The Gospel of St. John: A Series of Discourses. / New Edition

by Frederick Denison Maurice

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.

DISCOURSE XIX.

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.