II. The Great Sacrificial Work Is To Reconcile
Corinthians 5:14-6:2; Romans 5:1-11;
Colossians 1:10-29; Ephesians 2:16
The great need of the religious world
today is a return to the Bible. That is necessary for two reasons, negative
and positive. Negatively, because the most serious feature of the hour in the
life of the Church is the neglect of the Bible for personal use and study by
religious people. Positively, because we have today enormous advantages in
connection with that return to the Bible. Modern scholarship has made of the
Bible a new Book. It has in a certain sense rediscovered it. You might say
that the soul of the Reformation was the rediscovery of the Bible; and in a
wider sense that is true today also. We have, through the labors of more than
a century of the finest scholarship in all the world, come to understand the
Bible, in its original sense, as it was never understood before. These
instructed scribes draw forth from their treasury things as new as old. It is
the old Book, and it is a new Book. It is the old Book, and the precious Book,
because of its power of unceasing self-renovation. The spirit that lives
within the Bible is a spirit of constant self-preservation. One way of
describing the Reformation is to say that, since the early Gnostic centuries,
it was the greatest effort that ever took place in the Church for the
self-preservation of Christianity. Remember, the Church was not reformed from
the outside, but from the inside. It was the Church reforming the Church. It
was the Church's faith that arose, under the Holy Spirit, and reformed the
Church. So it is with the Bible. Whatever renovation we find in connection
with the Bible - I do not here man renovation of ourselves, but renovation of
our way of understanding the Book - arises out of the Bible itself. This
remains true today, as it was true in the Reformation time, although it is now
true in a somewhat different application. The Bible is still the best
commentary upon itself. I have always done much in my ministry in the way of
expounding the Bible, and I would say to the younger ministers particularly who
are here, Do not be afraid of that manner of preaching. I have known young
ministers who were over-scrupulous I have known them say, "If I take a long
text people will think it is because I am lazy and do not want the labour of
getting a sermon out of a small one." Never mind such foolish people. Do not
be afraid of long texts, long passages. Preach less from verses and more from
paragraphs. If I had my time over again I would do a great deal more in that
way than I have done. Read but one lesson, and read it with elucidatory
comments. Of course some people can do that better than others. There is
always the danger that if a person try it who has no sort of knack in that
direction, the people will feel they have been let in for two sermons instead
of one; and, excellent as these might be, people do not like to feel they have
been got to church upon false pretenses. It might even given an excuse to
certain people for omitting one of the services altogether, on the plea they
had put in the requisite amount of attention at one service. I would also
admit that if you do this it will not reduce your labour. It will really add
what might amount to another sermon to your weekly work. It is no use doing it
if you do it on the spur of the moment. If you just say things that occur to
your mind while you are reading, you may say some banal, or some nonsensical
and fantastic things. It means careful preparation. The lesson should be
prepared as truly as the prayer should be prepared, and as the sermon should be
prepared. You have to work your way through the chapter with the aid of the
best commentary that you can get; and you have to exercise continual judgment
in doing so lest you be dragged away into little matters of detail instead of
keeping to the larger lines of thought in the passage in hand. Then, if you do
as I say, there is this other advantage, that you can take a particular verse
out of the long passage for your sermon; and thus you come to the sermon with
an audience which you yourself have prepared to listen to you. You have
created your own atmosphere, and you have done it on a Bible basis.
Now I will confess against myself that
sometimes, as I preach about here and there, and have done as I have been
recommending you to do, people have come to me afterwards and said, as nicely
as they could, that the sermon was all very well, but in respect of the reading
of the Scripture, they never heard it after that fashion; they had never
realized how vivid Scripture could become. That simply results from paying
attention to the chapter with the best help. You will find, I am sure, that
your congregation will welcome it.
Supposing, then, we return to the Bible.
Supposing that the Church did - as I think it must do if it is not going to
collapse; certainly the Free Churches must - supposing we return to the Bible,
there are three ways of reading the Bible. The first way asks, What did the
Bible say? The second way asks, What can I make the Bible say? The third way
asks, What does God say in the Bible?
