Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

by James Martineau

Only it is not on "a particular truth," but on a particular error, that the "pause" of faith was here made;—an error found or implied, as our author observes, "in almost every book of the New Testament; in the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul, no less than in the Book of the Revelation." Mr. Jowett does not evade the difficulty. In an admirable essay on this special subject, he frankly states the facts, traces their influence on the early Church, accepts them as among the limits which human conditions impose on Divine revelation, and shows from them, how, even in God's highest teachings, he leaves much truth to be drawn forth from time and experience.

"It is a subject," he says, "from which the interpreter of Scripture would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to say at the outset, 'that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ himself.' Nothing can be plainer than the meaning of those words, and yet they seem to be contradicted by the very fact, that, after eighteen centuries, the world is as it was. In the words which are attributed, in the Epistle of St. Peter, to the unbelievers of that day, we might truly say that, since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from the beginning. Not only do 'all things remain the same,' but the very belief itself (in the sense in which it was held by the first Christians) has been ready to vanish away."—Vol. I. p. 96.

It is the infirmity of human nature—an infirmity irremovable by inspiration—to translate eternal truth into forms of time, to throw color into the invisible till it can be seen, and look into any given infinity till finite shapes appear within it, and it is felt as infinite no more. The soul tries, as it were, every apparent path, from spiritual apprehension to scientific knowledge, from deep insight to clear foresight, from perception of what God is to vaticination of what he does; and abides alone with the Holy Presence, that will not tell His counsels, but is ever there himself. From the world of Divine reality into that of transient phenomena, there is no bridge found as yet; and only He, whose footsteps need no ground, can pass across. We know somewhat on both sides; but the chasm between vindicates its perpetuity against all invasion. Vision for faith; prevision for science:—this seems to be the inviolable allotment of gifts by the Father of lights. And whoever overlooks this rule, and, inspired with discernment of what absolutely is, ventures to pronounce what relatively will be, embodies his truth in a form whence it must again be disengaged. The deepest spiritual insight is ineffectual to teach past history; it is equally so to teach future history. The moment you lose sight of this fact, and expect the sons of God to predict for you, you confound inspiration with divination, and will pay the double penalty of missing the truth they have, and being disappointed at that which they have not. It is not always much otherwise with themselves; the light which they are, they do not see; and that which shapes itself before them, and becomes the object of their minds, is but the shadow of human things, deepened and sharpened, perhaps also misplaced, by the preternatural intensity. By its very inwardness and closeness to the soul's centre, God's Spirit may express itself chiefly in the unconscious attitudes and manifestations of the mind; especially as it is these that often leave the most ineffaceable impressions of character upon others, and may, therefore, be the vehicle of a more life-giving power than any purposed teaching or more conscious authority. The disappointment of an avowed prediction, or the error of an elaborated doctrine, no more affects the Divine inspiration at the heart of Christianity, than the miscalculations and failure of the Crusades disprove their Providential function in the historical education of mankind. Mr. Jowett takes up the question from another side, and shows how the faith in a future life, though not directly given, necessarily disengaged itself in the end from the expectation of the coming of Christ.

"We naturally ask, why a future life, as distinct from this, was not made a part of the first preaching of the Gospel?—why, in other words, the faith of the first Christians did not exactly coincide with our own? There are many ways in which the answer to this question may be expressed. The philosopher will say, that the difference in the mode of thought of that age and our own rendered it impossible, humanly speaking, that the veil of sense should be altogether removed. The theologian will admit that Providence does not teach men that which they can teach themselves. While there are lessons which it immediately communicates, there is much which it leaves to be drawn forth by time and events. Experience may often enlarge faith; it may also correct it. No one can doubt that the faith and practice of the early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in; 'the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.' In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of the Lord with the same feeling. While to the one it seemed near and present, at any moment ready to burst forth, to the other it was a long way off, separated by time, and as it were by place, a world beyond the stars, yet, strangely enough, also having its dwelling in the heart of man, as it were the atmosphere in which he lived, the mental world by which he was surrounded. Not at once, but gradually, did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of the other. Apart from the prophets, though then beyond them, springing up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long experience, as the 'fathers one by one fell asleep,' as the hopes of the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from being national to becoming individual and universal,—from being Jewish to becoming Christian."—Vol. I. p. 99.

