Thinking God's thoughts after him ...

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Chapter I

CAN we know the mind of God? Of course the finite mind cannot fully comprehend the Infinite Mind. But it is generally believed that God has revealed Himself in the moral nature of man, who was created in his image; in the physical universe which, as the Psalmist affirmed, declares his glory; in his dealings with his intelligent creatures, which have enabled men to say, " There is a Divinity which shapes our ends " ; and above all in the Revelation which we call preeminently and in harmony with its own claims, " the Word of God "; and it is believed that He has revealed Himself sufficiently to meet all the practical purposes of this life, and to instruct and prepare men for the life to come. The great Teacher said, " This is life eternal to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Man's highest ambition and chief glory should be, as far as possible, to know the mind of God, and to think his thoughts after Him. All other knowledge is unsatisfying and unimportant in comparison with this.

Man's tendency is to philosophize about what is revealed, and to speculate beyond what is revealed, and hence we have changing and contradictory views of religious truth, a;id idle conjectures, which are born of human ignorance, and have only a human basis of authority. A safe and incontrovertible canon of interpretation is this: "The obvious meaning of the Word of God is the Word of God," as binding in the twentieth century as in the second. To affirm that Christianity has not a definite historical quantity is to repudiate it altogether.

It would seem that with so many sources of knowledge there should be a satisfying degree of fullness and a reasonable degree of unanimity. The truth of God does not change, and is always made known as the truth of God to the willing and obedient spirit. " He that willeth to do his will shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,"

The truth of God is unaffected by divergent interpretations, or by changing climes or centuries. Some people are led astray, it is to be feared, by the specious plea that truth must be expressed in

CERTAINTY OF FAITH ii

terms of modern thought, which often covers a wide departure from or an actual denial of the truth of God. As it is frequently used it covers a multitude of heresies. Some theologians seem to have adopted the famous saying of Heraclitus, " All things are in a state of flux, and nothing abides." The faith of yesterday is discarded and outgrown to-day by reason of supposed new light. The old and the tested must give place to the ever-changing modern, and the more modern the modern is the more acceptable it sometimes seems to be, until a recent English writer, himself a modernist, is constrained to declare that " Modern lives of Christ have become too modern." In like manner it may be said that some modern interpretations of the Bible and revealed religion are too modern. If the modern thought of to-day is to give way to the more modern thought of to-morrow, the time will soon come, if it has not come already in some quarters, when Christ will not be able to recognize his own Gospel, and the note of finality and universality which rings out clearly and unmistakably in the great commission, will be silenced forever. Another English writer declares that American Christianity is now divided into two schools. " The one is orthodox. . . . The other school seems to have sacrificed almost everything which makes Christianity distinct from a temporary philosophy. Its members have the bad habit of preaching eugenics in the place of the Gospel. They appear to be afraid of the great Epistles and the nobler passages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms which would suggest that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity which can make it an absolute and universal faith. They have become afraid of the historian and the natural scientist. Unless they are careful they will prove to have sold the pass to the enemy from an unmanly and needless timidity." Professor Josiah Royce in '' The Problem of Christianity " frankly says, " What views or types of views are, or ought to be, characteristic of the modern man, hardly any of us will wholly agree in defining. And if there is any typical modern man, he would seem, at first sight, to be a creature of a day. To-morrow some other sort of modern man must take his place. And of the modern man of a future century we now cannot even know the race, much less. It would seem, the religious creed."

We are hearing much In these days about *' a progressive revelation," a phrase which probably does not always mean the same thing on different lips. No one doubts that God, the God of nations and of our lives, Is constantly revealing Himself in human history and in personal experience to those who are wise enough to detect his presence and his guiding purpose. But when the technical term, Revelation, is employed, as it constantly is, to denote the plan of salvation unfolded in the Bible In the prophetic history of God's ancient people and in the life, teachings, death, resurrection and completed mission of his only begotten Son, our Lord, it can be called progressive only in the sense of an advancing conquest to itself of the faith of men and nations, but not in the sense of an Increase or modification of its original content and substance. Christ commanded that his Gospel, the Gospel which He committed to his disciples, should be preached in all the world to every creature. The apostle Paul expressed his astonishment that men should for a moment be tempted to surrender that Gospel for another, which was '' not another," and pronounced an anathema upon those who yielded to the temptation. Christ's Gospel could not be duplicated or outgrown. For it there was no possible substitute, and never would be.

President Arthur T. Hadley, speaking of " some Influences In modern philosophic thought," says truly enough, " Fashions in thinking have changed nearly as fast as fashions in dress. System has succeeded system with bewildering frequency. The idol of to-day is the antiquarian curiosity of to-morrow." But when he or others imply that similar changes are to be expected and are actually taking place, not only in the fashion of religious thinking, but in the substance of revealed truth, so that they constitute a progressive revelation, the implications are utterly without warrant. President Hadley says, " The poet of to-day, like the Hebrew poets of old, is essentially a prophet, the bearer of a progressive revelation; one of a historical chain of seers, feeling after God, if haply they may find Him, and each in his own way bringing men a little nearer to the truth." There seems to be ample evidence that the inspired Psalmist not only felt after God, but that he actually found Him, and that his inspiration was of a unique kind, altogether different from that of Kipling and Walt Whitman, more authoritative and commanding than theirs, a better and truer and more trustworthy revealer of God and duty and the spiritual nature of man, and not only not surpassed by, but not to be classed with, the progressive inspiration of the latest modern poets.

