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Page 26
While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in
impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ's worth can advance
to ever greater certainty. We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the
Truth and the Life. We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the
uttermost. We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New
Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul's, admits
its inadequacy by calling Him God's "_unspeakable_ gift." We see the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in His face; He is to us the
Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the
world. Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how
God and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the God who redeems us and
the Man we aspire to be. Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot
Andrewes') "God's as much as He can send; ours as much as we can
desire."
CHAPTER IV
GOD
The word "God" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His
part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the
assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "God" is the
name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in
that which inspires them. One man's god is his belly, another's his
reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the
God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he
bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially
minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified
humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy
heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy
God." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one
who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth. And a
glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even
among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of God.
A principal fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of
God. Men began with what was termed "Natural Religion." They studied the
universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it. It was
intricately and wisely designed; its God must be omniscient. It was
vast; He must be omnipotent. It displayed the same orderliness
everywhere; He must be omnipresent. In epochs when men emphasized the
beneficence of nature--its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom--they
concluded that its Creator was good. In an epoch, like the latter part
of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion.
Charles Darwin wrote, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the
clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature."
Christians never stopped with the view of God drawn from "Natural
Religion." They made this their basis, and then added to it the God of
"Revealed Religion," contained in the Bible. They selected all the
texts that spoke of God, drawing them from _Leviticus_ and
_Ecclesiastes_ as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and
constructed a Biblical doctrine of God, which they added to the
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from
Nature. The God and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various,
often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further
obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature.
It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian
view of God.
Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are
not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one
path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of
Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust
and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fashion an image of
Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave
it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God's
disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as
faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "God," writes
Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not
man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest
inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God's
Self-unveiling to us, God's "Frankness," His Word made flesh.
Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover:
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