The passage: Paul says his readers did not learn Christ that way, if they heard him and were taught in him as truth is in Jesus: as regards their former way of life they are to put off the old man, who is going to ruin through the love of the lie (Eph. iv. 20-22).
How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought that we may have learned him wrong, which is far worse than not learning him at all, for a false Christ, hard to exorcise, then takes his place. The point is whether we have learned Christ as he taught himself, or as men taught him who thought they understood but did not; whether we know him with fleshly notions and low human fancies, or after the spirit, as God knows him. The Christian religion, being higher and wider than the Jewish, has been open to even greater corrupt misrepresentation. Have we learned false statements about him, or himself? Is our brain merely full of things concerning him, or does he dwell in our hearts, a lesson ever being learned, the power of our life?
I have been led to what I am about to say by an utterance of one in the front rank of those who assert that we can know nothing of the “Infinite and Eternal energy from which all things proceed.” It is this:
“To visit on Adam’s descendants, through hundreds of generations, dreadful penalties for a small transgression they did not commit; to damn all who do not use an alleged way of forgiveness most have never heard of; and to reconcile by sacrificing a perfectly innocent son to satisfy an assumed need for a propitiatory victim: these are acts that, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth abhorrence, and ascribing them to the Ultimate Cause of things must become impossible, even if not felt to be full of difficulties.”
I quote this not to oppose either clause, for I entirely agree with it, and I do not mean to address its writer or anyone who holds with him. I have never heard a word from that way of thinking that touched anything I hold. One of my earliest recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system here assailed, and I scorn such paganism as heartily in the name of Christ as in the name of righteousness. Rather than believe a single point involving its spirit, even with the assurance of the salvation it offers, I would join those who “know nothing,” and set myself, hopeless of heart, to what I am now trying with infinite hope in the pure originating One: to get rid of my miserable mean self, comforted only by the chance that death would either end thought or reveal something of the Ultimate Cause that it would be no insult to him to hold. Even such a chance alone might enable one to live.
I will not now inquire how the writer comes to offer these so-called beliefs as Christianity, when so many who believe in Christ with true hearts, some of higher rank in literature than he, hold none of them and abhor them as much as he does. He would probably answer that he had to deal with the ruling notions of religious society; and that these are held by the bulk of Christians, educated and uneducated, however many think an explanatory clause here and there turns away the reproach, I am sorry to be unable to deny. Mitigated forms of expression change nothing: a brief examination would show these ideas to be not merely analogous to the originals but ultimately identical.
But if I had to do with the writer, I would ask how, refusing these dogmas as abominable, yet knowing they are attributed to men whose teaching has done more to civilize the world than any other, he has not inquired enough to satisfy a man of his faculty that this was not their teaching; that it was so different and so good that even the forced companionship of such lies has not destroyed its regenerative power. He will allow that a man named Jesus died for the truth he taught: can he believe he died for that? Would it not be well to inquire what he really taught, from the primary sources? I mention him only to make my position plain to those to whom I do speak: those who call themselves Christians.
If I asked these Christians how such opinions come to be held concerning the Holy One whose ways they take on them to set forth, most would answer, “He tells us these things himself in his word; we have learned them from the Scriptures.” Many would offer explanations that seem to them to remove all cause for reprobation, and others would say that better ideas, though widely held, have not yet had time to show themselves in the belief of the nation’s thinkers. Of those who present doctrine as the quotation describes, some are content that it should be so, and some find it grievous but do not see how to get rid of it. To the latter it may be a little comfort to hear one who has studied the New Testament for many years and loves it beyond words declare his conviction that there is not an atom of such teaching in the whole lovely, divine utterance; it is altogether men’s invention, honest in part at least, but not true. Thank God, we are nowise bound to accept any man’s explanation of God’s ways, however good the man, if it does not commend itself to our conscience; to accept what we cannot see to be good would be sin.
