Discourses XVI. and XVII
A friend, who has kindly looked over the sheets of these Discourses, has intimated to me that though I may have said enough on the simple and childlike character of St. John’s narrative, I have not directly encountered an impression which he believes to be very general,—that the discourses of our Lord which are contained in this Gospel, are essentially and radically unlike those in the other three. He thinks that this impression may not be felt by the most humble and devout readers of the Gospel; but that it is far from being confined to those who have any knowledge of Baur’s opinions, or have even the slightest acquaintance with German theology. It forces itself upon every one who is only beginning to exercise his faculties of comparison and criticism upon the Scriptures; it is especially likely to affect those who have derived their impressions of them from our ordinary English commentators and pulpit teachers.
My own experience corroborates this opinion. Earnest men feel this difficulty more than indifferent men. It is, therefore, one which no teacher ought to leave unconsidered. But every reader must feel how hard it is for one man to put himself exactly in another’s point of view, and to discern what the inconsistencies are which seem to him most glaring. To speak about tones and habits of writing, so as to make oneself intelligible, so as not to assume canons of criticism which the objector does not recognise, is possible, but certainly far from easy. I believe that I can only fulfil my friend’s wishes on this subject, with any satisfaction, if I take some special discourse from one of the first three Gospels,—some one which shall be admitted to exhibit their characteristical manner,—and another from St. John, which shall be admitted to exhibit his manner. For many reasons, I think that the former specimen ought to be taken from St. Matthew. Nor can I have much doubt on which passage of St. Matthew the reader would wish me to fix. All would say, ‘The Sermon on the Mount exhibits that purely ethical tone which we trace in the earlier Gospels. There Christ speaks with authority, no doubt, as a king and a lawgiver; but it is to proclaim blessings upon the poor in spirit, the merciful, the pure in heart. There is little of what in modern times we call doctrine. There is no formal theology. It is a code which saint, savage, and sage, may all recognise as divine, whether they conform to it or no.’
What shall we choose as the parallel discourse to this in St. John? It would be difficult to find any contrast so marked and striking as that which the 8th chapter offers. The discourse there is argumentative, not hortatory. It is addressed to disputers in Jerusalem, not to crowds about a mountain. Those who hear it do not confess its authority, but canvass every word of it. No passage in St. John is more strictly theological. Here, then, if anywhere, we may expect to find the radical essential dissimilitude which is spoken of. Let us see whether it is there,—whether the opposition which is so manifest upon the surface does, or does not, penetrate to the heart’s core of the two records.
We may amuse ourselves for ever with the words ethical, theological, doctrinal. They are evidently mere artificial helps to our conceptions. We can never arrive through them at any safe apprehension of human thoughts or divine. But it is not difficult, I think, for any earnest reader to ascertain what is the cardinal idea,—at all events the cardinal word in the Sermon on the Mount. Let us take a few passages of it, that we may be clear on this point. ‘Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’ ‘I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you; that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’ ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.’ ‘But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.’ ‘But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ ‘Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’ ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ ‘But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ ‘Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?’ ‘Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.’ ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?’ ‘Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.’
I am sure I need not remark that we have not here the mere repetition of a name. All the precepts that answer most to the description that is given of the Sermon on the Mount, when it is praised for its ethical qualities, for its beautiful morality, are here made to depend upon the fact that those whom He was addressing had a Father in heaven, who knew them and desired them to be what He was. This is the thread which binds all these precepts together. Take it away, and they lose not only their cohesion, but all their practical force; they become a set of cold, dead, formal letters in a book, which we may admire if we like them, but which have no power over us, which do not concern human beings at all. This is not only a truth, but it is the truth which exercises all the charm over those who feel that there is any charm in the Sermon on the Mount, however they may account for it, or represent it to themselves. A person who has been reading the old Hebrew Scriptures asks himself,—‘What is the change that I experience in passing from them to this document? St. Matthew was a Hebrew; perhaps he wrote in Hebrew. He says the law is not to pass away; but that every jot and tittle of it is to be fulfilled. Why, then, do I call his book a Gospel? Why does it transport me into a world altogether different from that in which I have been dwelling,—from that in which I have had such wonderful revelations of God? Christ speaks to me of a Father; Christ reveals a Father. All other differences are contained in that. This is the new revelation.’
