Dynamic Christianity

Contents

CHAP.

Preface

I. The Miracle of Power in Christ.

II. The Opposing Power of Sin.

III. Transforming Power Experienced.. .

IV. The Mystery of the Power.

V. The Bible and Spiritual Power.

VI. Power in the Inner Life.

VII. Power for the Life of Service.

VIII. Spirituality the Urgent Need.

IX. Revival Power in the Church.

X. The Preacher and the Revival.

XI. The Laymen and the Revival.

XII. Ideals and Methods in Evangelism. ..

XIII. The Personal Element in Evangelism

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PREFACE

This book has been written nnder the conviction that the mystical element in Christianity has been of late years too greatly neglected, with quite serious results; that there must be a return to the clear recognition that the religion of Christ depends for its effectiveness and triumph upon a divine, super¬ natural power, defying all naturalistic explanations. Christianity is the religion of power. Its true nature can be understood only as it is interpreted in terms of power. Its earliest apostles were to be endued with “power from on high.” That pentecostal endowment is the indispensable requisite of the Church in every age. That power, proceeding from God through Christ and creating its own spe¬ cific product, has manifested itself through the centuries in the re-creation and radical transforma¬ tion of human lives. It is mysterious, inexplicable, but undeniably real, self-attesting—an emanation from the Almighty.

The religion of Jesus is ethical, but when it is portrayed purely as a system of ethics it loses its main value, essence and forcefulness. It is pro¬ foundly philosophic, but is vastly more than a phi¬ losophy. It contains a lofty theology, but its vitaliz¬ ing efficiency lies not in a compilation of dogmas. It is more than any theories, abstractions, or intellectualisms; it is dynamic—an effluence from the Omnipotent.

Without organization, doubtless, church activities 5

PREFACE could not be carried on. To provide a means for human effort there must he adequate machinery and established methods. But there is always a danger that the machine or the routine shall itself unconsciously come to be considered a substitute for the true energizing force and spiritualizing agent. Failure will characterize every attempt to evangelize the world when reliance is placed pri¬ marily on clever planning and ingenious devices.

The writer of these pages would not intimate that the Church of to-day is devoid of spirituality. That supreme grace exists in large proportions and is evidently operative. But the perplexing and enor¬ mous problems which face Christianity in the press¬ ing responsibilities of evangelistic and missionary work in America and Europe, and on the Oriental side of the globe, make imperative the positive acces¬ sion of a double portion—yea, a quadruple portion —of the life and potency of the Spirit if conquest is to be rationally expected. A fuller and deeper spir¬ ituality in the Church is the absolute and urgent necessity in this generation.

It is the earnest hope of the author that this volume may come with its message to very many laymen who are awakening to the claims of God upon them in bringing the gospel in forms of life to their fellow laymen everywhere; to consecrated pastors striving to arouse their memberships and communities to the demands of the soul in an age when material considerations are so insistent; to faithful evangelists who, by their preaching of the Word, would quicken consciences and lead men to repentance, conversion, and the loftiest attainments of grace; and to all self-sacrificing missionaries pro-

PREFACE claiming at home and in far distant parts of the earth to needy millions the infinitely precious truths of the Fatherhood of God, the redemption through Christ, the inspiration and sanctification of the Holy Spirit.

Levi Gilbert.

Chapter I

Riding one day on the traction cars, and coming to a crossing where several lines met, all at once onr car and all the others came to a standstill. “Lost the power/ ’ said the conductor to an inquiring passenger. After a few minutes’ waiting, on look¬ ing down the avenue he saw one car start, and exexclaimed, 4 4 He’s got the power I ’’ And as he spoke our car moved on.

The parallel between his condition and the Church’s is real and striking. Just as his car was inert and helpless without the electricity from the power house, so the Church is lifeless and inoper¬ ative without the all-necessary spirituality from God. “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you. ’ ’ This is the only condition in which men have power with other men and pre¬ vail. It is indispensable.