But it is no part of my object now to set forth what I believe or do not believe; a time may come for that. I want to address those who call themselves Christians, and expostulate with them thus:
Whatever your opinions on the greatest of all subjects, is it well that the impression of Christianity on your generation should be that of your opinions, and not of something beyond opinion? Can Christianity be represented by opinion, even the best? If it could, how many of us are such as God would choose to represent his thoughts by our opinions of them? If you answer, “The opinions I hold are those of the Bible,” I reply that none can understand, still less represent, another’s opinions but those of the same mind with him, certainly not those who suppose opinion to be the object of any writer in the Bible. Is Christianity a system of articles of belief, however correctly worded? Never. I would rather have a man who held, as numbers of you do, the most obnoxious untruths and irreverent opinions, if he lived in the faith of the Son of God—trusted in God as the Son of God trusted in him—than a man with whose every formula of belief I agreed but who knew nothing of a daily walk with God. The one, holding doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God; the other, holding the doctrines of Christ and his Apostles, is of the world, yea, of the devil.
“What! A man hold the doctrine of devils, and yet be of God?”
Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is what he lives by, and the man I mean lives by the love of God and obedience to his law so far as he has recognized it. Those hideous doctrines are outside him; he thinks they are inside, but they cannot really be inside any good man. They are sadly against him, for he cannot love to dwell on them, yet he lives in a measure like the true God. What a man believes is what he does. He would shrink with loathing from actions he thinks God justified in doing; like God, he loves and helps and saves. Will the living God let such a man’s opinions damn him? No more than he will let the correct opinions of another, who lives for himself, save him. What I insist on is that, supposing your theories right and containing all that is to be believed, they are not what makes you Christians; with not a few of you they are just what keeps you from it. For when you say that to be saved a man must hold this or that, you leave the living God and his will and trust in a notion about him. Some of you say we must trust in the finished work of Christ, in his merits, the atonement, the blood he shed. All these statements repudiate the living Lord in whom we are told to believe, who by his presence with and in us, and our obedience, lifts us out of darkness into light and into the liberty of the sons of God. No belief about him is the faith of the New Testament. Unless the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus makes a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me, for no opinion is Christianity and no plan of salvation is the gospel of the living God. Many will grant this heartily, yet the moment you talk with them you find they insist that to believe in Christ is to believe in the atonement, meaning only their special theory of it. If I say we must believe in the atoning Christ and cannot believe in any theory of atonement, they denounce me: “He does not believe in the atonement!” If I explain it otherwise than they do, they say I deny it, and count it of no consequence that I believe in the atoner with my whole heart, soul, strength and mind. This they call contending for the truth! Because I refuse an explanation that is not in the New Testament, though they think it is, and seems to me as false in logic as detestable in morals, I am not a Christian! What wonder that men such as the one I quoted refuse the Christianity they suppose such “believers” to represent! A potent faith in the Lord himself may mingle with this folly, but the importance they place on theory obstructs true faith even more than the theories themselves: while the mind is occupied in asking,
“Do I believe or feel this thing right?”—the true question is forgotten: “Have I left all to follow him?” To the man who gives himself to the living Lord every belief will come right; the Lord himself will see that his disciple believes aright about him. If a man cannot trust him for this, what faith has he? It is because he has little faith that he clings to preposterous, dishonouring ideas, the traditions of men about his Father instead of the teaching of Christ and his apostles. The living Christ is to such people a shadow, and no soul can thoroughly believe in the all but obliterated Christ of their theories: the disciple of such a Christ rests on his work, or his merits, or his atonement!
