The Lag in Christian Experience

To recall the street named Aldersgate is to be reminded that the history of the Church is, among other things, the history of the effort to hold in balance correct doctrine and vital experience. Names like Chrysostom, Luther, Zinzendorf, and Kierkegaard signal the struggle, which in 1563 reached a pinnacle in the Heidelberg Catechism of Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus, both Reformers of the second generation.

In this year of the 400th anniversary of this acknowledged masterpiece, we do well to celebrate its doctrinal fidelity and devotional warmth. Its first question keynotes the depth, comfort, and beauty of the entire catechism, penetrating immediately to the heart of evangelical piety. Observe well the stress upon personal experience of doctrinal truths:

What is thy only comfort in life and in death?

Answer. That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.

Modern confessional statements somehow do not sound like this. Nor is ours noted as an age of devotional classics, of Christian saints towering over journeyman Christians. William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest—such titles fall strangely upon the modern ear; they have a distant ring. John Bunyan meant something quite different by the term The Holy War than we do. Theological giants like John Owen and Abraham Kuyper wrote classic works on the Holy Spirit. And names like Athanasius, Luther, Calvin, Andrews, Donne, M’Cheyne, Krummacher represent luminous gifts to the devotional life of the Church which yet shine as lights from the past.

Where are their kindred today? Why is the devotional atmosphere of past days not reflected in the church life of our day? Numerous factors are cited to explain the glaring disparity. Ours is the age of science, a mechanistic age which allows little if any room in our universe for prayer. It is the age of organization, and the Church echoes its age in decreeing priorities, the horizontal so often taking precedence over the vertical even among the saints, who also share to a degree the headlong pursuit of external success so characteristic of their fellow citizens. And they see their ministers acquiring distinction not so much through saintliness as by position, oratory, academic degrees, by size of churches and salaries. Not that these things are wrong in themselves—it is what is omitted that constitutes the vagrancy. Ministers are often discouraged from pursuit of holiness by theological controversies and extremes, ranging from arguments supporting God’s complete transcendence to those affirming his complete immanence. The divinity student finds the biblical balance neither in Otto nor in Schleiermacher.

This is not to say that God or we are chained by these several factors, though it is to recognize them as obstacles along a difficult path. There are the pitfalls of a cold or dead orthodoxy and of a doctrinally diffused pietism. There are those who seem to stop still at the point of justification, shunning progressive sanctification. There are others who seek to skip over justification and try sanctification on their own. There are some who continually look back to an initial sanctification experience and rehearse it, relate it, clutch it, never moving beyond it so as not to lose sight of it—the surest way to lose it. Then there is the florid language of sticky sentimentalism assumed by some, often as not as a substitute for real spiritual growth. This in itself is enough to drive some people right away from the quest for holiness. But this course is just as mistaken, and flies in the face of biblical imperatives. The verbs in these command our attention: we are to fight, to strive, to mortify, to crucify—a holy war indeed. Obstacles or no, the battle is joined. If the level of Christian experience in the Church today falls below that of some periods past, we cannot recoup by simply reaching back to the past: the answer must come from above. For we are not bound to a cycle theory of history which binds us to earth and binds God out. The Cross has been thrust into the earth. The grace of God there manifested cries out for the response of man’s whole being in love and devotion.

Let this not be discounted as an irrelevant individualism, a cryptic mysticism having no answer for the modern crisis. Love for neighbor must follow true love for God. The biblical ethic presumes personal regeneration; the manifestation of this ethic is both personal and social. We may walk with Christ toward Emmaus and wind up serving him in Jerusalem or Rome. But it is our communion with Christ through his Spirit which is basic to our service.

Let those who would confine Christian experience to a mere inwardness without issue listen to famed British historian R. H. Tawney as he declares that democracy in England probably owes more to Puritanism than to any other single movement. Yet he perceptively points behind the outward phenomena to that which lay behind:

But, immense as were its [Puritanism’s] accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [London, 1926], pp. 269, 199).

In the twentieth century as in the seventeenth, the outcome of historic social and military battles, the destiny of men and nations, the survival of civilization—these oftimes rest with those who on their knees make supplication to Providence, almighty in power and in love.

