RELIGION AND THEOLOGY.
2 Cor. xi. 3.—"The simplicity that is in Christ."
There is much talk in the present time of the difficulties of religion. And no doubt there is a sense in which religion is always difficult. It is hard to be truly religious—to be humble, good, pure, and just; to be full of faith, hope, and charity, so that our conduct may be seen to be like that of Christ, and our light to shine before men. But when men speak so much nowadays of the difficulties of religion, they chiefly mean intellectual and not practical difficulties. Religion is identified with the tenets of a Church system, or of a theological system; and it is felt that modern criticism has assailed these tenets in many vulnerable points, and made it no longer easy for the open and well-informed mind to believe things that were formerly held, or professed to be held, without hesitation. Discussions and doubts which were once confined to a limited circle when they were heard of at all, have penetrated the modern mind through many avenues, and affected the whole tone of social intelligence. This is not to be denied. For good or for evil such a result has come about; and we live in times of unquiet thought, which form a real and painful trial to many minds. It is not my intention at present to deplore or to criticise this modern tendency, but rather to point out how it may be accepted, and yet religion in the highest sense saved to us, if not without struggle (for that is always impossible in the nature of religion), yet without that intellectual conflict for which many minds are entirely unfitted, and which can never be said in itself to help religion in any minds.
The words which I have taken as my text seem to me to suggest a train of thought having an immediate bearing on this subject. St Paul has been speaking of himself in the passage from which the text is taken. He has been commending himself—a task which is never congenial to him. But his opponents in the Corinthian Church had forced this upon him; and now he asks that he may be borne with a little in "his folly." He is pleased to speak of his conduct in this way, with that touch of humorous irony not unfamiliar to him when writing under some excitement. He pleads with his old converts for so much indulgence, because he is "jealous over them with a godly jealousy." He had won them to the Lord. "I have espoused you," he says, "to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ." This had been his unselfish work. He had sought nothing for himself, but all for Christ. That they should belong to Christ—as the bride to the bridegroom—was his jealous anxiety. But others had come in betwixt them and him—nay, betwixt them and Christ, as he believed—and sought to seduce and corrupt their minds by divers doctrines. "I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."
What the special corruptions from Christian simplicity were with which the minds of St Paul's Corinthian converts were assailed, it is not necessary for us now to inquire. Their special dangers are not likely to be ours. What concerns us is the fact, that both St Paul and Christ—his Master and ours—thought of religion as something simple. Attachment to Christ was a simple personal reality, illustrated by the tie which binds the bride, as a chaste virgin, to the bridegroom. It was not an ingenuity, nor a subtilty, nor a ceremony. It involved no speculation or argument. Its essence was personal and emotional, and not intellectual. The true analogy of religion, in short, is that of simple affection and trust. Subtilty may, in itself, be good or evil. It may be applied for a religious no less than for an irreligious purpose, as implied in the text. But it is something entirely different from the "simplicity that is in Christ."
It is not to be supposed that religion is or can be ever rightly dissociated from intelligence. An intelligent perception of our own higher wants, and of a higher power of love that can alone supply these wants, is of its very nature. There must be knowledge in all religion—knowledge of ourselves, and knowledge of the Divine. It was the knowledge of God in Christ communicated by St Paul that had made the Corinthians Christians. But the knowledge that is essential to religion is a simple knowledge like that which the loved has of the person who loves—the bride of the bridegroom, the child of the parent. It springs from the personal and spiritual, and not from the cognitive or critical side of our being; from the heart, and not from the head. Not merely so; but if the heart or spiritual sphere be really awakened in us—if there be a true stirring of life here, and a true seeking towards the light—the essence and strength of a true religion may be ours, although we are unable to answer many questions that may be asked, or to solve even the difficulties raised by our own intellect.
The text, in short, suggests that there is a religious sphere, distinct and intelligible by itself, which is not to be confounded with the sphere of theology or science. This is the sphere in which Christ worked, and in which St Paul also, although not so exclusively, worked after Him. This is the special sphere of Christianity, or at least of the Christianity of Christ.
And it is this, as it appears to us, important distinction to which we now propose to direct your attention. Let us try to explain in what respects the religion of Christ is really apart from those intellectual and dogmatic difficulties with which it has been so much mixed up.
I. It is so, first of all, in the comparatively simple order of facts with which it deals. Nothing can be simpler or more comprehensive than our Lord's teaching. He knew what was in man. He knew, moreover, what was in God towards man as a living power of love, who had sent Him forth "to seek and save the lost;" and beyond these great facts, of a fallen life to be restored, and of a higher life of divine love and sacrifice, willing and able to restore and purify this fallen life, our Lord seldom traversed. Unceasingly He proclaimed the reality of a spiritual life in man, however obscured by sin, and the reality of a divine life above him, which had never forsaken him nor left him to perish in his sin. He held forth the need of man, and the grace and sacrifice of God on behalf of man. And within this double order of spiritual facts His teaching may be said to circulate. He dealt, in other words, with the great ideas of God and the soul, which can alone live in Him, however it may have sunk away from Him. These were to Him the realities of all life and all religion. There are those, I know, in our day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions—"dogmas of a tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to all who live in Him and know in Him. The soul and God are, if you will, dogmas to science. They cannot well be anything else to a vision which is outside of them, and cannot from their very nature ever reach them. But within the religious sphere they are primary experiences, original and simple data from which all others come. And our present argument is, that Christ dealt almost exclusively with these broad and simple elements of religion, and that He believed the life of religion to rest within them. He spoke to men and women as having souls to be saved; and He spoke of Himself and of God as able and willing to save them. This was the "simplicity" that was in Him.