026. CHRIST THE FULLNESS OF THE GODHEAD

CHRIST THE FULLNESS OF THE GODHEAD When the later theology, then, throws out the supernatural and dogmatic, as coming not from Jesus but from Paul’s Epistles and from the fourth Gospel, our claim is that Paul and John are only inspired and authoritative interpreters of Jesus, seeing themselves and making us see the fullness of the Godhead that dwelt in him. If we go back to Christ, we must go back with all the light upon his being and his mission which Paul and John have given. Instead of stripping him of supernatural and dogmatic elements, we must clothe him with them, for they are his own. Without them, indeed, Christ is no Saviour. Mrs. Browning said well in "Aurora Leigh ": The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the Life too with the Law.

He could not give the life unless he were the Life. Those who would go back to Christ, in the sense of discarding the supernatural and the dogmatic, deprive us of the very essence of Christianity and leave it without authority or efficacy. They give us simple law instead of gospel, and summon us before a tribunal that damns us. To degrade doctrine by exalting precept is to leave men without the motive or the power to obey the precept. The Alexandrian philosophy enabled Paul and John to interpret Christ better than this; it enabled them to see in him the life of God, and so the life of man. Not only the Alexandrian philosophy, but all subsequent philosophy—yes, all science, all history, all art—has its part to play in enlarging and classifying our conceptions of him. And so we come to our proper task. Let us go back to Christ with the new understanding of him which modern thought has given us. We propose to go back from deism to Christ, the Life of Nature; from atomism to Christ, the Life of Humanity; from externalism to Christ, the Life of the Church.

Deism represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew so soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of selfdevelopment. It insists on the inviolability and sufficiency of natural law as well as on the exclusively mechanical view of the world. The solar system is regarded as a sort of "perpetual motion," which God made, indeed, but which does not need God to uphold it. I do not claim that the Christian church or the Christian pulpit has consciously adopted this view, but I do claim that both church and pulpit have unconsciously been far too greatly influenced by it. We have fallen in with modes of thinking caught from the skepticism of the past century, and are only gradually coming to realize how irrational and unscriptural they are. Modern science and modern philosophy have been teaching us better. The fact of the dissipation of energy shows that the universe can be no "perpetual motion," and that mere mechanism can never explain the forces which are presupposed in it. Force itself can never be understood except as the exercise of will. Dead things cannot act. God must be in his universe in order to any movement or life. The living God must be the constant source of power.

Thus the thought of the world inclines more and more to the conviction that no merely mechanical explanation of the universe suffices; that biology is more fundamental than physics; and that underneath physics must be psychology. The system of things cannot be conceived as a universe without postulating an omnipresent reason and will. The Christian believer goes further than this. He instinctively identifies this omnipresent reason and will with him from whom he receives the forgiveness of sins, who dwells as a living presence in his soul, and before whom he bows in unlimited worship and adoration. In all this he only follows the lead of Scripture, for the Scripture too identifies the omnipresent, living, and upholding God, with Jesus Christ. In other words, the eternal Word through whom the universe was created is still the life and sustainer of it, and this eternal Word took bodily form and manifested his fullness in Jesus Christ. The deism that separated nature from God and virtually denied his omnipresence is demonstrated to be error only when we recognize Christ as Immanuel, God with us. It is none other than the Creator and Upholder of the universe that has died to save us. All nature assumes new significance now, as instinct with the same love and care that led our Lord to endure the cross. Nature is not itself God, and we are not pantheists. But nature is the constant expression of God. In it we hear the same divine voice that spake from Sinai under the Old Dispensation and that uttered the Sermon on the Mount under the New. Ruskin once wrote: The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth, and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same infinity, the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day star. But how much more sacred and beautiful does the world become when we get back to Christ, its Maker and its Life. When we recognize him therein, nature may well be called a great sheet let down from God out of heaven, wherein is nothing common or unclean. The smallest diatom that clings to the waving reed is worthy of profound study, because the wisdom and will of Christ are displayed in it, and the Milky Way is but the dust thrown aloft by the invisible chariot wheels of the infinite Son of God as he rides forth to subdue all things unto himself. In this recognition of Christ as the Life of Nature I see the guarantee that theology and science will come to complete accord. They are but pictures of Christ’s working taken from different points of view. Theology tells us the Why, while Science tells us the How. We need have no fear of evolution, for evolution is only the common method of Christ, a method, however, which does not fetter him, because his immanence in nature is qualified by his transcendence above nature. Immanence alone would be Christ imprisoned, as transcendence alone would be Christ banished. Reason and faith are not antagonistic to each other. They are working toward the same end—the discovery and unfolding of the truth as it is in Jesus. When the great tunnel of St. Gothard was constructed, workmen bored simultaneously from either side of the Alps. For nearly ten years they worked on in the dark. But in 1881 one of the parties began to hear, through the lessening thickness of the intervening rock, the sounds of the hammer and the voices of the workmen from the other side. Then it was a small matter to break through the barrier and to clasp hands. It was a wonderful feat of engineering to bring together those two sets of workmen in the heart of the mountain and in the center of a tunnel nine and one-half miles long. But Christ our Lord is accomplishing a greater wonder in bringing together in himself the forces of reason and of faith, of theology and of science, that through all the Christian centuries have been blindly approaching each other. Their union is possible, simply because theology has been seeking Christ and Christ is the truth, while science has been seeking the truth and the truth is Christ.