030. FIRST CHRIST, THEN SCRIPTURE

FIRST CHRIST, THEN SCRIPTURE To the man who has wearied himself in seeking for the truth amid abstract doctrines and formal creeds, it is an unspeakable relief to find that the truth is a personal Being, and that Christ himself is the Truth. This, as I interpret his book, was the experience of Berdoe. He was a student of medicine. He became an agnostic. Entangled in the toils of unbelief, yet eager to find some satisfaction for conscience and heart, he asked a certain theological professor where he could find light. And the professor wisely said to him: "Buy a set of Robert Browning." Browning’s continual insistence that Love is the central secret of the universe, and that this love is demonstrated in Christ, turned the medical student from an agnostic into a believer, and his recent book entitled "Robert Browning and the Christian Faith" is his own confession of faith. It is an illustration of the extent to which Christ is entering into modern literature and is turning poets into prophets. Not first doctrine and then Christ; not first creed and then Christ; not first inspiration and then Christ; not first Scripture and then Christ; but first Christ and then Scripture, inspiration, doctrine, creed ; this is both the order of logic and the order of experience. Only Christ in us, a principle of life, makes Scripture, inspiration, doctrine, creed, intelligible; only the Truth within enables us to understand the truth without.

We need not only truth, but power. If truth be not a person, if it be not one with the life and will at the center of the universe, then it is only vain poetizing to say:

Truth crushed to earth will rise again, The eternal years of God are hers;

While error, wounded, writhes in pain And dies amid her worshipers.

Truth, without God, is an abstraction and not a power. In all moral conflicts there is an inward unsusceptibility, arising from the perversity of the affections and the will, which renders the work of truth’s advocate long and arduous. When we look within and without we shall be pessimists, unless we believe that this truth is one with the reason and will of God which has been manifest in Jesus Christ. Only they have a right to say that truth is mighty and will prevail who believe in the cross as God’s judgment against moral evil and in the resurrection as God’s pledge that this evil shall be overcome.

He who goes back to Christ as the life and power of God can have no doubt as to the issue of the struggle between good and evil, truth and error, for the secrets of all hearts are known to Christ, and he is the omnipotent force that works for good in human history. The solid globe is in his grasp, and when our prayer touches the hand that upholds the western hemisphere, the other hand can instantaneously answer that prayer in India or in Japan. His will is the electric current that throbs through the universe, and the faith of the humblest Christian can work wonders simply because it brings the soul into connection with that inexhaustible source of power. Light and movement are possible to the church of God, because the faith of the church, like the trolley, lays hold of him in whom is all the fullness of the Godhead, and to whom all power in heaven and earth is given. And we have hope for the race, hope for a kingdom of God in human society, hope for a purified nationality and State, hope for a parliament of man and federation of the world, because our Christ is not confined to the church, but is the universal life of humanity, the principle of all ethical and spiritual evolution, the one and only revealer of God in the universe.