What I insist on is that a man’s faith be in the living, loving, ruling, helping Christ, devoted to us as ever he was, with all the powers of the Godhead for the salvation of his brethren. What saves a man is not faith that he did this or his work wrought that, but faith in the man who did and is doing everything for us; without it he cannot heal us spiritually, any more than he healed physically when present to men’s eyes. If you ask, “What is faith in him?” I answer: leaving your way, your objects, your self, and taking his and him; leaving your trust in men, money, opinion, character, atonement itself, and doing as he tells you. It is the one terrible heresy of the church that it has always presented something else than obedience as faith in Christ. The work of Christ is not the Working Christ, any more than his clothing is his body. If the woman who touched the hem of his garment had trusted in the garment and not in him who wore it, would she have been healed? Those who believe about Christ rather than in him get what comfort they do because, touching the mere hem, they cannot help believing a little in the live man inside the garment. No wonder they are so often miserable: they lie down to sleep with only the skirt of a robe in their hand, a robe never his, only supposed his by them, when they might sleep in peace with the living Lord in their hearts. Instead of knowing Christ in them saving them, they waste themselves in soul-sickening self-examination—whether they believe, whether they truly trust the atonement, are sorry enough, are of the elect, have an interest in the blood shed—the way to madness of brain and despair of heart; while the man who died for them waits to begin to save them from every evil, first from this self that consumes them with trouble about its salvation. He will set them free and take them home to the Father’s bosom, if only they mind what he says, which is the beginning, middle and end of faith. If instead of searching the mysteries of corruption in their own charnel-houses they would awake and arise from the dead and come into the light he waits to give them, he would at once begin to fill them with the fulness of God.
“But I do not know how to awake and arise!”
I will tell you: get up and do something the Master tells you, and so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking whether you believe, ask whether this day you have done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not. It is absurd to say you believe, or want to believe, in him if you do nothing he tells you. If you can think of nothing he said that has had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have good ground to think yourself no disciple. Do not waste your time trying to convince yourself otherwise. What if you succeeded, and he said after all, “Why did you not do the things I told you? Depart from me; I do not know you!” If it is true that you are his disciple, you can make it truer; if not, you can begin at once to be one, by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere: let it be at once, in the very next thing at the door of conscience! Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but Christ and do not do his words, you build on sand. What have those teachers not to answer for who have turned your regard from the Lord’s own words, which are spirit and life, to plans of salvation tortured out of his apostles’ words, even were those plans as true as they are false! There is but one plan of salvation: to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, to take him for what he is, our master, and his words as if he meant them, as he did. To do his words is to enter into vital relation with him; obedience is the only way to be one with him. The relation is absolute and can begin to live only in obedience: it is obedience. Have I the poorest notion of a God, and dare I enter into relations with him the first of which is not that what he says I will do? The thing is eternally absurd. I know what the father of lies whispers to those who dislike this teaching: “It is the doctrine of works!” But one word of the Lord humbly heard will send all the demons of false theology into the abyss. He says the man who does not do what he tells him builds his house to fall in ruin; he tells his messengers to baptize all nations, “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” It is faith he requires, the highest act of which the human mind is capable; but faith in what he is and says, a faith that can exist only in obedience, a faith which is obedience. For this, men have substituted a belief about him, faith in some supposed design of his coming in the flesh. It was himself and God in him that he manifested; but they make faith in him thus manifested secondary to accepting a paltry contrivance of juggling morality which they attribute to God and Christ and call the atonement and the plan of salvation. Do you put faith in him, I ask, or in the doctrines and commandments of men? If you say, “In him,” then do you not see that you are bound above all things to obey him? You find it too hard to trust him as you would; it will remain so while you will not even try the things he tells you that you can do, and are not true to him. The very thing that would make you able to trust him you turn your back on: obedience you decline or neglect. You say you do not refuse? I care not whether you refuse, while you do not obey. Remember the parable: “I go, sir, and went not.” What have you done this day because it was the will of Christ? Have you dismissed an anxious thought for the morrow, ministered to a need without letting your right hand know, forgiven your enemy, given to one who asked, sought God’s kingdom first? Tell me something you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because he told you. If you do nothing he says, no wonder you cannot trust him, and are driven to take refuge in the atonement, as if something he did, and not he himself in his doing, were the atonement. “That is not as you understand it?” What does it matter how you understand it, so long as you are not of one mind with the Truth, not at one with God? Knowing you do not heed his word, why should I heed your explanation of it? You do not do his will, and so cannot understand him; you do not know him, and so cannot trust him. Your common sense ought to know itself unequal to the task; only the heart of the child can understand the Father. Would you have me think you guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost, that you understand Jesus Christ and yet will not obey him? That were too dreadful; I believe you do not understand him. No man can yet do aright what he tells him, but are you trying? Obedience is not perfection, but trying. You count him a hard master and will not stir. Do you suppose he ever gave a commandment knowing it could not be done? He tells us a thing knowing we must do it or be lost; not even his Father could save us except by getting us at length to do everything he commands, for not otherwise can we know life or learn the holy secret of divine being. He knows you can try, and that in your trying and failing he will help you until you do God’s will as he does it himself. He takes the will in the imperfect deed and at last makes the deed perfect. Correctest notions without obedience are worthless. Doing God’s will is the way to oneness with God, which alone is salvation. Even clasping the Father’s knees at the gate of heaven, you could not be at peace unless your whole being were in every vital movement one with the living God; with one brooding thought not a joy in him, or one desire you could not leave to his will, you would not be saved, and so could not feel saved. God, all and in all, ours to the fulfilling of our very being, is the religion of the perfect, son-hearted Lord Christ.
