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

by Frederick Denison Maurice

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.

DISCOURSES XXII. XXIII. and XXIV.

I have dwelt much in these Sermons upon the fact that our Lord treated His disciples as a body, and as a holy body. Many persons, as soon as they hear remarks of this kind, exclaim—'Oh, yes; we have often heard that doctrine of corporate holiness set forth before. But it seems to us the very destruction of personal holiness. It involves every ecclesiastical fiction; Romanism is at the bottom of it.'

When statements of this kind are made honestly and earnestly, I am glad to hear them. Abhorrence of fictions we should take all pains to cultivate in others and in ourselves. Whatever tends to the weakening of personal holiness, let it have what logical consistency it may, must be false. And that there is a doctrine about corporate Christianity, corporate faith, corporate righteousness, which is open to these charges, I, at least, can have no doubt. I should not say that Romanism was at the bottom of it; but rather that it is at the bottom of Romanism, in so far as Romanism is an immoral system, and one that deposes Christ from His rightful dignity.

1. Let me explain myself upon each of these points. To suppose a society—call it a Church or what you will—constituted holy by an arbitrary decree of God, its members remaining unholy, I hold to be a most dangerous fiction; one which we cannot too vehemently repudiate, as alike condemned by experience, by reason, and by Scripture. Experience testifies that when a nation or a Church claims a holiness or a righteousness of its own, it becomes practically most unholy and unrighteous in all its acts and purposes. Reason declares that it must be so, because righteousness is predicable only of voluntary beings, and that to be made righteous by an arrangement is impossible in the nature of things. Scripture declares that it must be so, because God is holy; and the holiness of man is only possible by the participation of His nature. But is it the same thing to assert that God has constituted man holy in His Son; that all unholiness is the result of the selfish desire of men to have something of their own, and not to abide in God's order; that a Church is the witness of the true constitution of man in Christ; that every Churchman, therefore, by his position and calling, is bound to say that he is only holy as a member of a body, and holy in its Head; that every Churchman who does not say this, who thinks that it is his individual holiness which helps to make up the Church, is setting up himself, and imitating the sin for which our Lord denounced the Pharisee? Does experience, does reason, does Scripture, protest against this doctrine? Is not experience in favour of it, inasmuch as it testifies that every true patriot has lived and died for his nation, and has renounced himself; that every true Churchman has lived to claim his own blessings for all men, to declare that he himself, as an individual, was worthy of none of them? Is not reason in favour of this doctrine, seeing that it affirms a voluntary creature to be a mere curse to himself till he confesses a law which is above himself, and gives up his self-will that he may have a free-will? Is not Scripture affirming, in every line, that God has chosen families, nations, Churches; and that these are holy because He is holy; and that those who go about to establish a holiness or righteousness of their own have not submitted to His righteousness?

2. I have anticipated the answer to the second question. Personal holiness is weakened, nay, is destroyed, by everything that could lead a man to think that it was fictitious in him, or that God was sanctioning a fiction. And therefore it is greatly imperilled by any notions which speak of the individual man having a righteousness imputed to him, in consequence of his faith, which is not truly and actually his. But this fiction is not the consequence of maintaining the doctrine I am asserting; it becomes inevitable when we deny that doctrine. If by the very law and constitution of His universe God contemplates us as members of a body in His Son, we are bound to contemplate ourselves in the same way. We have a righteousness and holiness in Christ. We have no right to deny it; our unrighteousness is the very effect of denying it. Imputation of righteousness then becomes no fiction. It means only that God beholds us as we are, as we have not learnt or do not choose to behold ourselves. The fiction has arisen because the truth has been denied.

3. When I speak of a Church, St. Paul tells me to speak of a body. He pursues the analogy, we all know, into its details; he speaks of head, and feet, and hands, of functions assigned to each, of sufferings passing from one to another, of a life circulating through the whole. Everything here is living and real. You turn the body into a corporation, a certain thing created by enactment, without parts, functions, life; you attribute to the dead thing what is true of the living thing—to the decapitated trunk what was true of that which derives all its strength and virtue from its head; then, indeed, you are involved in a series of falsehoods, each more monstrous than the last; or, to speak more modern and courteous language, in a series of developments, each preserving a family likeness to its ancestor, the very last and most prodigious being able to prove its descent from the notion out of which they all started. Once suppose it possible for the Church to exist out of Christ, and for humanity to exist out of Christ, and a Church which thinks this may impose anything it pleases upon those who belong to it. Nothing would be restrained from it which it had imagined to do, if its first maxim were not a falsehood, if Christ did not reign in spite of the determination of His subjects to set up another ruler.