With the Apostle Paul, however, the "coming of Christ" occupies the place of our "future life"; the living mass of disciples, waiting till then for the "redemption of their bodies," fill the foreground and largest space in the scene; the rising of the dead is the subsidiary fact, needful to the completeness of the gift of life in Christ. On this crisis, supposed to be so near, his eye was exclusively fixed whenever he spoke of the Christian's "salvation"; and could he have been told that no such crisis would come, that, for fifty generations, the present order of the world would vindicate its stability, we cannot imagine what shape his faith would have assumed; whether he would have made light of all these centuries, said that with the Eternal "a thousand years are but as one day," and still opposed to one another the αιων ουτος and the αιων μελλων; or whether he would have found that the distinction was evanescent, and the kingdom of God was to be not sent hither, but to be created here; or how, in either case, he would have represented to himself the state of the innumerable dead. These are questions which did not arise for him; and it were vain to conjecture his solution. He is engaged with other problems;—all, indeed, having reference to that never doubted crisis, and arising out of its manifold relations, yet so treated by him as to detach them unawares from their origin, and give them a permanent place in the religious consciousness of men. Who were to be the subjects of that salvation? How were they qualified? By what act of God's, and what temper of their own, to reach the blessing? What present assurance had they of this approaching good? It is in dealing with these questions that St. Paul darts from his objective theology into the deepest recesses of human experience, and fetches into expression spiritual truths that transcend their incidental occasion, and will remain valid while there is a soul in man.