The Bible is full of references to this need of divine power. God ‘ ‘ gives power to the faint. ’ ’ Paul knew “the effectual working of his power.” Jesus returned from the wilderness “in the power of the Spirit.” Pentecost is a reality—is a perpetual necessity and a perpetual privilege, and not an isolated event in the past—and is not to be explained on any naturalistic principles. The Church must be something more than an ecclesiastical organiza¬ tion, or a club under religiously social auspices. It must be charged with supernatural power from 9 celestial dynamos—must be the earthly conductor of God’s life and energy for men. Otherwise all its machinery stops and is useless. Christians must be filled, like Peter and Paul, with the Holy Ghost and with power. “Getting the power” is not some sort of hysteria or epileptic seizure, not a piece of fanat¬ icism or insanity, but the prime necessity of any real being and activity in the Christian, and of any evangelizing potency and effectiveness in the world. All human culture and all churchly methods must be vitalized from on high.

Conduct may well be, as Matthew Arnold insisted, three fourths of religion, and to-day we are seeing clearly the indefensible folly of sneering at what thoughtless people style 44 mere morality . 9 9 Morality —righteousness—is the element in religion without which it is a superstition or a fanaticism. It is the grandest product of a right faith, and the 4 4 fruit of the Spirit”— 44 love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kind¬ ness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control” —shows that, in Christianity, morality is inseparable from religion. In ancient paganism, as in the systems of present-day heathenism, this connection between worship and creed and life and character was fatally sundered.

Nevertheless, there was some sort of meaning in the old reference to 44 mere morality.” Christianity must be ever perceived to be infinitely more than a system of ethics. It cannot be reduced to the propor¬ tions of a convenient compendium of moralisms and maxims for living, such as is contained in the books of Confucius, the 4 4 Meditations 9 ’ of Marcus Aurelius, or a 4 4 Poor Richard’s Almanac . 9 9 Its distinguishing mark is the presence in it of a supernatural Spirit

THE MIRACLE OP POWER IN CHRIST which works with effectual power. This power it is which differentiates Christianity from other reli¬ gions. For many centuries before Christ men had known that in the moral realm they were not measur¬ ing up to their possibilities. Christ has made the obligations of the moral law vastly more luminous and binding for us. But before his Advent men recognized the claims of conscience, felt the demands of the higher law, gave expression to their ideals and aspirations. Christ, indeed, spake as never man spake on the problems of the soul; but there had been great teachers and masters—Moses, Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Confucius, the Talmudists—in the world before him. Christianity cannot assert its preemi¬ nence and uniqueness in the world, simply and only as a revelation of the laws and rules of morality.

But, with all their perception of what they ought to do, it was the uniform confession of these ancients that they did not attain to their goal, that they lacked the power to carry out their noblest purposes. Their highest endeavors ended in defeat. The Roman cried, “I approve the better and yet the worse pur¬ sue. ’ ’ And Saint Paul voices the pathetic confession of the Hebrews: “The good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice. ’ ’ This confession is one that is repeated every day among men of our own time. Lecturers in an ethical culture society may discourse glowingly on the pos¬ sibilities of man’s spiritual attainments. The great fraternal orders, in their rituals, may elaborate lofty conceptions of moral excellence; but still there is evermore the old lament over non-attainment—“To will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not.” There is nothing in life at once more pathetic and affecting than to behold the heroic endeav¬ ors many men are making, without Christ, to live up to the highest demands of their clearest moments of insight. Their vision of truth and right is unob¬ scured. They strive after it. But, feeble and frail in themselves, and assailed by passions and tempta¬ tions, they are overthrown again and again, and have no continuous or permanent victory.

