08-The Church and The World

VIII. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD.

John 17:16. “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”

I ENDEAVOURED to make it clear this morning that the proper idea of holiness is that of dedication to the exclusive service of God. Holy things are those which are set apart for the use of worship; holy persons or saints are those whom God has made his own by election and calling, and who consent to be his. Holiness therefore implies separation; and those who are to be in any sense holy must in some way be separate. What kind of separation is rightly involved in, or required by, Christian holiness in the present age, is the question which we are to consider this evening. The most obvious way of being separate is that of refusing to have fellowship with other people who do not think or feel as we do. “Come out from among them, and be ye separate,” is an exhortation addressed by St Paul to the Christians of Corinth. And when we look back to the beginnings of the Church, we see small societies of persons who have come out very decidedly from the world surrounding them. The Christians were separated in religion, in morals, and in social life, from their neighbours. Their Christian profession imperatively required them to be thus separated. Their holiness was endangered by free association with the heathen. And it was necessary that they should draw together closely and seek support for their faith in mutual encouragement and in the common atmosphere of a Christian society. We can understand easily enough this state of things, when we recall the circumstances of the first age of the Church. Within the Church there is a close communion or fellowship of the saints with one another; on the outside there is a marked separation between the few saints and the unholy world surrounding them. But the scene changes when we pass from the first century to the nineteenth. What is to be said about separation when the whole society is professedly Christian? From whom are we, the Christians of this country, to separate ourselves? Christians are not a select few in England; rror is England a little Christian land surrounded by heathen nations. How far can we use, in what way can we reasonably and honestly apply to our own case, the Scriptural doctrine concerning the separation of Christians from the world? What is for us the holy fellowship, and what is the world? The true and thorough answer to be given to these questions is this, that the primary and essential separation of the holy is from all that defiles. This is to be insisted upon now as much as ever and in all possible circumstances. But the social separation from persons or classes is altogether a secondary and variable matter. It may be that the only way of avoiding defilement is by separation from certain persons; then such separation becomes a duty of holiness. But otherwise all refusal of fellowship between human beings is undesirable and to be regretted. There ought never to be separation for separation’s sake, between Christians and non-Christians, or between some Christians and others. And to trust to such separation for the promotion of holiness, is a fatal error.

It is the more fatal, because it is also a very natural and seductive error.

There are two conspicuous forms of this perversion of the idea of holiness in these later ages. In both, men start from the notion that it is a fundamental necessity of Christianity to cut out some portion of the world for God, and to leave the rest of it as not God’s. The one kind of separation we may call religions, the other ecclesiastical.

I. When Christians have been most in earnest, great stress has been laid upon the difference between being really, and being only nominally, Christian. The Bible speaks of regeneration, of conversion, of the absorbing faith of the believer, of the required renunciation of all earthly things. A great number of baptized and professing Christians have been very unlike what Christians according to the Bible standard ought to be, some shamelessly profligate, many conspicuously followers of fashion and pleasure, still more, cold and heartless believers in the crucified and risen Christ. How was it possible to assume that such Christians as these had undergone the new birth and were living a life in Christ? It was a natural conclusion that there must be an inner circle of true believers as well as the larger body of nominal Christians. The believers, it was held, had undergone the inward change which transformed them from being children of the world into children of God. The line of separation, it then appeared evident, was to be drawn between the regenerate and the unregenerate. The genuine Christians would know one another by having the same tastes and interests, the same preferences and the same aversions; they would feel also the vital difference between themselves and the unconverted. There would thus be a living communion or fellowship of the holy, and a more than formal separation between them and the rest of the world. And it would then be regarded as highly important for the true believers not to make light of their separation from the world, but while they longed to persuade their perishing brethren to submit to the inner change which would enable them to cross the line, to fake care that the line was not obliterated. It became a duty of charity to the unconverted themselves, to warn them by protests and by repulsion of the danger of remaining children of the world.