Having made this discovery, let us turn to the 8th chapter of St. John. What is that about? I am afraid of repeating myself; but I will repeat St. John without fear.
‘And yet if I judge, my judgment is true: for I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me.’ ‘I am one that bear witness of myself, and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me. Then said they unto Him, Where is thy Father? Jesus answered, Ye neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also?’ ‘They understood not that He spake to them of the Father.’ ‘And He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please Him.’ ‘I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.’ ‘Jesus answered, I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me.’ ‘Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that He is your God.’
These passages I think I have shown are the cardinal passages here, as the others are the cardinal passages there. May I entreat the reader, who thinks there is a radical difference between St. Matthew and St. John, seriously to meditate upon them? They will show him that there is a difference, a very great difference, between these Evangelists. I think they will show him that the difference is of the kind which I have endeavoured to indicate in these Sermons, between one whose function it was to declare to men that they had a Father, and one whose function it was to show them how it was possible they should have a Father, by unfolding the unity of the Father and the Son.
A book has recently been published by Mr. John McLeod Campbell ‘On the Nature of the Atonement.’ I cannot feel too thankful to the pious and excellent writer for the light which he has thrown upon this subject; for his exemplary charity to those with whom he is at variance; for his successful effort to reclaim the doctrine from the region of hard scholasticism to the region of practical life and holiness; above all, for his vindication of the character of God as a Father, and for his determination to assert, that likeness to His character, and communion with Him, are the ends which God is seeking for us, and which we are to seek from Him. In every one of these respects, I wish to be a learner from Mr. Campbell. Others may criticise him who feel that they know more than he does. I cannot read his book without perceiving how little I do know of the truths which seem to me the most vital and cardinal, and how impossible it is to know more, except by having more of the spirit of love, which is the Spirit of God.
In a book written expressly for Scotland—though admirably fitted to enlarge and deepen the thoughts of Englishmen—I cannot wish that he should have followed any other method than that which he has followed. He knows what books are popular among the religious people of his own land; and of these he has spoken with singular candour and wisdom. I might, indeed, wish that Calvinists knew something of Calvin as well as of Edwards, and that Scotchmen cared more for the broad, bold statements of Knox, than for the modifications of much feebler men in this country. I can say for myself that I have read, with infinite delight, Knox’s book on Predestination; finding there the fullest and most vehement assertions of God as an absolutely righteous Being, and the greatest indignation against his opponents for daring to say that a believer in predestination must think of Him chiefly as a Sovereign. Knox would evidently have died rather than have adopted phraseology which his descendants think that it is heretical to complain of. He would have rejoiced not to limit God’s grace in any way; only he could not see how the acknowledgment of it as universal was compatible with the attributing of every good thing to God and nothing to man. As an assertor, as a resistor of Arminian denials, we may embrace him and go all lengths with him. And I apprehend that even when he was upon earth, at all events that now, he would prefer this sympathy to that of men who fritter away his positions, and only accept his negations.