The first way is, with the aid of these
magnificent scholars, to discover the true historic sense of the Bible. There
is no more signal illustration of success here than in the case of the
Prophets. During the time when theology dominated everything and was
considered to be the Church's one grand concern, about one hundred years after
the Reformation, when its great prophets had passed away, and the Church had
fallen into different hands, the whole of the Old Testament - the Prophets
amongst the rest - was read for proof passages of theological doctrines. Now
for books like the Prophets that is absolutely fatal - fatal to the books and
to the Church; and fatal in the long run to Christian truth. There is no
greater service that has been done to the Bible than what has been done by the
scholars I speak of, in making the Prophets live again, putting them in their
true historical setting and position. Dr. George Adam Smith, for example, has
done inestimable service in this way. And what has been done for the Prophets
has also been done for the New Testament. Immense steps onward have been
taken; and we are coming to know with much exactness what the writer actually
had in his mind at the moment of writing, and what he was understood to have
had in his mind by those to whom he first wrote. In this way we get rid, for
example, of the idea that Paul was thinking about us who live two thousand
years after him. He was not thinking of us at all. He did not expect the
world to last a century. It is quite another question what the Holy Spirit was
thinking about. Paul was thinking in a natural way about his age and his
Churches, about their actual situation and needs. That is another illustration
of the principle that if you want to work for immortality you must work in the
most relevant and faithful way amid the circumstances round about you. The
present duty is the path to immortality. And so also I might illustrate in
respect to the Gospels.
The second way of reading the Bible is reading
it unto edification. That is to say, we read a passage, and we allow ourselves
to receive any suggestion that may come to us from it, and we do not stop to
ask whether that was in the writer's mind, or whether it was in the mind of the
people to whom he wrote. That is immaterial. We allow the Spirit of God to
suggest to us whatever lessons or ideas He thinks fit out of the words that are
under our eyes. We read the Bible not for correct or historic knowledge, but
for religious and spiritual purposes, for our own private and personal needs.
That is, or course, a perfectly legitimate thing - indeed, it is quite
necessary. It is the way of reading the Bible which the large mass of the
Church must always practice. But it has its dangers. You need the other ways
to correct it. All the three must cooperate for the true use and understanding
of the Bible by the Church at large. But I am speaking now about its use by
individuals, and the danger I mean is that the suggestiveness may sometimes
become fantastic. Some preachers fail at times in that way. They get to
taking what are called fancy texts, texts which impress the audience much more
with the ingenuity of the preacher than with his inspiration. For instance, a
preacher in the North, now dead, was preaching against the Higher Criticism and
its slicing up of the Bible, and he took his text from Nehemiah, "He cut it
with a penknife"! That is all very well, perhaps, for a motto, but for a text
it is rather a liberty. It is not fair to the Bible to indulge in much of that
at least. If I remember rightly, Dr. Parker had a great gift in this way, and
more than sometimes it ran way with him. It is a temptation of every witty
man, and every ingenious-minded man. But there is a peril in it, the abuse of
a right principle. We are bound, or course, to vindicate for ourselves and for
others the right to use the Bible in the suggestive way, if we are not to make
a present of it to the scholars. And that would be just as bad as making a
present of it to a race of priests. But when we read too much in that way it
is apt to become a minister to our spiritual egotism, or, what is equally bad,
our fanciful subjectivity.
Now the grand value of the bible is just the
other thing - its objectivity. The first thing is not how I feel, but it is,
How does God feel, and what has God said or done for my soul? When we get to
real close quarters with that our feeling and response will look after itself.