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Pope Calls For Global Authority To Guard World Peace

For the first time the Roman Catholic Church has codified its doctrine of world peace. In his masterful and historic Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), Pope John XXIII spoke out against racism, denounced colonialism, proclaimed liberty as a human right, and called for general disarmament. More significant was his call for a supernational world authority able to cope with the realities which today threaten the whole of mankind. (See also News, page 37.) Speaking of individual national political communities, he said, “At this historic moment the present system of organization and the way its principle of authority operates on a world basis no longer correspond to the objective requirements of the universal common good.”

It is of special interest to Protestants that the new encyclical rests squarely on the Roman Catholic doctrine of natural law. Natural law is its foundation and the ribwork of its superstructure. The encyclical’s creative possibilities for world peace depend wholly on the existence of and creative moral energies inherent in natural law.

According to the Roman Catholic conception, the moral law is engrained in the created universe and in the nature of man. This universal moral law is grounded in truth, functions according to justice, can be perfected by mutual love and brought to more refined and human balance in freedom. Every man is regarded as essentially rational, possessed of general decency, and able to seek the general good of mankind. On this view of the moral potential of human nature the Pope could, and for the first time did, address his encyclical to all men. On this basis of the universal moral law engrained in every human being, Pope John raised the hope of world peace and called for a “public authority” with which all nations would freely affiliate and by which nations could do what they could not do individually, i.e., cope with the threat of universal destruction.

To this natural law, Karl Barth once uttered his angry Nein. To this “natural goodness” of unregenerate man, Protestants countered with a doctrine of a radical and more pervasive evil, while not denying that the unregenerate man is capable of doing some kinds of civic good. It is this area which some Protestants wholly ignore, contending that there are no possibilities for a more bearable world order except on the basis of personal regeneration—a view sometimes compounded with the naïve notion that if all men were Christian, all mankind’s problems would therewith be solved.

Protestants are not of one mind concerning the possibilities of natural law, yet they may fairly point out that the Pope’s view appears overly optimistic precisely at the point where he argues the inadequacy of individual nations to cope with the threat (posed by individual nations!) to mankind’s universal good. He urges the creation of a “world authority” through a free association of all nations, yet the existence of such an organization and the exercise of its authority depend on mankind’s conformity to natural law.

Pope John had good words for the United Nations and seemed to suggest that it could be broadened to be such a world authority. While it is the best such instrument for world peace we have, it has yet to be demonstrated that mankind is sufficiently moral to transform it into a world authority which could with any greater optimism assure world peace.

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On Biblical Inspiration, A Frank Look At The Alternatives

Before a Christian departs from the doctrine of the verbal-plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, he owes it to himself to face frankly and honestly the alternatives and their issue. In his Edinburgh classroom, the late Principal John Baillie of New College saw to it that his students were aware of these. He told them that he held to verbal and conceptual inspiration, but in reference to neither did he believe in plenary inspiration. He stoutly maintained that “no reputable theologian” would hold to thought inspiration and not word inspiration. To him it was “absurd” to say that the Holy Spirit inspired thoughts and not words. “We cannot separate Paul’s thought from his language, nor can we deny that words at the end of Romans 8 and in Deutero-Isaiah are inspired.” But Principal Baillie denied that there was plenary inspiration anywhere.

He portrayed the traditional view as maintaining every part of the Bible to be “equally inspired.” The modernistic deviation from this, he went on, was to claim that only parts of the Bible were inspired. He pointed to recent attempts to hold parts of Scripture to be plenarily inspired and others not. Some held the New Testament to be more inspired than the Old Testament. Some held the Lord’s own words to be inspired and not those of the apostles. “But,” said Principal Baillie, “these are modern expedients and do not meet the problem.”

The noted Edinburgh scholar then presented the logical alternative to verbal-plenary inspiration by citing approvingly Archbishop William Temple as holding: revelation is in the person of Christ; He wrote no book and we cannot be sure of any single deed or saying of His recorded, cannot be sure that it has been truly recorded; but we can be sure of the whole picture; when the certainty of infallibility is in, then spirituality goes out; the human element is present as well as the divine in all of the record, so we can never be sure it is free from error.

So much for the alternatives. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S choice is a matter of record. We do not see certainty and spirituality warring against each other. Lack of assurance on all the parts of the Bible does not produce for us assurance on the whole. And we are not stirred with conviction by a thunderous “Thus saith the Lord … perhaps.” Nor do we feel we can expect the world to be. A faltering, uncertain voice in the pulpit exacts a deadly toll in both the Church and the world.

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