Neither Edwards, however, nor Dr. Williams, nor Knox, nor Calvin, have much influence upon the mind of England in the present day—at all events on the minds of English Episcopalians. Luther, to whose Commentary on the Galatians Mr. Campbell has done justice, commands our sympathy more. It is the man who speaks to us more than his books. I believe if we knew them better, we should find such a man speaking in them that we should be scarcely able to make the distinction. He whom we suppose to be the assertor of Justification by Faith, is really the poor stricken monk, overwhelmed by the sense and burden of sin; grasping the assurance of forgiveness which comes to him from the old Creed; believing that assurance as given by the God who is the subject of the Creed; certain that it cannot mean indulgence for sin, that it must mean deliverance from sin; discovering that it involves the actual possession of righteousness; discovering that he cannot have that righteousness in himself, and must have it in Christ; learning gradually from St. Paul how Christ is made unto us righteousness and is the righteousness of God; knocking down every obstacle which stood in the way of the apprehension of this righteousness; preaching the Gospel to men that it is theirs as well as his; anathematizing Popes, Councils, Kings, Doctors, Reformers, whoever seem to him to intercept the intercourse between the sinner and his Lord. With such a man—in his strength and in his weakness, in his gentleness and in his rage—Englishmen, so far as they are enabled to make his acquaintance, feel a cordial interest; they are sure that he was fighting a good fight, even when the smoke of the cannon, or his own single-handed rashness, conceal him from their sight, and make his intentions perplexing to them. And those who have had any fights in themselves, and who therefore know that his descriptions are real and not imaginary, will heartily approve of Mr. Campbell’s judgment in putting him foremost among those who have started from the sense of evil in themselves, and have been led to believe in an atonement as the only emancipation from it.
It must not, however, be concealed, that the following of Luther has had an effect in cramping men’s study of St. Paul. In another book I have endeavoured to explain how it seems to me that this effect has been produced. The doctrine of Justification by Faith has been assumed to be the Pauline doctrine. Luther said that it was so; and Luther surely entered into St. Paul as no one else has done. Persons who followed the course of Luther’s experience thought that the Epistle to the Romans must begin from the sense of sin, as Luther and as they began. If it did not appear to do so, then the two first chapters must be treated as prologue, and it must begin with the third. All questions about the relation of Jews and Gentiles must be treated as accidental or subordinate to the primary thesis; whatever does not concern that, in the final chapters, must be resolved into practical exhortations, introduced, after the manner of a modern sermon, when the doctrinal statement has been concluded. Those who, without this experience, merely desired to elucidate the formal doctrine, of course subjected the Epistle to still more formal treatment. Its human character disappeared; and the divinity which was to compensate for that disappearance was of a very dry, hungry, uninspired character indeed. Both parties agreed to regard the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians as the specially Pauline Epistles, because there were most allusions in them to justification by faith; other Epistles were to be interpreted mainly by reference to these. Ultimately, Baur, who wrote a triumphant vindication of the Lutheran doctrine against Möhler’s ‘Symbolik,’ has discovered that only four of the thirteen Epistles can be genuine, because the Pauline diagnostic is wanting in the rest; and that there was a deadly antipathy between St. Paul and the other apostles, because he was asserting that spiritual doctrine which they were setting at nought.
The time, therefore, it seemed to me, had come for re-examining this question about the subject-matter of St. Paul’s Epistles, and seeing whether we have a right to limit them as some German Evangelicals have been inclined to limit them. I contended, in ‘The Unity of the New Testament,’ that the words ‘It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles,’—words that occur in the Epistle which was dearest to Luther, in the Epistle on which Baur grounds his great argument for an opposition between St. Paul and the other apostles; words that contain St. Paul’s own account of his conversion, and therefore begin from what Lutherans must admit to be the right starting-point of his history,—are the key to the meaning of his life and the object of his mission. I attempted to show that, if we used this key, the Epistle to the Romans might be read as a whole letter, not be cut into fragments to meet a certain hypothesis; and that all the Epistles which Baur would reject become the varied and harmonious expositions of a great and divine purpose. Using that key, also, it seemed to me that a most close and intimate relation would appear between the Epistle to the Hebrews and those which bear St. Paul’s name on the face of them; and that—whether the old tradition or the suspicion of critics respecting that Epistle has the strongest foundation, whether or not it actually proceeded from the hand of St. Paul—it does illustrate and fulfil his intention, and is a transition point between him and the other Apostles, especially between him and the Apostle St. John.