In the Apostle's habit of thought there is a certain antique realism which renders many of his doctrines and reasonings almost unpresentable before a modern imagination. With our sharp notions of personality, of the entire insulation of each mind as an individual entity, of the antithesis of inner self to the outer everything, we are quite out of St. Paul's latitude, and shall be perpetually taking for figures and personification what had a literal earnestness for him. The universe is with him full of Agents that for us are only Attributes,—the theatre of certain real principles (i. e. principles having existence independent of us), that carry out their tendencies and history among themselves, and upon and through individual men, as organs or media of their activity. Thus, Sin is neither the mere voluntary unfaithfulness of the transgressor, nor the person of the tempter; but both of these; and that not apart from one another or alternately, but blended together under the conception of a universal element of evil, having its objective focus in Satan and its subjective manifestation in man. In like manner its opposite, Righteousness (Justification), is not exclusively human rectitude, or the Divine justice, or quasi-goodness substituted for genuine; but less ethical than the first, less forensic than the last, and more ontological than either; that element, we may say, in the essence of God which sets man at one with Him, and is the common ground of their harmonious relation. Around these two contrasted principles, others, equally conceived as real elements, and misunderstood as mere attributes or phenomena, group themselves on either side. With the former is Death,—the pair being gemini, not simply joined by decree of God in time, but inseparable in rerum natura, co-ordinates by physical necessity; and Flesh, the material or medium that furnishes the endowments of sense, and instinct, and the natural will, and affords to Sin its seat and hold upon us; and Law, the discriminating light that parts the mixture of good and evil, and, on entering into us, brings the slumbering evil into the conscious state, and so makes it sin relatively to us, and simultaneously shows us the good without adding to the force for producing it. With the latter—Righteousness—are enjoined Life, the positive opposite of Death, and, like it, a function of the moral as well as the natural constitution, the immortal energy inherent in sinless being; and Spirit, the absolute essence of God, present as the vivifying source of whatever transcends nature,—a faint susceptibility, felt only to be overmastered, in the sons of Adam,—a conquering power, coalescing with the personality itself, in Christ and his disciples,—and a spontaneous flow of higher life seizing on converted men as organs of its charismata; and Faith,—the opposite of Law,—the passing out of ourselves to embrace unseen relations, to make conscious appropriation of the Spirit, and thus enter into union with Christ and God. Even this most subjective of all the great principles of the Apostle's theology, is more than a mere private and personal act. As common to all the disciples,—the simultaneous gaze that connects them as a whole with Christ,—its single threads pass out and become a converging web. As something other than the act (of obedience) which men were under bond to render, it is a new institute of God, and, relatively to them, reads itself off as Grace. As opposed to Law, in which there is a delivery of the Divine will into men, it involves a drawing by Divine love of an affection out of men. And under all these aspects it acquires something of that indeterminate character, subjective and objective at once, which the associated elements possess in a much higher degree. The same mode of thought is traceable in another form. The Apostle exhibits the providential scheme of the human race by distributing them into two successive gentes,—the earthy or natural, the heavenly or spiritual; and lays down all the predicates of each direct from the personal history of their respective heads, Adam and Christ. Whatever is true of the founder is considered as known of the followers; the phenomena of his being spread themselves inclusively to theirs. He is regarded, not simply as a representative individual, while they are the represented individuals; but as a type of being within which they are contained, and which in its history and vicissitudes carries them hither and thither. Condemnation and redemption take place by Kinds, and fall on particular persons in virtue of their partaking of these kinds. Settle the attributes of the species, as found in its archetype, and you know what to say of individuals. It is not difficult to understand this way of thinking so long as the Apostle applies it, as a naturalist might, to the Adamic gens; and argues, that, being made of earthy materials (χοικοι), and having the focus of personality in σαρξ, with no adequate counterpoise of πνευμα, it is the seat of sin and death. But it is less easy to follow the Apostle's meaning when he similarly identifies Christians with Christ, and transfers, or rather extends, to them all the great characteristics of his existence. They are crucified to the world. They are "all dead" with him; they are "buried with him" in baptism; they are "risen with him"; their "life is hid with him in God." And while this is true of living disciples, he is no less "the first-fruits of them that sleep"; his resurrection is but the first pulsation of an act that next proceeds to theirs, and then completes the transformation of the living. All this is meant for more than rhetorical analogy. With Christ, and in Christ, took place a re-constitution of humanity. Of the new man, he was the ideal and archetype; inverting the proportions of σαρξ and πνευμα, and having his essence and personality in the latter, so as to render sin an unrealized possibility and death a transitory accident. The spirit in him which evinced its life-giving power in raising him from the dead, is no more limited to his individuality, than flesh and blood were the attributes of Adam only. It spreads to the whole family of souls, springing up into his kindred; it flows into them as they look up to him in faith, and are reborn to him; it repeats in them the fruits it produced in him,—the sacrifice of self,—the dying away of passion and pride,—the heavenly love that darts upon the wing whither the bleeding feet of conscience fail to climb,—together with many "a gift less excellent," of healing and of tongues. The consciousness of this new heart, set free with Divine affections, is immediate evidence of their union with Christ, of the Real Presence of his Spirit within them, of their substantive incorporation into his essence, and therefore of a restored harmony and even oneness with God. To what extent the Apostle conceived that this transformation of nature, by partnership in the properties of the heavenly Christ, might be carried in the living disciple, it is not possible to say. It amounted to "a new creation"; and among the "old things" that had already "passed away," he probably included more than the moral habits and feelings of the unconverted state; and conceived that the same spirit by which these died out was purifying also the bodily organism of the believer, and leavening it with antiseptic preparation for its final investiture with immortality. That last "change," like the resurrection itself, is not regarded as an external miracle, suddenly forced on an uncongenial material by mere Almightiness; but as the last and crowning stage of an internal development, whose principle had long been active,—the emergence from all entanglement with "flesh and blood" of that spiritual element which in Jesus "could not be holden of death," and which, dwelling in his disciples, already deadened and damped the vitality of the σαρξ, and would at last quicken the σωμα with imperishable life. Thus it is that "Christ" is not to St. Paul an historical individual, but a generic nature,—the archetype of a spiritual species, sharing his attributes and repeating his experience.

Cleared as a stage for these contending principles, the universe witnesses their co-existence and antagonism from the beginning to the end of time.

The great drama has two main acts, and the cross of Christ divides them.

The first is a descending period, accumulating the force of evil to a pitch of frightful triumph. The second is an ascending period, at whose goal the last enemy is gone.

In the opening scene of the first, extending from Adam to Moses, both Flesh and Spirit were there; not yet, however, in conflict; but the latter sleeping as a mere susceptibility, and the former having its own way in the instinctive life of man. The state was not one which, had the comparison been made, would have accorded with the Divine will. It was therefore really, though unconsciously, a reign of Sin, as was proved by the presence of Sin's inseparable sign,—the generations died.