Do not tell people how they ought to feel towards Christ. That is useless. It
is just what they ought that they cannot do. Preach a Christ that will make
them feel as they ought. That is objective preaching. The tendency and
fashion of the present moment is all in the direction of subjectivity. People
welcome sermons of a more or less psychological kind, which go into the
analysis of the soul or of society. They will listen gladly to sermons on
character-building, for instance; and in the result they will get to think of
nothing else but their own character. They will be the builders of their own
character; which is a fatal thing. Learn to commit your soul and the building
of it to One who can keep it and build it as you never can. Attend then to
Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom, and the Cause, and He will look after
your soul. A consequence of this passion for subjective and psychological
analysis, for sentimental experience and problem-preaching a real, objective,
New Testament gospel he has raised against him what is not the most fatal
accusation - even within the Christian Church it has come to be very fatal - he
is accused of being a theologian. That is a very fatal charge to make now
against any preacher. It ought to be actionable in the way of libel. We have
come to this - that if you penetrate into the interior of the New Testament you
will be accused of being a theologian; and then it is all over with your
welcome. But that state of things has to be turned upside down, else the
Church dries into the sand. There is no message in it.
The third way of reading the Bible is reading it
to discover the purpose and thought of God, whether it immediately edify us or
whether it do not. If we did actually become aware of the will and thought of
God it would edify us as nothing else could. No inner process, no discipline
to which we might subject ourselves, no way of cultivating subjective holiness
would do so much for us as if we could lose ourselves, and in some godly sort
forget ourselves, because we are so preoccupied with the mind of Christ. If
you want psychological analysis, analyze the will, work, and purpose of Christ
our Lord. I read a fine sentence the other day which puts in a condensed form
what I have often preached about as the symptom of the present age: "Instead of
placing themselves at the service of God most people want a God who is at their
service." These two tendencies represent in the end two different religions.
The man who is exploiting God for the purposes of his own soul or for the race,
has in the long run a different religion from the man who is putting his own
soul and race absolutely at the disposal of the will of God in Jesus Christ.
All this is by way of preface to an attempt to
approach the New Testament and endeavour to find what is really the will of God
concerning Christ and what Christ did. Doctrine and life are really two sides
of one Christianity; and they are equally indispensable, because Christianity
is living truth. It is not merely truth; it is not simply life. It is living
truth. The modern man says that doctrine which does not pass into life is
dead; and then the mistake he makes is that he wants to turn it into life
directly, and to politicize it, perhaps; whereas it works in-directly. The
experience of many centuries, on the other hand, says that Christian life which
does not grow out of Christian doctrine becomes a failure. If not in
individuals, it does in the Church. You cannot keep Christian piety alive
except upon Christian truth. You can never get a Catholic Church except by
Catholic truth. I think perhaps we all here agree about that. It is of immense
importance that we do not think entirely about our individual souls, and that
we think more about the Church, the divine will, the divine Word, and the
divine Kingdom in the world. It is of supreme importance that we should know
what the Christian doctrine is on the great matters.
Now in connection with the work of Christ the
great expositor in the Bible is St. Paul. And Paul has a word of his own to
describe Christ's work - the word "reconciliation." But he thinks of
reconciliation not as a doctrine but as an act of God - because he was not a
theologian but an experience preacher. To view it so produces an immense
change in your whole way of thinking. It secures for you all that is worth
having in theology, and it delivers you from the danger of obsession by
theology in a one-sided way. Remember, then, that the truth we are dealing
with is precious not as a mere truth but as the means of expressing the eternal
act of God. The most important thing in all the world, in the Bible or out of
it, is something that God has done - for ever finally done. And it is this
reconciliation; which is only secondarily a doctrine; it is only secondarily
even a manner of life. Primarily it is an act of God. That is to say, it is a
salvation before it is a religion. For Christianity as a religion stands upon
salvation. Religion which does not grow out of salvation is not Christian
religion; it may be spiritual, poetic, mystic; but the essence of Christianity
is not just to be spiritual; it is to answer God's manner of spirituality,
which you find in Jesus Christ and in Him crucified. Reconciliation is
salvation before it is religion. And it is religion before it is theology.
All our theology in this matter rests upon the certain experience of the fact
of God's salvation. It is salvation upon divine principles It is salvation by
a holy God. It is bound of course, to be theological in its very nature its
statement is a theology. The moment you begin to talk about the holiness of
God you are theologians. And you cannot talk about Christ and His death in any
thorough way without talking about the holiness of God.