It is right at this point that the particular and distinguishing characteristic of the religion of Christ is to be found. He promised his disciples that they should be endued with power from on high when the Holy Ghost should come upon them. For this power they were to tarry in Jerusalem. He definitely announced that all power was given unto him. It was he who was to speak power into helpless souls —to energize them so that their natural weakness and inefficiency should be overcome, and they should be able, not only to dream and resolve and plan in the field of the Spirit, but also actually to achieve. And when Saint Paul—looking back over the melan¬ choly record of his years when not what he would do did he practice, but the very thing that he hated, that he did, with the mind serving the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin—cried out, “ Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” he was able, aided by his own mar¬ velous and transforming experience, to reply to him¬ self immediately, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The gladness of that cry has thrilled our sinning and baffled humanity through the centuries since, and thrills it yet. In America, where men honestly say that they want to be good, but admit with contri-

THE MIRACLE OP POWER IN CHRIST tion that, unaided, they can’t; and, in other lands, where the systems of faith are inert and uninspirational and noneffective for good amid multiplied depravities, there is immeasurable joy in the promise of a Spirit of Truth, who, without failure, shall guide into all truth and make the impossible possible. “Without me, ye can do nothing,” says Christ; “I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me,” exclaimed Paul. And since then the Church has gone on proclaiming in joyous hymns its “Year of Jubilee” and singing

“Ye slaves of sin and hell.

Your liberty receive.”

We would not imply that all Christians have achieved absolute mastery over all temptations, that they are perfect and never overthrown. But they “press toward the mark,” and they have that within them and on their side which shall ultimately make them “more than conquerors”—which shall over¬ come the evil in them with good. Sin has no more dominion over them—does not reign and rule in them. The “strong man” has been hound by a stronger than he. The “backbone of the rebellion” was broken at Vicksburg and at Gettysburg. There was much more fighting, and defeat alternated with victory for the national cause; but Appomattox was never an uncertainty, and it came in due time. So it is in the campaigns of the spiritual life. The prayer of all men everywhere must in time come to be that of the Christian worshiper to-day:

“Holy Spirit, Power Divine!

Fill and nerve this will of mine;

By thee may I strongly live.

Bravely bear and nobly strive.”

This dynamic, transmuting energy puts the reli¬ gion of Christ in a class by itself. Other religions may have partial glimpses of the truth, hut Chris¬ tianity has more than truth—it has power. And its Founder, from whom emanates this mighty agency, is thereby differentiated from all other founders of other faiths or religious systems. He is not only “a teacher come from God,” but a miracle-worker in the realm of the spiritual as well as in that of the phys¬ ical. There is a vast difference between teaching truth and exemplifying it in life, and then making that life potent for regenerating dead souls.

A friend once loaned us a handbook on theosophy. We have known something of the system and also something of the career of its modern expounder, Madame Blavatsky. To speak of her actions as “eccentricities” is a species of amiable charity, but we are not concerned particularly about that. This handbook says: 4 6 There are many persons who are apt to measure the value of any system of philosophy by the personal habits of its exponents, and, conse¬ quently, the theosophist is asked to reconcile certain personal eccentricities observable in Madame Bla¬ vatsky with the ideals of human progress and per¬ fection held out by theosophy.”

The writer then goes on to say that he does not attempt to reconcile them, and that it is a matter of comparative indifference. Whether genius is con¬ sistent or inconsistent with itself in the ideals it con¬ ceives is quite unimportant—truth is truth through whatever channel it may come. Tennyson may smoke a clay pipe and Swedenborg take snuff, but “we must be content as servants of all that is good, beautiful, and true in life to be uplifted by the fact, to be guided by the philosopher, and to tolerate the man in all his mortal weakness; we can acknowledge the aesthetic beauty of the one and the intellectual strength of the other without committing ourselves to an assent of their personal failures, habits, or peculiarities.’ ’

There is a certain measure of truth in such a state¬ ment. Doubtless many have been helped by the pulpit proclamations of preachers who were after¬ ward found to be of unsound life, and who perhaps had been living falsely and hypocritically. Most Christians would acknowledge that they themselves are not practically living up to the high demands of the gospel they profess, and that their failure is not in minor matters relating to pipes and to snuff¬ boxes, but in more serious departures from moral obligations. But the Christian, though aware of his own defects, has supreme satisfaction in point¬ ing to the Founder of his faith—the Perfect One, who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth —who not only showed the way, taught the truth, expounded the life, but could say to a critical and hostile world, “I am the way, the truth, and the life’’; to obey his call, “Follow me,” is to be led into all ideal excellence. Theosophy may say “the truth has claims of its own apart from the idiosyncrasies of its exponents,” but this does not apply to Christ who incarnated and practically showed forth all he taught, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps. And herein Christianity will always show its immeasurable superiority to every other faith, and to theosophy or any modern substitute for the religion of Jesus. Where else in the world or in history has there been another than Jesus who could calmly ask, “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” What system of philosophy, either ancient or mod¬ ern, has ever practically demonstrated its ability to break the power of inbred sin and set the prisoner free? If philosophy could have saved the world, salvation would have come from the Greeks. But of what philosopher could it ever have been said that he “taketh away the sin of the world”?

