The image of God, and other sermons

Foreword

T HESE sermons are published with a hope that they will be helpful to at least some of their readers. They have been chosen with reference to certain questions which are of great importance to every one; and to such of their readers as listened to them when they were preached in the Universalist Church of the Messiah, in Philadelphia, they may call up pleasant recollections of a ministry of many years.

E. C. S.

Philadelphia, Pa.

Contents

I. The Image of God . . . .9

II. The Incarnation . . . .19

III. The Miracles oe Jesus Christ . . 28

II

“ The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth . . . and of his fulness have we all re¬ ceived, and grace for grace ”— John i : 14 , 16 .

H ISTORY tells us that, at the time of his death, the apostle John was in the ninety-fifth year of his age. As Jesus had predicted, he lived till after the fall of the city of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the Jewish nation, and the establishment of Chris¬ tianity as the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth. Before he passed away Christian churches had multi¬ plied, especially along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Sufficient time had then elapsed for the introduc¬ tion of certain false doctrines among them, owing to the prevalence of philosophical theories which some people mistakenly tried to combine with Christianity. Thus arose what is called the Gnostic heresy, in view of which the apostle wrote that part of his gospel, commonly known as its proem, of which my text is a portion.

The Gnostics were a set of people who claimed su¬ perior knowledge; and, according to their teaching, the material universe was not created by God, but by a subordinate being who was one of a long series of emanations from God, to whom they gave the name of aeons. They said that God was too holy and too spir¬ itual in His nature to have created a universe which contains evil elements; and so they held that this universe, including humanity, was made by the lowest of that series of emanations, the aeon whom they called the logos. Another was called by a Greek name whose meaning is life, and another by a name whose meaning is light; and the whole series, taken together, was called the pleroma, which means the fulness of the emanations proceeding from God. Each of them was supposed to be a spiritual being and to have a certain measure of creative ability.

There is no word in our language which exactly corresponds to the Greek word logos. It cannot be exactly translated into English. Indeed, like some of our own words, it has various meanings. Thought, reason, speech, expression, power, energy,—each of those terms corresponds to some aspect or phase of its meaning; but we have no single term or phrase with precisely the same meaning that the word logos conveyed. Our English words logic and logical are derived from it, and the expression “ logical cause ” comes pretty near to the meaning which the Gnostics probably gave to it when they used it as the name of the imaginary aeon who, according to their philosophy, created the world.

They furthermore taught that, to deliver mankind from the element of evil which the logos had put into them, another aeon, higher in the series, had come to this world, and had been manifested to mankind as the Lord Jesus Christ; and, inasmuch as all flesh was sup¬ posed to be evil, they said that Jesus, instead of having a material body, had only the semblance of such a body with which to appear among men, and that he only apparently lived a human life and only apparently died on the cross.

In view of that fantastic theory, St. John wrote the proem of the wonderful gospel in which he has re¬ corded the life and teachings of Christ. And his mean¬ ing would be somewhat clearer if, instead of saying, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the translators of the passage had rendered it in this way: “ In the be¬ ginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God ”; for logos is the term which he actually used, and, instead of meaning “ word ” in our sense of the expression, it rather means the creative cause.

In this proem, the apostle emphasizes the real truth of Christianity in opposition to the nonsensical theory of the Gnostics. With a few vigorous sentences he brushes away the whole series of imaginary icons be¬ tween God and mankind, together with the Gnostic theory as to the nature of Christ; and, referring the creation of all things directly to God, he declares that Jesus Christ was human not only in appearance but also in fact, that He had a body of flesh, and that in Him was incarnated the actual pleroma, the real fulness of divine qualities, to which spiritual life and light belong. He says that the logos which created the world, instead of being a remote emanation from God, whose influence was to be counteracted by Christ, was with God in the beginning, and was nothing but God’s own activity—God’s thought, God’s energy, God’s reason and wisdom and power and love —which is the same as saying that it was God Him¬ self. And, furthermore, he says that Christ, instead of being only an emanation from God, masquerading in the semblance of a real human being, was an actual human incarnation of all of the divine attributes by which the world was created—that in Him was light, and in Him was life, and in Him was a full revelation of God.