Why do I refer to these points here? Because it seems to me that the doctrine of Justification by Faith, either in the practical form in which it presented itself to Luther, or in the merely dogmatical form which it assumes in some of his successors, has determined the thoughts of a number of Germans, Englishmen, and Scotchmen on the subject of the Atonement; so that their thoughts of the one unconsciously and inevitably govern their thoughts of the other. They start from evil, from the conscience of evil in themselves, and then either each man asks himself,—‘How can I be free from this oppression which is sitting so heavily upon me?’ or the schoolman asks, ‘What divine arrangement would meet the necessities of this case?’ Of course, the results of these two inquiries are very different; and Mr. Campbell has done an immense service to Christian faith and life by bringing forth the former into prominence, and throwing the other into the shade. His book may be read as a great protest of the individual conscience against the utter inadequacy of the scholastic arrangements to satisfy it; as a solemn assertion,—‘This arrangement of yours will not take away my sin; and I must have my sin taken away; this arrangement of yours does not bring me into fellowship with a righteous and loving God; and I must have that fellowship, or perish.’ This is admirable; but if what I have said is true, there is another way of contemplating the subject. We need not begin with the sinner; we may begin with God. And so beginning, that which speaks most comfort to the individual man may not be first of all contrived for his justification. God may have reconciled the world unto Himself; God may have atoned Himself with mankind; and the declaration of this atonement, the setting forth the nature and grounds of it, and all the different aspects of it, may be the real subjects of those Epistles, in which the individual man has found the secret of his own blessing, of his own restoration; but which he mangles and well-nigh destroys when he reconstructs them upon the basis of his individual necessities, and makes them utter a message which has been first suggested by them.
The subject belongs to this place, because the words, ‘Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold,’ have led me to speak in this Discourse of the calling in of the Gentiles as part of that mystery of atonement, the great act of which was the Son of Man’s laying down His life that He might take it again, the ground of which was the unity of the Father and the Son. Here St. Paul and St. John wonderfully coincide. That which must be thrown into the background by those who merely connect the atonement with individual salvation, becomes most prominent for both Apostles; for the one who believed that He was an ambassador from God to men, telling them that He had reconciled the world unto Himself, and beseeching them to be reconciled to Him; for the other who taught that ‘God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.’ If it be asked, then, whether there is no difference between the tent-maker of Tarsus and the old man of Ephesus, I should answer—this; that while St. Paul’s main work was to set forth the fact of atonement, laying its groundwork always in the righteousness of God manifested in Christ, and ascending, in the Epistle to the Ephesians especially, to the purpose which He purposed in Christ before the worlds were; St. John’s calling was to trace this last idea to its source in God Himself; to exhibit the original constitution of man in the Divine Word; to set forth atonement as the vindication of that constitution, and the vindication of the right of all men to enter into it; to set forth the union of the Father with the Son in one Spirit, as the ground of the reconciliation of man, and of his restoration to the image of his Creator.
To those, then, who ask me whether I hold the doctrine of the Atonement in some unusual and unnatural sense, or do not wish to thrust it into a corner, as if the Bible had other more important subjects to treat of, I answer,—My great complaint of the oracles of the English religious world is, that they do give a most unusual and unnatural sense to the word Atonement; that they give it a most contracted signification; that they lead their disciples to form a poor opinion of its effects; that they do not follow Apostles and Evangelists, in connecting it with the whole revelation of God and the whole mystery of man. I answer again,—that they connect it with their own faith and their own salvation, not with that cross on which Christ was lifted up that He might draw all men to Him. On many points I believe I could adopt forms of language usual among Calvinistical divines, to which Mr. Campbell, looking at them from his point of view, rightly objects as involving fictions; but I would rather be suspected of rejecting all popular modes of speech on the subject, even when I see in them a good and wholesome meaning, than yield for one instant to those representations of the character and will of God which must end with us, as they did with the Jews, in the identification of the Father of lights with the Spirit of lies.