There is something pathetic in the distress and perplexity which have been occasioned by this theory of the difference between converted and merely nominal Christians. There is so much that is true in it, so much that is high and self-denying in the life that it enjoins. To many and many a humble Christian it has seemed absolutely necessary, at any cost of feeling, to hold it and act upon it. And yet nothing, I think, can be more clear and certain than that the kind of distinction assumed does not exist in fact. When the Gospel is suddenly preached with warmth in the midst of an utterly dead and careless generation, the real difference between those who accept it and those who turn their backs upon it may for a time be nearly as great as the theory assumes. But in the families and the households of the converted, and generally in an age like our own and in such a society as that represented, for example, by this present congregation, the line comes to be more and more evidently an arbitrary one. It is difficult, is it not impossible? to say that a select number of this congregation have undergone a change which makes them utterly different from the rest. Your mind refuses to effect the separation practically, which is the way in which, if made at all, it ought to be made. The most thoroughly honest will be the. most unable to decide in their own case whether they belong to the regenerate or the unregenerate. I have heard it said, “The test may be a very simple and Catholic one; a person can surely tell whether he loves Christ or not.” But no: this test fails, the moment you begin to apply it. Every one here, I may hope, loves Christ a little; no one here loves Christ in the degree in which it is reasonable that saved sinners should love their Saviour. In brief, you have not two sets of persons, one set of one nature, the other set of a totally different nature. The two natures are struggling together in each person; and the degrees of difference between Christian and Christian are so various as to be indeterminable by any measurement.

I have alluded to the distress which the attempt to make a separation of the converted from the unconverted has occasioned to multitudes of earnest souls. But the pain thus given is not the worst result of it. A graver evil is that it tends to make religion unreal and artificial. Religious people have been led to cling to arbitrary forms of outward habit as if they were identical with the deepest spiritual characteristics. To dance or not to dance has been made the test of a Christian. Consciences have been miserably confused. And along with artificiality a very genuine worldliness has stolen into the most exclusive Christian society. The strictly religious have not been more kind, more frank, more magnanimous, than others: and people of the world have had too much excuse for justifying themselves on moral grounds in not desiring to be religious.

Hi Happily, as members of the Church of England, we are under no constraint or even temptation to bisect Christian society into the two classes of the converted and unconverted. The necessity of doing this is a tradition of the religious world, but not of the Church of England. Our Church treats all its members as the Apostles treated the members of their Churches. It throws the broad mantle of the Christian calling over them all; and beneath this, it assumes that there may be every kind and degree of unworthiness. It is our own fault if we allow this comprehension to seduce us into indifference to holiness. There are none here who have a right to think of their condition as other than a holy one. You are all holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, called to be saints. The same standard is placed before all, and each will have to answer to himself and to God for the manner in which he conforms himself to it.

2. I turn now to another mistaken mode of effecting the separation implied in holiness, that which I have called the ecclesiastical. According to this, the Church is holy, and the world in its ’~ivil form and organization is not holy. It is very important in these days that we should set this view distinctly before our minds and ask ourselves whether we assent to it.

It is not so easy, however, to make the theory a satisfactorily distinct one. The “ Church” is a word which is notoriously difficult to define. So is the “World.” The case is simplest in modern Romanism. There the Church means ultimately the Pope. The portion of mankind which adheres to the Pope is holy, and holiness is bound up with hearty and unqualified submission to the Pope.

Civil governments, so long as they are obedient to the Holy Father, partake of his holiness; as soon as they set themselves in any opposition to Rome, they become unholy and profane. That is intelligible enough as a theory. But the holiness of the Church, thus understood, proves itself to be only a matter of definition and theory, when we find civil governments more righteous, more observant of the will of God, as they often have been, than the Pope and the Church. In the long struggles of history between the Papal See and national governments, it is impossible for any fair inquirer to refuse to admit that the policy of Rome has been continually marked by falsehood, intrigue, and violence. The Court of the Pope has often been as profligate as any other Court. The title of “ His Holiness” seems one of bitter irony, when given to some of the occupants of the Papal See. But in our own Church, which does not acknowledge the Pope, there is a strong tendency to make out that the Church, as clerically organized, appropriates God’s calling and is alone holy, and that the world, as organized under civil government, is altogether outside of that calling which makes holy. Ecclesiastical assemblies are held to have the Spirit of God pledged to them exclusively. Men quote our Lord’s saying, “ Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” as if Caesar meant civil government and God ecclesiastical government, and as if Caesar and God had separate jurisdictions, each limiting the other. But Caesar did not mean the national government as distinct from the ecclesiastical, and most certainly God did not mean the ecclesiastical government, and it is even absurd to imagine that God’s authority does not interfere with that of secular government. There is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that ecclesiastical organization has God with it any more than the civil system of society. The Lord Jesus did not come as a priest, but as the son of a carpenter; the Apostles were not Jewish priests, they were all drawn from the ranks of the laity. Pilate, the representative of a secular foreign dominion, did indeed put our Lord to death: but our Lord himself said, “He that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.” The priests were those who really caused Jesus to be put to death; he was sentenced to death for blasphemy by the Church Court of the Sanhedrim. When the Apostles were addressing and teaching the believers in Christ, they used abundantly, as I have shewn, the terms expressing holiness; but these terms were invariably applied to the whole body, and to the body not as organized under overseers and elders, but as doing the work of God in the world. I am not contending for a general confusion of functions; I do not say that ecclesiastics have not their own place and honour; but I confidently deny that the holiness of the Church is intended to belong to its ecclesiastical functions only.