That is not saying that Jesus was God. It is saying that God was in Jesus, fully manifesting the divine at¬ tributes by which, in the beginning, He created the world. The apostle does not say that in the beginning there were two persons, each of whom was God, and that one of them, called the logos, became incarnate in Christ. He simply uses the word logos as a name for God’s attributes, which he identifies with God Himself, as when he elsewhere says that God is love; and then he says that those attributes in their glorious totality were embodied and revealed in Christ; as St. Paul also teaches in his epistle to the Colossians, where he says that “ in him dwelleth all the fulness ( pleroma ) of the Godhead bodily.”

That is the unspeakably glorious truth which we cele¬ brate on Christmas day—the truth that when Jesus Christ was born there came into this world a human being in whom God so incarnated His own divine at¬ tributes that He represents God to us, and is a perfect revelation of God’s character and desires and inten¬ tions concerning us.

If you ask for an explanation of it—as to the method by which God was incarnate in Christ, or as to the exact nature of the relation between them—you ask for the explanation of an insoluble mystery. As the apostle declares, “ Great is the mystery of godliness; he who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, be¬ lieved on in the world, received up in glory.” Jesus Himself said, “ No one knoweth the Son but the Father ; neither knoweth any one the Father save the Son and he to whom the Son will reveal Him.” We know the Father through Jesus Christ; but God only knows just how He so dwelt in Jesus Christ as to make that revelation possible. We have the wonderful Bib¬ lical story of the birth and the life and the resurrection of Christ. From beginning to end it is exceptional, marvelous, incomprehensible by our human intelligence. But that is no reason for rejecting or doubting it. A fact does not depend on our knowledge concerning it, neither is it invalidated by our ignorance concerning it. We may believe it and utilize it without understanding it. And it is a glorious fact that, in a way which at present is beyond our comprehension, God so dwelt in Jesus Christ as to reveal Himself to us, and finally to reconcile the whole family of mankind to Himself.

Never was there another such glorious revelation. There have been other manifestations of the divine nature and attributes, but none to compare with that which is given in Christ.

God is revealed to some extent through what we call the laws and the forces of Nature and the results which they produce for the good of mankind. As the Scrip¬ ture declares, “ The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead ”; and, again, “ In times past He suffered all nations to walk in their own ways; nevertheless He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” All of our material blessings are owing to the creative power and goodness of God, and are to some extent manifesta¬ tions thereof. We should take them as such; and when we eat our daily bread it should be with a thankful realization of the truth that

24 ,

“ Back of the loaf is the snowy flour,

And hack of the flour the mill,

And hack of the mill are the wheat and the shower,

And the sun and the Father's will.”

Ah, yes, back of all of our material blessings, and back of Nature itself, is the creative energy of God— His providence, His wisdom, His power, His love. The divine logos, which was with Him in the begin¬ ning, is the cause of all created things, and through His visible works we get some intimation of His nature and character; still further intimations of which have been given to us through godly men who spoke as His Holy Spirit informed and directed them. At sundry times and in divers manners He had so spoken to the world before the advent of Christ.

But all such revelations were very faint and imper¬ fect, compared with that which He has given to us through His Son Jesus Christ. They were as candle¬ light to sunlight, in comparison with the gospel. In Jesus Christ there was so perfect an expression of God’s nature and character that He could truthfully say, “ He who hath seen me hath seen the Father; I am in the Father and the Father in me; I and my Father are one.” In Him the divine logos was so completely embodied that he identified Himself with it as God’s representative, saying, “ I came down from heaven ”; “ Before Abraham was, I am ”; “ I am the light of the world ”; “l am the bread of life ”; “ I am the resur¬ rection and the life ”; “ As the Father hath life in Him¬ self, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Him¬ self ”; and “ All men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.” No other human being would ever have been justified in using such language;

but Jesus Christ was fully justified, because of the great truth which is set forth in my text.

Of course, we cannot understand it; the mystery is too great for us. But an illustration may help us to grasp its significance.