Nothing is more remarkable, in reading the records of rescue missions, than to note the marvelous results accomplished in the lives of ignorant and imbruted men who simply called upon Jesus to save them. Frequently Mr. Hadley, in his Water Street Mission, told his fellow workers to keep away from some poor sinner who was agonizingly appealing to Christ. “Let him alone,” he would say; “Jesus has got his grip on him.’ ’ And, sure enough, by and by there would come a shout, and the “great trans¬ action” would be “done,” the miracle of the new birth worked.

Now, most preachers would be inclined to help the seeker through by considerable information as to the nature of faith, as to the character of the Sav¬ iour, as to how he saves, as to the evidences of salva¬ tion ; and perhaps they would volunteer the informa¬ tion to the seeker that he was saved long before he had any assurance of it himself. Better more fre¬ quently follow Mr. Hadley’s plan and “let him alone”—let “Jesus deal with him.”

This may seem to some like superstition. They will think that the situation demands more philos¬ ophy and more theology. But why? If Jesus is a living Christ, and able to exert divine power in rad¬ ically transforming human souls, why should he not do it when called upon earnestly—as when blind Bartimseus called on him—to “have mercy”? Is it necessary to possess a theologian’s comprehension of him and his work—or even that of an average Christian?

We do not decry an intelligent faith, and do not exalt a “blind faith.” But when a man brings the best faith he has—as did the uninformed thief on the cross—however unintelligent and almost stupid and superstitious it may seem; when he comes, in his dull way, and with his vision bleared by sin, believing, somehow, that Jesus “can do this,” there is every evidence that Christ graciously takes him as he is, ignorance, sin and all, and blesses and saves him. But some may ask, “If about all the poor wretch knows is the name of Christ, why not as well call upon Jupiter to save?” And the sufficient answer is, Because Jupiter does not exist, has not saved, and cannot save. Christ does exist; he lives, and has saved, and does save. This is enough. “All hail the power of Jesus’ name!”

“In the name of God let us all cease trying to find it,” remarked Dr. Campbell Morgan once when the discussion turned on the origin of the great religious movement in Wales a few years ago. “At least let us cease trying to trace it to any one man or con¬ vention. You cannot trace it, and I will not trace it to-night. Whence has it come? All over Wales—I am giving you roughly the result of the questioning of fifty or more persons at random in the week—a praying remnant have been agonizing before God about the state of the beloved land, and it is through that that the answer of fire has come. You tell me that the revival originates with Roberts. I tell you that Roberts is a product of the revival. You tell me that it began in an Endeavor meeting where a dear girl bore testimony. I tell yon that was part of the result of a revival breaking out everywhere. If you and I could stand above Wales, looking at it, you would see fire breaking out here and there and yonder and somewhere else, without any collusion or prearrangement. It is a divine visitation in which God—let me say this reverently—in which God is saying to us, ‘ See what I can do without the things you are depending on; see what I can do in answer to a praying people; see what I can do through the simplest, who are ready to fall in line, and depend wholly and absolutely upon me. ’ ’’ The inexplicable, miraculous power that evidently resides in Jesus has been the enigma of two thousand years, and is yet as mysterious and as far from solution as ever.