Because the Church is holy to the Lord, therefore all the business of life, including the high and sacred work of civil government, is to be discharged as to the Lord, and may claim the assistance of the Divine Spirit. The simple truth is that any theory of holiness which would cut out a portion of the world for God, leaving the rest as not God’s whether the selected portion be the inner circle of true believers or the outward ecclesiastical organization is altogether a wrong one. The Scriptural doctrine of holiness claims all the world for God. It does reject and excommunicate, indeed; but not willingly any portion of society or any person, assuredly not civil government; but all tempers and habits displeasing to the just and gracious God. My brethren, when you have been repelled by some erroneous notions of exclusive sanctity, when you have turned away from the sainthood of men who thought they gave themselves up to God by deserting the world and by outraging the senses, or from the Pharisaism of narrow religious cliques, or from ecclesiastical fanaticism, the easiest course may seem to be to throw aside all ideas of holiness, and to content yourselves with what society may determine to be sensible and moderate and practical in morals and religion. Let me entreat you to beware of this bias, and to resist it as a temptation. Be not persuaded to take a worldly view of life and to make respectability your standard.

We cannot afford to lose the elevating influence of the consciousness of sanctity. You know what the sense of honour has done for the privileged classes of society, how it has made men regard it as an intolerable insult to be charged with lying, cowardice, or meanness, and has thus been in some degree a real safeguard to them against the faults deemed unworthy of a gentleman. Well, holiness is the Christian’s honour. The sense of holiness is a much better thing than the sense of honour. It is the heritage of the poorest and most despised, as well as of the highly bred. It does not threaten an accuser with sword-point or pistol-ball, whether the accusation be well-founded or not; but it shrinks with disgust from the sin itself. It cherishes the instinct which feels shame not in being thought to be defiled, but in being defiled. I know not how the place of this instinct of holiness could be supplied.

Let it not be lost from amongst us, Christian brethren. Let us not have to cast about for new influences to be furnished by philosophy to do the purifying work of Christian sanctity. Begin from God, and seek his effectual aid. Study to think of yourselves, not only he-re and on Sundays, but on week days and in your appointed industry, as dedicated to God. Has he not called you to be his own? How come you to be Christians? You have not chosen Christ, but he has chosen you.

He took you for his members before you could have an opinion or make a choice. So far as your Christianity has any honest meaning at all, it means that you have been introduced by God into a holy state, made members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of heaven. “What? know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” Bear in rnind God’s character, as well as the calling and gifts you have received from him; remember with what an abiding anger he hates sin; try to imagine with what feelings the perfect Heavenly Father must behold his children corrupting and defiling themselves. And do not think of yourselves as if you were alone in the world. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Respect those around you as also holylike yourselves with a Divine consecration. God has put into our hands the awful power of edifying or corrupting one another. Therefore beware that no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace to the hearers.

These are the incomparable exhortations of Christian duty. They are not the precepts of a worldly and secular morality: they require the Christian to emancipate himself absolutely from the dominion of the world. But they are good for the world.

They are in no respect unpractical, or opposed to the welfare of the world. The world is better for all denials of its authority over the children of God.

Let us therefore come out of it, that we may the more effectually serve it. Let us refuse to be governed by custom, to be awed by fashion, to follow a multitude to do evil. Whatever the cost may be of a life regulated from heaven, it is wise to look to God for guidance, for support, and for reward. Having the Eternal God for our Father, let us cleanse ourselves earnestly from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.