One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 2. John Williamson Nevin

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СКАЧАТЬ at once makes it a duty to seek the extension of the gospel among all men, and authorizes the confident expectation that this extension will finally be reached. The world needs christianity, and it can never rest satisfied to be anything less than a full complement for this need. It has regard by its very nature, not to any section of humanity only, not to any particular nation or age or race, but to humanity as such, to the universal idea of man, as this includes all kindreds, tribes, and tongues under the whole heaven. “The field is the world.”37 Christianity can tolerate no Heathenism, Mohammedanism, or Judaism at its side. It may not forego its right to the poorest or most outcast and degraded tribe upon the earth, in favor of any other religion. Wherever human life reaches, it claims the right of following it and embracing it in the way of redemption. The heathen are given to the Son for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession. It is a sound and right feeling thus which enters into the cause of missions in its ordinary form, and leads the church to pray and put forth action in various ways for the conversion of the nations.

      But it is not always so clearly seen, that the intensive mastery of the world’s life belongs just as truly as this extensive work to the idea of the kingdom of God, and that it ought to be therefore just as much also an object of missionary interest and zeal. The two interests indeed can never be entirely separated; since it belongs to the very nature of christianity to take possession in some way of the interior life of men, and the idea of salvation by its means unavoidably involves something more than a simply outward relation to it under any form. Hence a mere outward profession of it is felt on all hands to be not enough; although even this, as far as it goes, forms a part also of that universal homage which is its due; but along with this is required to go also some transformation of character, as a necessary passport to the heavenly world towards which it looks.

So in nominally christian lands, and within the bounds of the outward visible church itself, there is recognized generally the presence of a more inward living evangelization, a narrower missionary work which consists in the form of what is sometimes called experimental religion, and has for its object the interior form of the life it pretends to take possession of, its actual substance, rather than the mere matter of it outwardly taken. In this country particularly no distinction is more familiar, than that between the mere outward acknowledgment of christianity and the power of religion in the souls of its true subjects; although the line of this distinction is more or less vaguely and variously drawn to suit the fancy of different sects. But still it is for the most part a very inadequate apprehension after all, that seems to be taken in this way of the inner mission of christianity. Even under its experimental and spiritual aspect, the work of the gospel is too generally thought of as something comparatively outward to the proper life of man, and so a power exerted on it mechanically from abroad for its salvation, rather than a real redemption brought to pass in it from the inmost depths of its own nature. According to this view, the great purpose of the gospel is to save men from hell and bring them to heaven; this is accomplished by the machinery of the atonement and justification by faith, carrying along with it a sort of magical supernatural change of state and character by the power of the Holy Ghost, in conformity with the use of certain means for the purpose on the part of men; and so now it is taken to be the great work of the Church to carry forward the process of deliverance almost exclusively under such mechanical aspect, by urging and helping as many souls as possible in their separate individual character to flee from the wrath to come and to secure for themselves, through the grace of conversion, a good hope against the day of judgment. With many of our sects, the idea of religion (evangelical or experimental religion as they are pleased to call it), would seem to run out almost entirely into a sort of purely outward spiritualism in the form now noticed, with almost no regard whatever to the actual contents of our life as a concrete whole. Their zeal looks to the conversion of men in detail, after their own pattern and scheme of experience, as a life boat looks to the preservation of as many as possible from a drowning wreck; but beyond this seems to be in a great measure without purpose or aim. Once converted and made safe in this magical way, the mission of the Church in regard to them (unless it should be found necessary to convert them over again), is felt to be virtually at an end; and if only the whole world could be thus saved, there would be an end of the same mission for mankind altogether; we should have the millenium, and to preserve it for a thousand years38 would only need afterwards to look well to the whole conversion of each new generation subsequently, as it might come of age for such purpose.

      But, alas, how far short every such view falls of the true glorious idea of the kingdom of God among men, as it meets us in the Bible and in the necessary sense of the grand mystery of the Incarnation, on which the whole truth of the Bible rests.

      Even in case of the individual man, singly and separately considered, the idea of redemption can never be answered by the imagination of a merely extensive salvation, a deliverance in the form of outward power, under any view. All admit that his translation bodily as he now is in his natural state into heaven, would be for him no entrance really into a heavenly life. It is not in the power of locality or place of itself to set him in glory. Precisely the like contradiction is involved (although it may not be at once so generally plain) in the supposition of a wholly ab extra transformation of the redeemed subject into the heavenly form of existence. This at best would be the creation of a new subject altogether, as much as if a stone were raised by Divine fiat to the dignity of a living angel, and in no real sense whatever the redemption of the same subject into a higher order of life. No redemption in the case of man can be real, that is not from within as well as from without; that is not brought to penetrate the inmost ground of his being, and that has not power to work itself forth from this, outwards and upwards, till it shall take possession finally of the whole periphery of his nature, body as well as soul. This in the very nature of the case is a process, answerable to the universal character of our present life. To conceive of it as something which is brought to pass suddenly and at once, without mediation and growth, is to sunder it from the actual constitution of humanity, to place it on the outside of this, and so to reduce it, in spite of all spiritualistic pretensions the other way, to the character of a simply mechanical salvation that is at last no better than a dream. And it is of course much the same thing, to make the beginning here stand for the whole; and so to swell the starting point of the new life out of all right proportion, that instead of being, like the beginning of the natural life itself, in a great measure out of sight and knowledge (or at most as a grain of mustard the least of all seeds), it is made to stand forth to view empirically as the proper whole of salvation in this world, throwing the idea of the process which should follow completely into the shade, or turning it into dull unmeaning monotony and cant. Every such restriction of the idea of christianity to a single point of the christian life, even though it be the point where all individual salvation begins, is chargeable with deep and sore wrong to the idea as a whole, and cannot fail to be followed with disastrous consequences, wherever it may prevail, in some form of practical one-sided divergency, more or less morbidly fanatical, from the true and proper course of the new creation in Christ. The full salvation of the man turns ultimately on his full sanctification; the kingdom of heaven must be in him as a reign of righteousness, in order that it may be revealed around him as a reign of glory. It must take up his nature into itself intensively, as leaven works itself into the whole measure of meal in which it is hid, in order that it may be truly commensurate with the full volume of his being outwardly considered. The new birth is the beginning of a progressive maturation, which has its full end only in the resurrection; and this last, bringing with it the glorification of the entire man, can be rationally anticipated only as it is felt to have its real possibility in the power of such a whole renovation ripening before to this blessed result.

But to understand fully the inner mission of christianity now under consideration, we must look beyond the merely individual life as such to the moral organization of society, in which alone it can ever be found real and complete. Pure naked individuality in the case of man is an abstraction, for which there is no place whatever in the concrete human world. The single man is what he is always, only in virtue of the social life in which he is comprehended and of which he is a part. His separate existence is conditioned universally СКАЧАТЬ