Christ and Him crucified, that is the historic
fact. But what do I mean when I say Christ and Him crucified? Does it mean
that a certain personality lived who was recognized in history as Jesus Christ,
and that He came by His end by crucifixion? That in itself is worthless for
religious purposes. It is useful enough if you are writing history; but for
religion historical fact must have interpretation, and the whole of
Christianity depends upon the interpretation that is put upon such facts. You
will find people sometimes who say, "Let us have the simple historic facts, the
Cross and Christ." That is not Christianity. Christianity is a certain
interpretation of those facts. How and why did the New Testament come into
being? Was it simply to convince posterity that those facts had taken place?
Was it simply to convince the world that Christ had risen from the dead? If
that were the grand object of the New Testament we should have a very different
Bible in our hands, one addressed to the world and not to the Church, to
critical science and not to faith; and there would not be so much argument
amongst scholars as there is. The Bible did not come into being in order to
provide future historians with a valuable document. It came for the purposes
of interpretation. Here is a sentence I came across once: "The fact without
the word is dumb; the word without the fact is empty." It is useful to turn it
over and over in your mind.
Paul was almost the creator and the great
representative of that interpretation. It was continued on his lines by
Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and many another. But what is it that we hear about
so much today? We hear a great deal about an undogmatic Christianity. And
there is a certain plausibility in it. If you have no theological training, no
training in the understanding of the Scripture in a serious way, that is, if
you do not know your business as ministers of the Word, it seems natural that
undogmatic Christianity should be just the thing you want. Leave the dogma of
it, you will say, to those who devote their lives to dogma - just as though
theologians were irrepressible people who take up theology as a hobby and
become the bores of the Church! It was not a hobby to the apostles. Why,
there are actually people of a similar stamp who look upon missions as a hobby
of the Church, instead of their belonging to the very being and fidelity of the
Church. So some people think theology is a hobby, and that theologians are
persons with an uncomfortable preponderance of intellect, who are trying to
destroy the privileges secured by our national lack of education and to
sacrifice Christianity to mind. People say we do not want so much intellect in
preaching; we want sympathy and unction. Now, I am always looking afield, and
looking forward, and thinking about the prospects of the Church in the great
world. And unction dissociated from Christian truth and Christian intelligence
has at last the sentence of the Church's death within itself. You may cherish
an undogmatic Christianity with a sort of magnetic casing, a purely human,
mystical, subjective kind of Christ for yourself or an audience, but you could
not continue to preach that in a Church for the ages. The Church could not
live on that and do its preaching in such a world. You could not spread a
gospel like that. Subjective religion is valuable in its place, but its place
is limited. The only Cross you can preach to the whole world is a theological
one. It is not the fact of the Cross, it is the interpretation of the Cross,
the prime theology of the Cross, what God meant by the Cross, that is
everything. That is what the New Testament came to give. That is the only
kind of Cross that can make or keep a Church.
You will say, perhaps, "Cannot I go out and
preach my impressions of the Cross?" By all means. You will only discover the
sooner that you cannot preach a Cross to any purpose if you preach it only as
an experience. If you only preach it so you would not be an apostle; and you
could not do the work of an apostle for the Church The apostles were
particular about this, and one expressed it quite pointedly: "We preach not
ourselves [not our experiences] but Christ crucified." "We do not preach
religion," said Paul, "but God's revelation. We do not preach the impression
the Cross made upon us, but the message that God by His Spirit sent through a
Christ we experience." And so with ourselves. We do not preach our
impressions, or even our experience. These make but the vehicle, as it were.
