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Page 5
[Sidenote: Advantage of Newer View.]
Out of this will come such a sense of the Divine Presence as the Church
and the individual Christian have not hitherto known. Moral distance
from God will be the only distance. "In Him we live and move and have
our being" comes to full interpretation through this thought of God.
Humanity is immersed in Him.
[Sidenote: Transcendent.]
[Sidenote: Huxley Against Hume.]
But this immanent God is also seen to be transcendent. He is in nature
and far beyond it. Vast as nature is, it is limited. God is the
unlimited. Within this region of transcendence is room for all His
gracious activities as distinguished from His natural activities; room
for marvel and miracle if He will and we need. When Huxley abandons
Hume's _a priori_ argument against miracles it is not worth while for
others to use it. Fewer doubt the existence of a God, I believe, than at
any time since men sought to prove that He does not exist. The Fatherly
in God is proved both by His work in nature and by those works of grace
which the student of nature alone can not see. God is a spirit. The
human spirit refined, purified, sees Him in proportion to its
purification.
[Sidenote: Modern Christology.]
[Sidenote: Former Limitations.]
[Sidenote: Ritual Statement.]
[Sidenote: Aim of Christianity.]
[Sidenote: Likeness to God.]
In respect of "Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord," it may, it must, be
said He remains in full and glorious vigor as the Redeemer of mankind.
The marked difference between our time and a half-century ago with
respect to Christ is in the extension, rather than the diminution of His
relation to salvation and the extension of the idea of salvation itself.
In the former days men's eyes were almost wholly fixed on His death and
its relation to salvation in the future life. Seldom indeed was the
value of the following text taken into consideration: "For if when we
were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much
more being reconciled we shall be saved by His life." There is less
disposition to dogmatize as to theories of the atonement. Most, I
think, come to feel that no one view contains the full significance of
Christ's death. Have you noticed how the Ritual puts it in the order of
the Lord's Supper? "Didst give Thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer
death upon the cross for our Redemption; who made there [on the cross]
by His oblation of Himself once offered a full, perfect, and sufficient
sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world."
The men who wrote that struggled to interpret His death by every
possible phase of its meaning. In our time we have come to see that the
aim of Christ and Christianity is to develop character and that this
must be gained in time that we may be ready for eternity. Thus the death
of Christ as the ultimate of self-sacrifice persuades us to the death of
sin in us that we may live renewed in God; "rise from our dead selves
to higher things." His life persuades us as the condition and example of
growth to move on from the first self-surrender into the habit and fact
of constant obedience and therefore "into the likeness of God's dear
Son."
The consciousness, well-nigh universal, of the nobility of
self-sacrifice is that which gives vitality and vogue among the masses
to the doctrine of the atonement. Self-sacrifice becomes more rare as
wealth and refinement modify men and women. He that has much is loath to
lose or leave it. Hence the rich generally fight in security. The poor
meet the bullets first.
Bad as is the conduct of some trades-unionists, it is among these
toilers that great deeds of sympathy and generosity are done. How they
tax themselves to help each other! How their women work for each other
when one is unable to care for herself or her children! Their doctrine
that "an injury to one is a wrong to all" has much that is Christlike in
it. Let us who believe in an atoning Christ rejoice that as long as men
honor bravery--self-sacrifice unto death for country, home, or the life
of dear ones; as long as they build monuments to generals, soldiers,
firemen, physicians who die for others, so will the world be slow to
disbelieve the doctrine that "Jesus Christ tasted death for every man."
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