Astronomers tell us that the sun is surrounded by a luminous envelope, consisting of certain rarefied sub¬ stances which are being continually generated by it. That envelope is called the photosphere. It proceeds from the sun, and is really a part of the sun, and with¬ out it the sun would be invisible. It is from the photo¬ sphere that we derive both the light and the heat; so that to us it is practically a revelation of the sun, or the sun in the process of revealing itself.

Suppose that a portion of the photosphere should be sent to this world, and here be formed into a glorious orb for our benefit. What a difference there would be between such a representative of the heavenly lumi¬ nary and even the best of those light-giving and heatgiving agencies which have hitherto been given to us! They are all indirectly derived from the sun; but the photospheric orb might say, I am the light and the heat of the sun; he that hath seen me hath seen the sun.

Even so in Jesus Christ there was such a perfect in¬ carnation of God’s nature and character that He could truthfully use such language as that which I have quoted. In Him “ the sun of righteousness ” is clearly revealed to us: “ For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

That is what the whole human race was waiting for. It had believed in God, in some fashion, for thousands of years; but it knew not whether to think of Him as one or as many, as good or as evil, as worthy to be trusted or only to be feared; and deep down in the hearts of men there was an ineradicable yearning for a trustworthy answer to the great questions which nat¬ ural religion was asking. “ Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! that I might come even to His seat! ” said the suffering patriarch; and in that saying he gave voice to the desire of all nations—a desire which is satisfactorily answered in Christ. Christ is God’s answer to that longing of humanity.

Well might the angels rejoice at His advent; well might the wise men bring their gifts to His cradle; and well may all people unite in His praise. With His ad¬ vent a new era began in this world. As when the sun arises above the horizon, the light thereof increases and spreads wider and wider as it mounts to the zenith, so, ever since the Saviour’s advent, His gospel has been steadily extending its influence, carrying spiritual life and light to the minds and souls of mankind. Grace and truth have come by Him, and of His fulness have we all received. To Him we are indebted for our knowledge of God’s fatherhood and of universal human brotherhood. To Him we owe our faith in a blessed immortality. To Him we look up as our model of perfectness, and from Him come the principles of our civilization. Let us, then, heartily rejoice in His ad¬ vent, and commemorate it not only with Christmas observances but with consecrated Christian lives.

In mediaeval times, when a church bell was being moulded, it was customary for the people to cast some of their golden and silver ornaments into the mass of molten metal, in order to make it ring more sweetly. And, to them at least, it must have rung more sweetly than it otherwise would; because, whenever they heard its tones, it appealed not only to their hearing but to their memories and their affections and their conscious¬ ness of self-sacrifice in the service of Christ. Every ornament they had cast into it made it sound the more sweetly. The more richly they had given to it, the more sweetly it gave back to them.

Would you also have the Christmas bells sound more and more sweetly as long as you live? Then mingle with your rejoicings over the advent of Christ some self-sacrifice for Him, some evidence of consecration to Him, that you may have the precious consciousness of contributing something to make known His way upon the earth, His saving health among all nations. Freely every one of us has received of His fulness; freely let us give to Him such gifts as He desires of us, and thereby assist Him to hasten the day when He shall have drawn the whole family of mankind to Himself and, as the result of His ministry, God shall be all in all.

Ill

THE MIRACLES OE JESUS CHRIST

* The Jews therefore came round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou hold us in suspense? If thou art the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believe not; the works that I do in my Father’s name, these bear witness of me ”— John 10 : 24 , 25 .

I F the New Testament gives us a reliable history of the ministry of Jesus Christ, He did a great many very wonderful things,—which in our translation are sometimes called miracles, sometimes wonders, sometimes signs, and sometimes works,—things which no other human being could do, and which apparently indicated that He either posessed supernatural power or was assisted by some being or beings who did. We are told, for example, not only that He cured all man¬ ner of diseases without any medicine, instantaneously healing the blind and the deaf and the leprous and the paralyzed, but that He even raised the dead to life, quelled a tempest without any visible means, walked upon the waves of the sea, transformed water into wine, fed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes, and, after suffering a horrible death on the cross, returned to life, and arose from the grave, and continued to live in this world for about forty days, at the end of which time He was taken up into heaven. A large part of the four gospels is devoted to an ac¬ count of such miraculous deeds and of the comments which they elicited, nearly a fifth of the entire history having reference to such matters.

