040. CONSCIENCE REFLECTS GOD'S HOLINESS

CONSCIENCE REFLECTS GOD’S HOLINESS

There are evidences of a return to this Pauline doctrine in D. W. Simon’s acknowledgment that God as well as man needs to be reconciled, and in J. M. Whiton’s concession that atonement is made to the immanent God in conscience. But when it is maintained that only conscience is propitiated, John’s declaration is forgotten: "If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things." We are made in the image of God, and that which is highest in us best shows us what God is. The subjective demand of conscience for reparation is only the reflection of the objective righteousness of God which requires satisfaction if the sinner is to be saved. The immanent God who reveals discloses to us the nature of the transcendent God who is revealed. And as the conscience of man in the progress of the centuries becomes increasingly sensitive, it becomes more and more evident that holiness is not only an independent attribute, but is the supreme attribute in the divine nature. As conscience is supreme in the moral constitution of man, so holiness is supreme in the moral constitution of God. As I am bound to love my neighbor only as myself, so God makes regard for his own purity and honor the standard by which all outgoing of affection for his creatures is to be tried and limited. Even love must put itself under the control of righteousness. Only as God is true to himself will he have anything to give to others. The atonement was necessary in order that God "might be just," and not only death and hell, but also the cross, declares that "righteousness and judgment are the foundation of his throne."

I can but believe that a new conviction of the ethical import of Christianity is taking possession of the church. I believe also that this is a reflection of the ethical element in the atonement of Christ. The apprehension of natural law and of its fixity has helped the apprehension of the solemnities of moral law. Heredity is but original sin in a new guise. Sociology declares the solidarity of the race. And even monism in its Christian form furnishes a basis for the inculcation of brotherhood and of obligation. The new sense of community which has made us feel the sorrows of Armenians and of Cubans and of Filipinos as if they were our own is the fruit of Christ’s cross and its demonstration that humanity is worth saving because it has kinship with the divine. He who is made priest, not according to the law of a carnal commandment but according to the power of an endless life, is the mighty prophet also, and he has taken our humanity into an eternal school. We are dull pupils, and it will take the great Teacher many generations before he can fully convince us that we are the offspring of God and are therefore of one blood with the Hottentot and the outcast, the grimy factoryworker and the child in the slums. But the cross has emancipated woman and the slave; it will yet do away with war and subdue the greed of capital; it will reform municipal and national politics and give us a righteous State. For all these things are corollaries of the one great truth that the suffering Saviour is the condensation into terms of space and time of the whole ethical process of the ages, that his humanity is true divinity, and that love to him can be shown only by loving our fellow-men, his brethren. The evolution of religion is inseparable from the evolution of morality, for they are but obverse sides of one whole, religion being simply morality toward God, while morality is religion toward man. The incarnate Word has subjected himself to a process of evolution, reaching results not at a bound, but slowly and by steps of natural and rational advance, and he has thus imaged to us the history of creation. Should we not expect to find the same process repeated in the written word, which conveys the knowledge of Christ to men? A seventh and last step of progress in our recent theology is its application of the principle of development to Holy Scripture. We see, as our fathers did not, that the recording of revelation like the giving of it was no single act, but multiplex, and that God spake to the fathers through the prophets in many parts and in many ways. The Spirit of Christ which was in them was the Spirit of the immanent Christ working after his common evolutionary fashion. It was not the sudden impact of a power from without but the movement of a power from within, which only in thought was distinguishable from the activity of their own minds and hearts and wills. And inspiration was like grace; it was not infallible nor impeccable. The first covenant was not faultless, and for the hardness of their hearts God gave his people statutes that were not good. The light of truth and of duty came to them gradually: it was first starlight, then dawn, finally day. No particular theory of inspiration is essential to Christianity, for Christianity existed in full vigor when no New Testament book had been composed. The genuineness and credibility of our Gospels might be successfully argued just as we argue the genuineness and credibility of Thucydides, even though they had never been inspired. The Holy Spirit can use all methods of composition which men properly and truthfully use in the communication of truth. Does Robert Browning impersonate Give or Fra Lippo Lippi, reanimating some dead hero and causing him to tell out to us the secret of his life? Then the Holy Spirit might conceivably inspire some godly writer of after times to impersonate King Solomon and disclose in the book of Ecclesiastes the skepticism and pessimism of his wanderings from God. If John Bunyan could properly construct an allegory like The Pilgrim’s Progress, the book of Jonah might conceivably be an apologue and still be inspired, and whether it is an apologue or a history is a mere question of interpretation which every Christian is free to decide for himself without prejudice to his faith in inspiration whatever his conclusion may be. Not only methods of composition but methods of collection are subject to this rule. A book may go by the name of its chief writer, and Isaiah or Zechariah may have a double authorship. The Pentateuch may be Mosaic only for substance; the laws of Leviticus may be later additions in the spirit of what Moses wrote; the speeches in Deuteronomy may be representations by one of Moses’ successors on the west of Jordan of instructions by the great lawgiver on the east of Jordan which had been traditionally handed down.