmatic Christianity which is without apostolic or
evangelical substance, but cultivates a certain emulsion of sympathetic
mysticism, intuitional belief, and benevolent action. Among lay minds of a
devout and social but impatiently practical habit, this is not unlikely to
spread; and particularly among those whose public interests get the upper hand
of ethical and historical insight and denude their religion of most of the
reflection it demands.
Upon undogmatic, undenominational religion no
Church can live. With mere spirituality the Church has not much directly to
do; it is but a subjective thing; and its favour with many may be but another
phase of the uncomprehending popular reverence (not to say superstition) for
the recluse religionist, the mysterious ecstatic, and the ascetic pietist.
What Christian faith and the Christian Church have to do with is holy
spirituality - the spirituality of the Holy Spirit of our Redemption. The
Christian revelation is not "God is a spirit," nor is it "God is love." Each
of these great words is now much used to discredit the more positive faith from
whose midst John wrote them down. Herein is love, not in affection but in
propitiation (1 John 4:10). Would Paul ever have written 1 Cor. 13 if it had
been revealed to him that it was going to be turned against Rom 3:25? And what
would his language have been to those who abused that chapter so? Christian
faith is neither spirituality nor charity. Its revelation is the holiness in
judgment of the spiritual and loving God. Love if only divine as it is holy;
and spirituality is Christian only as it meets the conditions of Holy Love in
the way the Cross did, as the crisis of holy judgment and holy grace. If the
Cross is not simply a manner of religion but the object of our religion and the
site of revelation, then it stands there above all to effect God's holiness,
and not to concentrate man's self-sacrifice. And except in the Cross we have
no guarantee for the supreme thing, the divine thing, in God, which is the
changeless reality and irresistible sovereignty of His Holy Love.
It is upon such faith alone, given by the Cross
alone, that a Church can live - upon the faith that founded it - upon a
positive New Testament Gospel. Of that Gospel the Church is the trustee. And
the Church betrays its trust and throws its life and its Lord away when it
says, "Be beautifully spiritual and believe as you like," or "Do blessed good
and think as you please."
There is timely saying of that searching
Christian genius Kierkegaard - the great and melancholy Dane in whom Hamlet was
mastered by Christ:
"For long the tactics have been: use every means
to move as many as you can - to move everybody if possible - to enter
Christianity. Do not be too curious whether what they enter is
Christianity. My tactics have been, with God's help, to use every means to
make it clear what the demand of Christianity really is - if not one entered
it."
The statement is extreme; but that way lies the
Church's salvation - in its anti-Nicene relation to the world, its
pre-Constantinian, non-established, relation to the world, and devotion to the
Word. Society is hopeless except for the Church. And the Church has nothing
to live on but the Cross that faces and overcomes the world. It cannot live on
a cross which is on easy terms with the world as the apotheosis of all its
aesthetic religion, or the classic of all its ethical intuition. The work of
Christ, rightly understood, is the final spiritual condition of all the work we
may aspire to do in converting society to the kingdom of God.
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