068. UNITY OF MANKIND IN CHRIST

UNITY OF MANKIND IN CHRIST But we must not conceive of this unity of all men in Christ as a merely physical unity. This would be repeating the error of Herbert Spencer. He believes in humanity as an organism. But since he denies freewill, the life of this organism is virtually nothing but physical life. The individual members passively execute the impulses communicated to them from the inscrutable power of which they are the partial manifestations. Sin, if such a thing be possible in the system, and misery, the natural consequence of sin, are both necessitated, and there is absolutely no remedy. There is no eye to pity and no arm to save. We shudder at this conclusion, and we rejoice that our view of the relation of humanity to Christ leads us to precisely the opposite result. Humanity is a moral, not a physical, organism. Though created and upheld by Christ, every man is endowed with that priceless heritage, freewill, and he can use his free-will in resisting, instead of obeying, the law of holiness which reigns supreme. And when moral disintegration has entered through this abuse of free-will, the law of love can repair the ruin that sin has wrought, Christ’s free-will can manifest itself as a recreated humanity in the incarnation, and individual men can secure new birth and new life by voluntary reunion with him from whom their life originally came but from whom they had morally separated themselves by their sin.

Love is the gravitation of the moral universe. It operates, however, not inversely as the square of the distance, but directly as the distance. Its law is: From each, according to ability; to each, according to need. The farther away from God the soul is, so much more goes out toward it the divine compassion; the more estranged from Christ, so much the more does Christ long to save. Kant denned an organism to be that in which the whole and each of the parts was reciprocally means and end. Christ, the Head and Life of universal humanity, the great whole of which each individual man is normally a part, recognizes the obligations of the organism which he has constituted. The natural tie which bound him to all men and all men to him made not only possible but necessary his bearing all our burdens and sins in his atonement. The holiness that condemned sin must involve in condemnation him who constituted the natural center and life of humanity. The heart must suffer with the suffering of the members; aye, the heart can suffer when the members cannot, because the members are stupefied and benumbed while the heart is yet healthy and whole.

Redemption, then, in terms of modern thought, is the movement of the whole to save the part. The great love of Christ is the rational effort of the organism to retrieve the error and to expiate the sin of its members. In the very nature of things the Lord can save humanity only by the sacrifice of himself. He must bear our just condemnation, if we are to go free. But for this very reason, that he is the essence of humanity and that all men live only in him, his sacrifice can be our sacrifice, his atonement can avail for us. We have mystified his work too long by our theories of external and mechanical imputation. The truth is something profounder and more vital than that. Because Christ is our life, naturally as well as spiritually, it was humanity that atoned in him. Only this conception of the organic unity of all men in him can enable us to understand Paul’s words: "The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that One died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again." In other words, the love that constrains to missions is simply the flowing out to the extremities of that great tide of life of which the death and resurrection of our Lord are the most signal types and manifestations. The doctrine of the immanence of God has been transforming the thought of our generation. We see, as our fathers did not, that while God is transcendent, transcendence is not necessarily outsideness; that God is not far from any one of us; that he works not only without but from within; that law is only perpetual miracle; and that evolution is nothing but the method of God. But the world has yet to learn the great truth that the God who is so near it, who constitutes its very life, and who is carrying forward its historic development, is none other than Christ. As he is the eternal Word, so he is the only Revealer of God. And he is Love. I would apply this doctrine of immanent Love to missions. I would induce you to see in Christ the center and source of all love, because you see in him the center and source of all life. As all physical energy is but the stored-up product of the sun in the heavens, so all the moral energy of man is but the stored-up product of the Sun of Righteousness. Our love is faint and cold, and, severed from the source of love, it will be soon exhausted; but, since it is connected with an infinite dynamo in Christ, there is no limiting its duration or its power. If I am a member of Christ’s body, then I tingle with loving life which he himself supplies. I too love every member of that humanity to which he has bound himself and for which he has shed his blood. I fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, which is the church. I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise. My love is a manifestation of Christ’s love. As I have freely received, so I freely give.

Mere natural selection would leave the weak and the bad to perish. It believes in a sort of progress; but, as Darwin and Huxley both confess, it can give no guarantee that this progress will be in the direction of benevolence or even of morality; it may, for all they know, be progress toward mere brute force and demoniacal injustice. This is because the philosophy of mere natural selection is deterministic, and it recognizes no central sensorium in the universe, knows of no divine consciousness or liberty or righteousness or love. John Fiske, in his "Cosmic Philosophy," has a glimpse of the truth, and improves greatly upon Herbert Spencer, his master, when he declares that the universe is not a machine but that it has an indwelling principle of life, and when he suggests, faintly and timidly, that artificial selection may do something which natural selection cannot. Oh, that it might dawn upon the minds of these scientists that Christ is this indwelling principle of life, that it is he that holds the universe together, and that he is none other’ than the manifested love of God! Now we see One who has not only the power but the disposition to save the lost, and with this we have the historical proof that what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God has done by sending us his Son. Incarnation and atonement and resurrection and regeneration are, so to speak, processes of artificial selection which counteract the natural selection of sin and death by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. To be organically bound to Jesus Christ, then, is to be organically bound to all men over the whole earth. To feel for men across the sea and to send them the gospel is only the recognition of their common relationship to us by virtue of their being natural members of Christ. As he has the deepest interest in their welfare and destiny, so we, his members, are bound to have interest in them also. Nothing human is foreign to us any more than it is to him. As he gave his life for the least and meanest of his members, so we ought also to lay down our lives for them. All the members of the race are brethren. We do not reach our individual perfection until we realize that we are parts of humanity, and no man is ever fully saved himself until he learns from Christ to work for the salvation of the world. The reign of universal peace and of universal righteousness will never come except by the recognition and worship of that Christ who is himself the embodied peace and righteousness of God, as well as the embodied unity and life of humanity. The race will be redeemed only as one after another of the individual members of the race accepts Christ’s gospel, permits his love to move him, becomes a channel of communication by which the great love of Christ may flow to all the world. As the love of Christ in us is the church’s great motive to missions, so it is the world’s great motive to turn from its sin. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," and the exhibition of Christ’s love in the Christian countenance and conduct is the great means of breaking down the barriers of selfishness and enmity and pride, and opening the hearts of sinners to the inflowing of the same life-giving stream. Christ himself is invisible, and the sinner thinks of him as far away, even though he stands at the door and knocks. It is most often the Christlike look, or the Christlike words, or the Christlike charity of some Christian, that convinces the erring that Christ is in the world and that even now Christ is seeking him. Ah, this is the reason why our missionary work is so supremely important! As God the Father does not work and is not known except through Christ the Son, so Christ the Son does not work and is not known except through his followers. Even as my Father hath sent me, he says, so send I you. "Lo, I am with you alway." "He that receiveth you, receiveth me, and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me." Could any identification be more complete? Dear friends, we shall never understand the fullness of the church’s resources nor the greatness of the church’s power, until we see in the church the new incarnation of the Redeemer and the new embodiment of his love. As we are the very body of Christ, surely the redeemed members will reach out after those who are still diseased and dying, and will persuade them, by the example of their own love and life, to receive that love and life themselves.