Well I know it is faith that saves us, but faith in God himself, not in any work of God. If I did not believe God as good as the tenderest, purest, most unselfish human heart could imagine him, an infinitude better and higher than we as the heavens are higher than the earth—believe it not as a proposition, but with the responsive condition of my whole nature; if I did not feel every fibre of heart, brain and body safe with him because he is the Father who made me—I would not be saved, for this faith is salvation: God and the man one, the vital energy flowing unchecked from creator into creature. The poorest faith in the living God revealed in Christ Jesus, if vital and true, that is obedient, is the beginning of the way to know him, and to know him is eternal life. A faith of any different kind will not save you. A faith, for instance, that God forgives me not because he loves me but because he loves Jesus Christ cannot save me, because it is a falsehood against God: if true, it would preach a God who was not love, in whom was no salvation, to know whom could not be eternal life. Such a faith would damn a man, binding him to a God who was anything but perfect. Such assertions, going by the name of Christianity, are the poor remnants of paganism, believed only by the part of our nature not yet Christian, so far as a lie can be believed. We must forsake all our fears and distrusts for Christ, and receive his teaching heartily, not letting the interpretation attributed to his apostles turn us aside. What they teach is never against what Christ taught, though the exposition of it often is, from the grievous fault of those who would understand, and even explain, rather than obey. We may be sure that no man will be condemned for any sin that is past. If he is condemned, it will be because he would not come to the light when it came to him, would not cease to do evil and learn to do well, hid his unbelief in the garment of a false faith, imputed to himself a righteousness not his, and preferred imagining himself worthy to confessing himself everywhere wrong and repenting. We may be sure also that if a man becomes Christ’s disciple, Christ will not leave him ignorant of what he has to believe; if we do what he tells us, his light will go up in our hearts, while till then we could not understand even if he explained. If you cannot trust him to let you know what is right, but think you must hold this or that before you can come to him, then I justify your doubts in what you call your worst times, but which I suspect are your best, when you come nearest the truth: those in which you fear you have no faith.
So long as a man will not set himself to obey the word of the Lord Christ, whether spoken, written or printed, I would not take the trouble to convince him that the most obnoxious doctrines are false. It is those who would fain believe but are hindered by such doctrines that I would help. Disputation about things hides the living Christ, who alone can teach the truth, who is the truth. I write for those whom false teaching has driven away from God—as well it might, for the God so taught is not worth believing in. A stick, a stone or a devil is all some of our fellow men have to believe in; whoever believes in a God not altogether unselfish and good, who does not do all he can for his creatures, belongs to the same class, and his is not the God revealed in Christ. If a man sees any darkness in God, and especially if he defends it, I cannot but think his blindness has followed his mockery of “Lord! Lord!” Had he strenuously obeyed Jesus he would by now have received the truth that God is light and in him is no darkness, a truth not acknowledged by calling the darkness attributed to him light, and the candle of the Lord in man’s soul darkness. It is one thing to believe that God can do nothing wrong, quite another to call right whatever presumption attributes to him.
The whole secret of progress is doing the thing we know. There is no other way of progress in the spiritual life, or in the understanding of it: only as we do, can we know.