And, furthermore, if the record is true, Jesus not only claimed for Himself the power to perform such miracles, but claimed that His performance of them was an evidence of His Messiahship.

At the very outset of His ministry, when the Jewish rulers challenged Him, and demanded a sign of His authority for driving the money-changers out of the temple, His answer was, “ Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” referring thereby to the crowning miracle of His resurrection from the grave. When John the Baptist, in his prison cell, began to have some doubt about Him, and sent messengers to ask Him whether He was really the Messiah, His answer was, “ Go your way and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.” To His disciples He said, on the night of the Last Supper, “ Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake.” And of those who had rejected Him He said, “ If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father ” : which agrees with what He said to His questioners on the occasion to which my text refers. “ If thou art the Christ,” said they, “ tell us plainly ”; to which He answered, “ I told you, and ye believe not; the works that I do in my Father’s name, these bear witness of me.”

Nothing can be plainer, if the New Testament is true, than that Jesus habitually appealed to His mir¬ acles as an evidence of His Messiahship. Ordinary works, such as any good man might perform, would have proved nothing in regard to it; they would have indicated no peculiar relation to God, and He could not have referred to them in support of His claim.

Not that the mere fact of working miracles would have proved Him to be the Christ, nor that Fie ever claimed that it would. According to the record, He based His claim not simply on the fact of His working miracles, but on the character of His miracles, taken in connection with the character of His teachings. He claimed that His teachings were supported by His miracles, because, taken in conjunction, they showed that He was acting in conjunction with God. The works to which He appealed were those which He did in His father’s name; and He appealed to them because they were such as might reasonably be expected of Him if He taught the truth in regard to God and His own relation to God: and that fact should always be borne in mind when we are considering the credibility of His claim. “ We know that thou art a teacher come from God,” said Nicodemus, “ for no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him ”; and, if the record is reliable, that is exactly what Jesus maintained—that the character of His miracles sup¬ ported His claim to be a teacher sent from God, be¬ cause it was incredible that a false pretender should perform not only such miraculous but such benefi¬ cent works.

And as Jesus Himself appealed to them as signs of His peculiar relation to God, so did His apostles, ac¬ cording to the record. After narrating the miracle of changing water into wine, the apostle John says, “ This beginning of miracles ”—or, as the Revised Version renders it, “ This beginning of his signs ”—“ did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed on him ”; and near the close of His gospel, after telling of the resurrection, he says, “ Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing ye may have life in his name.” And St. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, said to his hearers that Jesus was a man approved of God among them by mighty works and wonders and signs which God had done by Him in their midst, as they themselves also knew.

Even His enemies, we are told, did not deny that He actually performed such works. They acknowledged the fact, but attributed it to the aid of demoniac powers.. They refused to acknowledge that His mir¬ acles were a sign of His Christhood, partly because, as He told them, they were not of His sheep, and would not listen to His voice, nor believe in Him even though He should rise from the dead, and partly because their conception of the Messiah was that of a temporal and military ruler who would free them from the yoke of Rome and exalt them to a leading position among the nations of the world. When they demanded a sign of Him in proof of His Messiahship, that was the kind of Messiahship which they wished Him to prove. Of that He of course would give them no sign, and to them His miracles were no sign that He was really the Mes¬ siah whom the nation was looking for.

But while they, in their hostility to Him, refused to acknowledge that His wonderful works were a sign of His Christhood, many others did acknowledge it; and, as Renan has admitted, skeptical though he was in re¬ gard to the miracles, Christianity would never have made any headway if the early Christians had not be¬ lieved in them. Belief in them was bound up with the faith of the early Church in the divine Sonship of Jesus, and the Church could not have survived with¬ out it.