Canon Farrar once wrote: “If the son of a Ben¬ galee peasant, hanged by order of the lieutenantgovernor of the Northwest Province because of the mischief he was making among the Moslems of Lahore, were to establish his faith on the ruins of Westminster Abbey and install the successor of his leading disciple on the throne of the British empire, we should be compelled to the inference that there is an Infinite behind; nothing but a God could control such a machine.” And he then adds in regard to Jesus: “It needed a fulcrum in eternity to make such a change in the things of time with so weak a lever as the life of this Galilsean.”

Surely there is Infinity in the power of the cross. The ancient Greek and Roman must have regarded with unfeigned wonder what was accomplished in

THE MIRACLE OP POWER IN CHRIST the name of “the holy child Jesus.” Christianity came presenting no new philosophy, no fresh meta¬ physical system, for the cure of the world’s ills. Its method was not preeminently intellectual, but moral and spiritual. It came not with a system, but with a Person. It originated not in Greece, the land of culture, but in Palestine, the most narrow, iso¬ lated, peculiar, and prejudiced of the Roman posses¬ sions, and from the most ignominious town of its most despised province. It came preaching faith in One who, in the estimation of the historians and rulers of his own race, was seditious, blaspheming, arrayed against the local authorities; One who, it might seem to Pilate, stirred up the poor to revolu¬ tionize the laws; who himself, a mere mechanic and plebeian, a poor, wandering vagabond, condemned by his own nation to the most shameful of all imagin¬ able deaths, perished as a malefactor on the cross, crucified as one part fool and three parts adventurer.

And its first disciples, converts, and propagators were fishermen, women, and outcasts of the lowest social scale. It preached to those who joyed in the life of revels, games, and banquets what to them seemed a ridiculous and unreasonable doctrine— that of self-denial, humility, and unselfishness. It insisted that salvation must be by Another, and that the individual could not save himself; that the salva¬ tion must come, not as the result of learning and processes of reasoning (wherein man might have pride), but only in trust and faith. It held up the cross of Christ as the symbol of all salvation, and pointed to him as the world’s Redeemer.

He must be for the Jew the “sign” of power he asked for. This Man, whom the Jew looked upon as an offense and with indignation, who seemed so little like the Captain of the Lord’s host, must be accepted as the incarnation of all power in the natural and spiritual realms! The Jew looked for a Conqueror and was pointed to a Peasant. While he was expecting a God, cleaving the heavens in majesty, he was shown a Babe in a manger. While he was hoping for a great Leader, who would throw off the yoke of Borne, he was presented with a com¬ panion of fishermen, and even an associate of pub¬ licans and sinners in the streets of the city. While he prayed for a conquering Immortal, his faith was asked for One who was expiring in agony between two malefactors. One could hardly imagine the indignation with which he might cry: “He, that fellow! He, the Messiah! He, the representative of our proud theocracy! He, the answer of the ages to the century-long expectation of a Deliverer! He, the Saviour of our grand race and nation! He, the culmination of the glorious line of patriarchs, judges, prophets, and kings! Away with him! Away with him! ’ 9

But it is precisely in these aspects of his shame and ignominy that Saint Paul puts the Christ before the Hebrew, Greek, and Boman world. He might have presented Jesus truthfully as a rabbi, leading a liberal movement, casting aside the shell of Juda¬ ism and proffering its purified essence as a worldreligion to the nations; as a tribune of the people, undertaking their cause against an oppressive hier¬ archy; as a wonderful teacher who thrilled the hearts of men; as possessing mysterious and mirac¬ ulous powers over nature, disease, and even death itself; as having himself broken open his own tomb and ascended to the right hand of God in glory. But, ignoring these, he preferred to speak, even to the fastidious Greeks, of the cross, of a symbol more shameful than the gallows. He takes a poor crucified victim and exalts him to the Head of the universe.

While the Greeks regarded that crucifixion with scant interest and called it “foolishness’’—only an isolated, unrelated event without philosophic signi¬ ficance, a death like thousands of others and without any particular bearing on life—it has become for the world just what Paul declared it was for him— both the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the modern world, quite as much as the ancient, cannot cure humanity of its sin and wretchedness through any philosophy, culture, or processes of education. Berlin, Paris, London, Boston, New York will fail here, with all their arts and schools, as Athens, Alexandria, Corinth, and Rome did before them. No amount of speculation about the soul, matter, nature, the universe, man, time, space, or eternity will heal our complaint or bring us spiritual health.