Is there anything, then, you will not leave for Christ? You cannot know him, yet he is the Truth, the one thing that can be known! Would you rather keep this or that, with imperfection, than part with it to be perfect? You cannot know Christ, for the principle of his life was the simple absolute relation of realities: his one idea was to be a perfect child to his Father. He who will not part with all for Christ is not worthy of him and cannot know him, and the Lord, being true, cannot acknowledge him. How could he receive into his house a man who prefers something to his Father, who strikes a bargain and says, “I will give up so much if you will spare me”? Such a man counts it too much to yield all to him who gave us everything, even himself, by life and death. He will have to be left to himself, to find what it is to be without God! Those who know God, or have caught a far-off glimmer of him, find life insupportable unless God is All in all, the first and the last.
The duty of Christians to their fellows is to let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of God’s designs. If you who explain the theory of Christianity had set yourselves instead to do the Master’s will, the one object for which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would be the part of the world you touch! Had you given yourselves to understanding his word in order to do it, and not to quarrying material from it to buttress your systems, in many a heart the name of the Lord would be loved where now it is unknown. Men, undeterred by explanations you were not forcing on them, and attracted by your behaviour, would say to each other, as Moses at the burning bush, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight!” They would come to see how these Christians loved one another and were just to everyone: their goods the best, their weights surest, their prices most reasonable, their word most certain; no jealousy or emulation in their families, no worship of mammon, no selfishness as the ruling principle; children as diligently taught to share as some are taught to save or to spend on self; religion nowhere one thing and daily life another; the churchman not thinking first of his church, nor the peer of his privileges.
What do I hear you say?—“How then shall the world go on?” The Lord’s world will go on, and without you; the devil’s world will go on, and with you. The objection is another overwhelming proof of your unbelief. Either you do not believe his word that if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness all things needful will be added to us, or what he undertakes does not satisfy you and you prefer the offers of Mammon. You want what you call a fortune, the freedom of the world, and would not live under such restrictions as the Lord might lay on you if he saw something precious might be made of you. You would inherit the earth, but not by meekness; you would leave God to look after eternal life, if only you might be sure of not sharing with the rich man when you die. But unable to trust him for this world, you cannot trust him for the next. Refusing to obey him in your life, how can you trust him for your life? Hence your substitutes for faith: you hold him to his word, bind him by his promises, appeal to the atonement and the satisfaction made to his justice, while you take no trouble to fulfil the one reasonable and imperative condition—condition and means in one—on which alone he can deliver you from the burden of life into its strength and glory: that you be true and obedient children. You say “Christ has satisfied the law,” but you will not satisfy him! He says, “Leave everything behind you, and be as I am towards God, and you shall have peace and rest,” and you turn away muttering about figurative language. If you had been true, living the life, you would have drawn the world after you, however little. In your churches you would be receiving truest nourishment, thinking far less of serving God on Sunday and far more of serving your neighbour in the week. The sociable vile, the masterful rich, the deceitful trader and the ambitious poor, whom you drew in with the offer of a salvation other than deliverance from sin, would not be lording it over you and dragging you down; you would be cleaner and stronger without them. Publicans and sinners would have been drawn instead and turned into true men and women; and the Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile, who is repelled more by your worldliness than by your misrepresentations of God, would have hastened to the company of the loving and true, eager to learn what made them so good, happy, unselfish, free of care, ready to die and willing to live, careless to possess. Finding you hold, from the force of false tradition, such things as you do, he would have said, “No! such beliefs can never account for such mighty results!” You would have answered, “Search the Scriptures and see.” He would have searched and found, not what you imagine there, but things infinitely better and higher that do account for what he wondered at: a truth he would hold for ever as the only gladness of his being. So you would have had your reward for being true Christians in spite of what you were taught, and been taught the truth in return by him whom your Christianity had enticed, sent to the fountainhead free of the prejudices that disabled your judgment. Delivered from the false notions that stunted your growth, how rapid it would have become!