How is it today ? Ought we also to believe in them ? Can we reasonably believe in them ? In answer to that question, let me say in the first place, that, in order to be logical, we must either believe in them, or reject the whole of the New Testament as unworthy of credence so far as the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are concerned. We cannot logically believe in the rest of the record while refusing to believe in the account of His miracles. I do not say that no one can really believe in the rest of the record, and believe that Jesus was the Christ, while refusing to believe in the account of His miracles; because, as a matter of fact, some people do. I only say that such people are very illog¬ ical. There are a good many illogical people on earth, and some of them belong to the Christian Church. Logically, however, it is as impossible to eliminate and reject the miraculous part of the New Testament with¬ out destroying the credibility of the record as a whole as for Shylock to have taken a pound of flesh from Antonio without taking his blood and destroying his life. For if the writers of the New Testament wrote falsely or erroneously in regard to the miracles, which occupy such a considerable part of the record and are so closely interwoven with its doctrinal teachings, what guaranty have we that the rest of their statements are any more trustworthy? To say that we are warranted in rejecting the miraculous parts of the history while accepting those parts of it which involve no such ele¬ ment is to violate the first principles of legitimate criti¬ cism. No one would apply such a rule of interpretation to any other history or ostensible history. As well say that in the story of Baron Munchausen we ought to accept all but the impossible portions, because all of the rest of it might easily have happened. That will not do. The incredible portions discredit what might otherwise be credible in the story, and we properly regard the whole account as fictitious. On the same principle, if the New Testament account of Christ’s miracles is incredible, constituting, as it does, so large a part of the narrative, it discredits the whole of it. Writers who- would either falsify or be mistaken to so great an extent would be unworthy of any confidence.

It is conceivable, of course, that any author, how¬ ever honest, may make some mistakes, and that even the authors of the New Testament have made some mistakes in regard to the miracles which they attribute to Jesus, but not that they were mistaken with refer¬ ence to all of them or to the majority of them. They knew whether their statements were true in the main, and, if not, nothing which they say is deserving of confidence.

But, supposing that their testimony is utterly dis¬ credited, and that no miracles were performed, what difference does it make, some people say, so far as the great doctrines of the Bible are concerned? Are not those doctrines self-evidencing, and can we not believe in them just as reasonably, regardless of the question as to whether the history is reliable or not ? No; not by any means.

Undoubtedly, some of those doctrines seem to shine by their own light to a person who has been educated from his. childhood to believe in them; but in the be¬ ginning they did not shine by their own light, nor do they even now to people who have not the Christian faith, nor entirely so to those who have. To a great extent they depend for their credibility on the authority and trustworthiness of him who proclaimed them, and our confidence in them must be largely determined by what we believe in regard to him, just as our confidence in the statements of a person on the witness-stand largely depends on what we believe as to his history and character. If we have reason to believe that the witness himself is a reliable person, we accept what he says, even if we ourselves are unable to prove it; whereas, if we doubt his reliability, we doubt what he says unless we have some positive proof of it. His statements may be true in either case, but in the latter case we have not the same faith in them as if we had faith in his personal character. And, even so, if we believe that the doctrines of the New Testament were proclaimed by such a person as it represents Jesus of Nazareth to have been, our faith in them is vastly stronger than if we reject what it says in regard to His history.

Our faith in the great doctrine of God’s Fatherhood, for example, is strengthened immensely if we believe that it was taught by one who was peculiarly the Son of God and who lived in such a relation to Him that He actually did what the New Testament says He did. There may be no direct connection between the doctrine and the miracles, but there is a very direct connection between faith in the doctrine and faith in the miracles: since the miracles, if genuine, while they do not prove the doctrine, do show the reliability of Him who pro¬ claimed it,—for He surely could not have performed them unless God had been with Him.

But still the question recurs, Can we reasonably be¬ lieve in them ? Granting that the record of them is an integral part of the gospel story,—granting that the early Church believed in them, and that without such a belief the Christian religion would have had no exis¬ tence,—must we not, in the light of modern knowl¬ edge, refuse to believe in them and attribute the record to the ignorance of the writers and the credulity of the age in which they lived ? So we are sometimes told in these days. It is said that in the time of Christ not only His disciples but people in general were exceed¬ ingly credulous, knowing nothing about the laws of nature, and that therefore they believed in miracles; whereas our knowledge of nature’s laws makes it ex¬ tremely unreasonable for us to believe in such violations of them. But that assertion involves two unprovable assumptions.