“When the question arises, How are we to be made in this way partakers of the living Christ, so that our religion shall be in very deed—not a name only, not a doctrinal or ritualistic fetich merely, nor a fond sentiment simply of our own fancy?” “All turns in this case on our standing in the divine order as it reaches us from the Father through the Son. That meets us in the written Word of God, which, in the way we have before seen, is nothing less in its interior life than the presence of the Lord of life and glory himself in the world.”
Again:
“We cannot now follow out the subject with any sort of adequate discussion. We will simply say, therefore, that what our Lord says here of his words or commandments is just what the Scriptures everywhere attribute to themselves in the same respect and view. They claim to be spirit and life, to have in them supernatural and heavenly power, to be able to make men wise unto everlasting life, to be the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever—not the memory or report simply of such word spoken in time past, but the always present energy of it reaching through the ages. The Scriptures—God’s law, testimonies, commandments, statutes, judgments, his word in form of history, ritual, psalmody, and prophecy—are all this through what they are as the ‘testimony of Jesus’; and therefore it is that they are, in truth, what the ark of God’s covenant represented of old, the conjunction of heaven and earth, and in this way a real place of meeting or convention between men and God. To know this, to own it, to acknowledge inwardly the presence of Christ in his Word, as the same Jehovah
from whom the law came on Mount Sinai; and then to fear the Lord as thus revealed in his Word, to bow before his authority, and to walk in his ways; or, in shorter phrase, to ‘fear God and keep his commandments,’ because they are his commandments, and not for any lower reason—this is the whole duty of man, and of itself the bringing of man into union with God; the full verification of which is reached at last only in and by the Word made glorious through the glorification of the Lord himself; as when, in the passage before us he makes the keeping of his commandments the one simple condition of all that is comprehended in the idea of the mystical union between himself and his people.”
According, then, to Dr. Nevin, “the divine order of our being” made “partakers of the living Christ is in the Word of God.”
To make what is plain unmistakable, he adds:
“What we have to do, then, especially in the war we are called to wage with the powers of hell, is to see that this conjunction with Christ be in us really and truly, through a proper continual use of the Word of God for this purpose.”
There is here and there throughout this article a haziness of language which smacks of Swedenborgianism, and makes it difficult to seize its precise meaning; but we submit that Dr. Nevin—and he will probably accept the statement, as our only aim is to get at his real meaning—proceeds on the supposition that Christianity is a theory, and becomes real as each individual, illumined by divine light, discovers and appropriates it in reading the written Word—the Bible. This is the common ground of Protestantism; and Dr. Nevin holds no other than the rule of faith of all Protestants. The following passage places this beyond doubt or cavil:
“It was the life of the risen Lord himself, shining into the written Word, and through this into the mind of the disciples,
which, by inward correspondence, served to open their understanding to the proper knowledge of both. And as it was then, so it is still. We learn what the written Word is only by light from the incarnate Word; but then, again, we learn what the light of the incarnate Word is only as this shines into us through the written Word—a circle, it is true, which alone, however, brings us to the true ground of the Christian faith.”