If any of you tell me my doctrine is presumptuous, contrary to the New Testament and to what the best of men have always believed, I will not therefore defend even my beliefs, much less my opinions. I appeal to you instead whether I have spoken the truth about our paramount obligation to do the word of Christ. If you say I have not, there is no other ground on which we can meet. But if you allow it is a prime duty, even if not the prime duty, then I insist that you do it, recommending the knowledge of him so and not otherwise. I do not try to change your opinions; if they are wrong, the obedience I insist on can alone set them right. I assert that only so can you fit yourselves to understand the mind of Christ. None but he who does right can think right; you cannot know Christ to be right until you do as he does and tells you to do, nor set him forth until you know him as he means himself to be known. If you serve and trust Mammon, how can you know the living God, who alone is to be trusted? If you do not admit it is a man’s duty to do the word of Christ, or admitting it do not care to do it, why should I care to convince you my doctrine is right? If I could convince your judgment while your hearts remain as they are, I should only add to your condemnation. The true heart must see at once that, however wrong I may be in other things, I am right in this: Jesus must be obeyed, and at once, in the things he did say; it will not long imagine it obeys him in things he did not say. If a man does what is unpleasing to Christ, believing it his will, he still gains by it, for it gives the Lord a hold of him which he will use; but before he can reach liberty he must be delivered from that falsehood. The man who does not choose to see that Christ must be obeyed will be left to the teaching of the Father, who brings all that hear and learn of him to Christ. The Father will leave no man to his own way. The Lord did not die to provide a man with the wretched heaven he may invent for himself or accept from others, but to give him life and bring him to the heaven of the Father’s peace, for the children must share in the essential bliss of the Father and the Son. This has been the Father’s work from the beginning: to bring us into the home of his heart, where he shares the glories of life with the Living One, in whom was born the life that lights men back to the original life. However a man refuses this destiny, it is useless to kick against the goads of God’s love. The Father is goading him, or will goad him if needful, into life by unrest and trouble; hell-fire will have its turn if less will not do, and who can need it more than those who neither enter the kingdom of heaven themselves nor allow those to enter who would? The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they were St Paul’s great trouble, and are found in every religious community under the sun.
The one thing truly to reconcile all differences is to walk in the light. So St Paul teaches in Philippians iii. 16. After setting forth the loftiest idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration, he says not, “This must be your endeavour also, or you cannot be saved,” but, “If in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless whereto we have already attained, let us walk by that same.” Observe what widest scope the apostle gives to honest opinion, even in things of grandest import! The one essential point with him is that what we have seen to be true, we walk by that. In such walking only will love and truth grow; the soul, then first in its genuine element and true relation to God, will see into reality that was before a blank to it, and he who has promised to teach will teach abundantly. Faster and faster will the glory of the Lord dawn upon his people so walking, and fast and far will knowledge of him spread, for truth of action, before and after truth of word, will prepare his way. The man walking by what he has attained will be able to think aright; the man who does not think right is unable because he has not been walking right. Only when he begins to do the thing he knows does he begin to think aright; then God comes to him in a new and higher way and works along with the spirit he has created. The soul without its heaven above its head, its life-breath around it, its love-treasure in its heart, its origin one with it, cannot think to any real purpose, nor ever would. When man joins with God, all impotence and discord is cast out; until then God is in contest with the gates of hell that open in the man, and can but hold his own. When the man joins him, Satan is foiled. For then first nature receives her necessity, the law of all laws: that God and man are one. Until they begin to be one in reality as in the divine idea, nothing can go right with the man, and God can have no rest from his labour in him. As the greatest orbs in heaven are drawn by the least, God himself must be held in divine disquiet until every one of his family is brought home to his heart, to be one with him in a unity too profound to be understood by any but the God from whom it comes, yet guessed at by the soul from the unspeakableness of its delight when it is at length with the only one that can be its own. For God is the heritage of the soul in the ownness of origin; man is the offspring of his making will; God himself is his birth-place; God is the self that makes the soul able to say I too, I myself. This absolute bliss of the creature is that for which the Son died and the Father suffered with him. Then only is life itself, right, one, and as designed by the eternal life-outgiving Life.
Whereto then we have attained, let us walk by that same!