But there is a strange and subtle power in the cross. Men to-day worship power. They seek it in all the applications of steam and electricity. They crave it in their personal influence. And in the cross, with its revelation of love and suffering, there is a power that the rudest and most barbaric acknowledge. The most cultured are not beyond being moved by its wondrous pathos. Standing before it, after the ages have shown its influence, the scoff dies out upon the lips of the scorner, and the heart of the believer swells with a rapture inex¬ pressible. Yes, humanity shall indeed conquer by that sign! If ever the burden of man’s woe is to be lifted from his weary shoulders, if ever the world is to be completely reconciled to God, if ever guilt and misery are to be banished from the universe, if ever a ne^ and glad humanity is to people a purified and redeemed earth, it will be through no other instru¬ ment than that rough piece of wood upon which a life once went out in uttermost agony!

In the cross of Christ I glory.

Towering o’er the wrecks of time.

The Jesus who thus accomplished on that cross the world’s redemption Carlyle designated as “our Divinest Symbol,” and Schelling characterized as the ‘ ‘ turning point of the world’s history. ’ ’ Writers on the life of Christ have collected the remarkable confessions of great philosophers, poets, historians, many of them not “believers” in the technical sense, but, rather, strongly under the influence of skep¬ ticism and rationalism. It might be expected that those who admittedly enroll themselves as disciples of Jesus would praise and eulogize him; and, there¬ fore, quotations from such theologians, preachers, saints, and followers may be said not to be very re¬ markable. It may be allowed that their expressions of love and admiration are natural, but these do not thereby lose their force. On the contrary, they are drawn from the deep experiences of a life lived inti¬ mately with Christ, from a rich inner consciousness touched into being by vital contact with the Vivifier himself.

Nevertheless, when testimony to Christ’s greatness and influence is given by doubters themselves against the marked tendency of their minds to dis¬ count the Bible narrative and to minify or repudiate altogether the divine and supernatural, their words seem to be weighted doubly with significance. Strauss bears this witness: “He is the highest object we can possibly imagine in respect of religion: the Being without w T hose presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible.’’ Dr. Congreve, the leader of the English Positivists, wrote: 4 ‘ The more truly you serve Christ, the more thoroughly you mold your¬ selves into his image, the more keen will be your sympathy and admiration.” Dr. Martineau held to the Unitarian scheme of theology, but he was constrained to describe Christ as “the commis¬ sioned Prophet, the merciful Redeemer, the inspired Teacher, the perfect Model, the heavenly Guide.” Matthew Arnold, who found difficulties in accepting Christianity’s creed, could yet define God as “the Eternal who makes for righteousness, from whom Jesus came forth, whose Spirit governs the course of humanity.” “Christ,” says Keim, the rational¬ ist biographer of Jesus, “is the crown of all the creations of God, God’s image, the best-beloved, the master-workman and world-shaper in the history of mankind. He, and no other, is, and remains, the appointed standard bearer of the world’s progress, who shall win over the quagmire and the spirits of darkness of the nether Cosmos.” Heider’s words are: “Jesus Christ is in the noblest and most perfect sense the realized ideal of humanity”; and Matthew Caludius, one of the people’s poets of Germany, writes: “No one ever thus loved as Christ did, or did anything so truly great and good as the Bible tells ns of him ever enter into the heart of man. It is a holy form which rises before the poor pilgrim like a star in the night, and satisfies his innermost crav¬ ing, his most secret yearnings and hopes. ’ ’

If ever, in moments of reaction and doubt, any Christian is troubled with the temptation-suggestion that it is beyond probability that any being, so exalted and possessing such transcendent power as our creed represents Christ as having, could ever have lived, it will prove a reassurance and a tonic to him to read again these passages from the pens of geniuses who, though “perplext in faith/’ felt themselves inevitably compelled to acknowledge the supremacy of Jesus in the world’s pantheon.