What we preach is something much more solid, more objective, with more stay in
it; something that can suffice when our experience has ebbed until it seems to
be as low as Christ's was in the great desertion and victory on the Cross. We
want something that will stand by us when we cannot feel any more; we want a
Cross we can cling to, not simply a subjective Cross. That is, to put the
thing in another way, what we want today is an insight into the Cross. You see
I am making a distinction between impression and insight. It is a useful part
of the Church's work, for instance, that it should act by means of revival
services, where perhaps the dominant element may be temporary impression. But
unless that is taken up and turned to account by something more, we all know
how evanescent a thing it is apt to be. We need, not simply to be impressed by
Christ, but to see into Christ and into His Cross. We need to deepen the
impression until it become new life by seeing into Christ. There are certain
circumstances in which we may be entitled to declare that we do not want so
many people who glibly say they love Jesus; we want more people who can really
see into Christ. We do, of course, want more people who love Jesus; but we
want a multitude of more people who are not satisfied with that, but whose love
fills them with holy curiosity and compels them habitually to cultivate in the
Spirit the power of seeing into Christ and into His Cross. More than
impression, do we need a spirit of divination. Insight is what we want for
power - less of mere interest and more of real insight. There are some people
who talk as though, when we speak of the Cross and the meaning of the Cross, we
were spinning something out of the Cross. Paul was not spinning anything out
of the Cross. He was gazing into the Cross, seeing what was really there with
eyes that had been unsealed and purged by the Holy Ghost.
The doctrine of Christ's reconciliation, or His
Atonement, is not a piece of mediaeval dogma like transubstantiation, not a
piece of ecclesiastical dogma or Aristotelian subtlety which it might be the
Bible's business to destroy. If you look at the Gospels you will see that from
the Transfiguration onward this matter of the Cross is the great center of
concern; it is where the center of gravity lies. I met a man the other day who
had come under some poor and mischievous pulpit influence, and he said, "It is
time we got rid of hearing so much about the Cross of Christ; there should be
preached to the world a humanitarian Christ, the kind of Christ that occupies
the Gospels." There was nothing for it but to tell that man he was the victim
of smatterers, and that he must go back to his Gospels and read and study for a
year or two. It is the flimsiest religiosity, and the most superficial reading
of the Gospel, that could talk like that. What does it mean that an enormous
proportion of the Gospel story is occupied with the passion of Christ? The
center of gravity, even in the Gospels, falls upon the Cross of Christ and what
was done there, and not simply upon a humanitarian Christ. You cannot set the
Gospels against Paul. Why, the first three Gospels were much later than Paul's
Epistles. They were written for Churches that were made by the apostolic
preaching. But how, then, do the first three Gospels seem so different
from the Epistles? If course, there is a superficial difference. Christ was a
very living and real character for the people of His own time, and His grand
business was to rouse his audiences' faith in His Person and in His mission.
But in His Person and in His mission the Cross lay latent all the time. It
emerged only in the fullness of time - that valuable phrase - just when the
historic crisis, the organic situation, produced it. Jesus was not a professor
of theology. He did not lecture the people. He did not come with a theology
of the Cross. He did not come to force events to comply with that theology. He
did not force His own people to work out a theological scheme. He did force an
issue, but it was not to illustrate a theology. It was to establish the
Kingdom of God, which could be established in no other wise than as He
established it - upon the Cross. And He could only teach the Cross when it had
happened - which He did through the Evangelists with the space they gave it,
and through the Apostles and the exposition they gave it.
To come back to this work of Christ described by
Paul as reconciliation. On this interpretation of the work of Christ the whole
Church rests. If you move faith from that enter you have driven the
nail into the Church's coffin. The Church is then doomed to death, and is only
a matter of time when she shall expire. The Apostle, I say, described the work
of Christ as above all things reconciliation. And Paul was the founder of the
Church, historically speaking. I do not like to speak of Christ as the Founder
of the Church. It seems remote, detached, journalistic. It would be far more
true to say that He is the foundation of the Church. "The Church's one
foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord." The founder of the Church, historically
speaking, was Paul. It was founded by and through him on this reconciling
principle - may, I go deeper than that, on this mighty act of God's
reconciliation. For this great act the interpretation was given to Paul by the
Holy Spirit. In this connection read that great word in 1 Corinthians 2; that
is the most valuable word in the New Testament about the nature of apostolic
inspiration.
What, then, did Paul mean by this reconciliation
which is the backbone of the Church? He meant the total result of Christ's
life-work in permanently changing the relation between collective man and God.
By reconciliation Paul meant the total result of Christ's life-work in the
fundamental, permanent, final changing of the relation between man and God,
altering it from a relation of hostility to one of confidence and peace.
Remember, I am speaking as Paul spoke, about man, and not about individual men
or groups of men.
There are two principal Greek words connected
with the idea of reconciliation, one of them being always translated by it, the
other sometimes. They are katallassein, and hilaskesthai -
reconciliation and atonement. Atonement is an Old Testament phrase, where the
idea is that of the covering of sin from God's sight. But by whom? Who was
that great benefactor of the human race that succeeded in covering up our sin
from God's sight? Who was skillful enough to hoodwink the Almighty? Who
covered the sin? The all-seeing God alone. There can therefore be no talk of
hoodwinking. Atonement means the covering of sin by something which God
Himself had provided, and therefore the covering of sin by God Himself. It was
of course not the blinding of Himself to it, but something very different. How
could the Judge of all the earth make His judgment blind? It was the covering
of sin by something which makes it lose the power of deranging the covenant
relation between God and man and founds the new Humanity. That is the meaning
of it.
If you think I am talking theology, you must
blame the New Testament. I am simply expounding to you the New Testament. Of
course, you need not take it unless you please. It is quite open to you to
throw the New Testament overboard (so long as you are frank about it), and
start what you may loosely call Christianity on the floating lines. But if you
take the New Testament you are bound to try to understand the New Testament.
If you understand the New Testament you are bound to recognize that this is
what the New Testament says. It is a subsequent question whether the New
Testament is right in saying so. Let us first find out what the Bible really
says, and then discuss whether the Bible is right or wrong.
The idea of atonement is the covering of sin by
something which God provided, and by the use of which sin looses its accusing
power, and its power to derange that grand covenant and relationship between
man and God which founds the New Humanity. The word katallassein
(reconcile) is peculiar to Paul. He uses both words; but the other word,
"atonement," you also find in other New Testament writings. Reconciliation is
Paul's great characteristic word and thought. The great passages are those I
have mentioned at the head of this lecture. I cannot take time to expound them
here. That would mean a long course. Read those passages carefully and check
me in anything I say - particularly, fir instance, 2 Corinthians 5:15 - 6:2.
Out of it we gather this whole result. First, Christ's work is something
described as reconciliation. And second, reconciliation rests upon atonement
as its ground. Do not stop at "God was in Christ reconciling the world." You
can easily water that down. You may begin the process by saying that God was
in Christ just in the same way in which He was in the old prophets. That is
the first dilution. Then you go on with the homeopathic treatment, and you
say, "Oh yes, all He did by Christ was to affect the world, and impress it by
showing it how much He loved it." Now would that reconcile anybody really in
need of it? When your child has flown into a violent temper with you, and
still worse, a sulky temper, and glooms for a whole day, is it any use your
sending to that child and saying, "Really, this cannot go on. Come back. I
love you very much. Say you are sorry." Not a bit of use. For God simply to
have told or shown the evil world how much He loved it would have been a most
ineffectual thing. Something had to be done - judging or saving.
Revelation alone is inadequate. Reconciliation must rest on atonement. For,
as I say, you must not stop at "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself," but go on "not reckoning unto them their trespasses." "He made
Christ to be sin for us, who knew no sin." that involves atonement. You
cannot blot out that phrase. And the third thing involved in the idea is that
this reconciliation, this atonement, means change of relation between God and
man - man, mind you, not two or three men, not several groups of men, but man,
the human race as one whole. And it is a change of relation from alienation to
communion - not simply to our peace and confidence, but to reciprocal
communion. The grand end of reconciliation is communion. I am pressing that
hard. I am pressing it hard here by saying that it is not enough that we
should worship God. It is not enough that we should worship a personal God.
It is not enough that we should worship and pay our homage to a loving God.
That does not satisfy the love of God. Nothing short of living, loving, holy
habitual communion between His holy soul and ours can realize at last the end
which God achieved in Jesus Christ.
In this connection let me offer you two
cautions. First, take care that the direct fact of reconciliation is not
hidden up by the indispensable means - namely, atonement. There have been ages
in the Church when the attention has been so exclusively centered upon
atonement that reconciliation was lost sight of. You found theologians flying
at each other's throats in the interest of particular theories of atonement.
That is to say, atonement had obscured reconciliation. In the same way, after
the Reformation period, they dwelt upon justification until they lost sight of
sanctification altogether. Then the great pietistic movement had to arise in
order to redress the balance. Take care that the end, reconciliation, is not
hidden up by the means, atonement. Justification, sanctification,
reconciliation and atonement are all equally inseparable from the one central
and compendious work of Christ. Various ages need various aspects of it turned
outward. Let us give them all their true value and perspective. If we do not
we shall make that fatal severance which orthodoxy has so often made between
doctrine and life.
The second caution is this. Beware of reading
atonement out of reconciliation altogether. Beware of cultivating a
reconciliation which is not based upon justification. The apostle's phrases
are often treated like that. They are emptied of the specific Christian
meaning. There are a great many Christian people, spiritual people of a sort,
today, who are perpetrating that injustice upon the New Testament. They are
taking mighty old words and giving them only a subjective, arbitrary meaning,
emptying out of them the essential, objective, positive content. They are
preoccupied with what takes place within their own experience, or imagination,
or thought; and they are oblivious of that which is declared to have taken
place within the experience of God and of Christ. They are oblivious and
negligent of the essential things that Christ did, and God in Christ. That is
not fair treatment of New Testament terms - to empty them of positive Christian
meaning and water them down to make something that might suit a philosophic or
mystic or subjective or individualist spirituality. There is a whole system of
philosophy that has attempted this dilution at the present day. It is
associated with a name that has now become very well known, the name of the
greatest philosopher the world ever saw, Hegel. I am not now going to expound
Hegelianism. But I have to allude to one aspect of it. If you are paying any
attention to what is going on around you in the thinking world, you are bound
to come face to face with some phase of it or other. But I see my time is at
an end for today.
Tomorrow I begin where I now leave off and shall
say something about this version of St. Paul's idea of reconciliation, which is
so attractive philosophically. I remember the appeal it had for me when I came
into contact with it first. I did feel that it seemed to give a largeness to
certain New Testament terms, which I finally found was a largeness of latitude
only. If it did seem to give breadth it did not give depth. And I close here
by reminding you of this - that while Christ and Christianity did come to make
us broad men, it did not come to do that in the first instance. It came to
make us deep men. The living interest of Christ and of the Holy Spirit is not
breadth, but it is depth. Christ said little that was wide compared with what
He said piercing and searching. I illustrate by referring you to an interest
that is very prominent amongst you - the interest of missions. How did modern
missions arise? I mean the last hundred years of them. Modern Protestant
missions are only one hundred years old. Where did they begin? Who began
them? They began at the close of the eighteenth century, the century whose
close was dominated by philosophers, by scientists, by a reasonable, moderate
interpretation of religion, by broad humanitarian religion. Of course, you
might expect it was amongst those broad people that missions arose. We know
better. We know that the Christian movement which has spread around the world
did not arise out of the liberal thinkers, the humanitarian philosophers of the
day, who were its worst enemies, but with a few men - Carey, Marshman, Ward,
and the like - whose Calvinistic theology we should now consider very narrow.
But they did have the root of the universal matter in them. A gospel deep
enough has all the breadth of the world in its heart. If we are only deep
enough the breadth will take care of itself. I would ten times rather have one
man who was burning deep, even though he wanted to burn me for my modern
theology, than I would have a broad, hospitable, and thin theologian who was
willing to take me in and a nondescript crowd of others in a sheet let down
from heaven, but who had no depth, no fire, no skill to search, and no power to
break. For the deep Christianity is that which not only searches us, but
breaks us. and a Christianity which would exclude none has no power to include
the world.
This document (last modifiedAugust 06, 1998) from Believerscafe.com
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