As an illustration of the continued progress in the fashion and substance of poetic religious thinking. President Hadley makes the following comparison. " No longer do we content ourselves with saying, as Tennyson did.

" Our wills are ours, we know not how, 5

Our wills are ours to make them thine."

We deem it a truer, as well as a nobler conception of life, to say with the more modern poet,

" East and west and north, wherever the battle grew, Forth to a feast we fared, the work of the will to do. Pillar of cloud by day, by night a pillar of fire, Sons of the will, we fought the fight of the will, our sire."

We are prompted to ask, is it true that this is ^' a truer and nobler conception of life," that the enthronement of the human will is indicative of genuine progress? Is not the submission of the human will to the divine will, and its harmonization with the revealed will of God, the method and the secret of the highest manhood? Christ disclosed the supreme motive and inspiration of his perfect life, when He declared, " I came not to do mine own will, but the will of Him that sent me.'' It would seem, then, that the *' progressive revelation " so called, as manifested in recent poetry, carries us not only beyond the teaching of Tennyson and David, but even beyond the wisdom of God as revealed in the teaching of Jesus Christ. What the next generation of poets, ^' the bearers of a progressive revelation," will attain unto we can scarcely imagine. We must modestly confess with Professor Royce, *' we now cannot even know the race, much less the religious creed."

But in all seriousness, the truth of God, revealed in his Word, if it is the truth of God, should control and determine modern thought, and not be controlled and modified by it. New thought is not always or necessarily true thought. A change of view is often mistaken for growth and progress. That there is a legitimate growth and progress, the Scriptures plainly avow. But " growth in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ " cannot be understood as meaning the rejection of revealed truth or a modification of it, but evidently a deeper apprehension and a richer experience of it, not a growth out of, but a growth in and into, that is the normal and expected development of the believer in Christ by the use of the means which He has provided from the beginning, for the use of the earliest disciples and also of the latest. In his able volume, " The Christian View of God and the World" (p. 25), Dr. James Orr says, *' Bit by bit, as the ages go on, we see more clearly the essential lineaments of the truth as it is in Jesus; we learn to disengage the genuine truths of Christ's Gospel from human additions and corruptions; we apprehend their bearings and relations with one another, and with new truths, more distinctly; we see them in new points of view, develop and apply them in new ways. All this Is true, and it is needful to remember it, lest to temporary points of view, and human theories and formulations, we attribute an authority and completeness which in no way belong to them. But it does not by any means follow from this that, therefore, everything in Christianity is fluent, — that it has no fixed starting-points, no definite basal lines, no sure and moveless foundations, no grand determinative positions which control and govern all thought within distinctly Christian limits, — still less that, in the course of Its long history, theology has achieved nothing, or has reached no results which can fairly be regarded as settled." The strangest delusion of our times Is the exaltation of the fickle and Illusive Zeitgeist to the position of supreme arbiter in the realm of revealed truth. Anyone familiar with the progress of religious discussion through the Christian centuries knows that the so-called modern thought Is not so modern, for the most part, after all. Every truth of revelation has been called In question again and again In the long past by the supposed spirit of the time, and over against It has been arrayed the " new thought " which has had Its little day and won a limited following. Discarded error ever and anon Is revived, and poses as newly discovered truth. One of the best preventives against erroneous views of religious truth, Is familiarity with church history.

In a volume which has been recently published, entitled '' Foundations of Christian Belief In Terms of Modern Thought," and containing essays by seven Oxford men, the foundations have been so effectually undermined that the reader is compelled to ask, " If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do? " One of the seven essayists, having repudiated the aur thority of the Scriptures as well as of the Church, declares, " Forms and habits of thought change from age to age, and thus In a limited sense new theologies are required." He is constrained to say, however, " But unless we are to suppose the Christian thinkers of the past to have done their work wholly amiss, we ought not to expect to find the new theologies turning out to be radically at variance with the old. Human nature, after all, varies but little from age to age, and Jesus Christ Is the same yesterday, to-day and forever." He then strangely adds, " He who would teach a new truth or reject an old, . . . must face the prima facie likelihood that his own prophecy may turn out false." It would be a thought distressing beyond expression that the ultimate truth, the saving truth of God, the wisdom that is able to make wise unto salvation and eternal life, has not been apprehended by the fathers, and is not at the present time positively attainable, and that we are consigned to the deplorable condition of those who are " ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

The essential truths of Christianity are facts, not fancies or theories. The fundamentals though often assailed, are among the things which *' cannot be shaken." Men may differ as to nonessentials, but be solid as to the fundamentals. The mythical theory of interpretation has received little favor at the judgment-bar of enlightened human reason. There is a wonderful harmony and consistency between the character and the words and the deeds of Christ. Accept the fact of his supernatural origin and nature, and all else is supernaturally natural; it is just what would be expected, and occasions no surprise. The person of Christ stands out in clear outline like the summit of some lofty mountain against a cloudless sky, not cold and snow-capped, but warm, glowing and glorified in the light of the setting sun; rather He is like the sun itself, shedding his light upon the loftiest summits of human thought and into the deepest valleys of human experience. He is the great outstanding miracle of Christianity. He still lives in the lives and the institutions of men and nations. He was taken up out of the sight of his followers, but his Influence yet survives, Increasing from century to century. Every new generation In the progress of the Christian centuries Is adding Its additional weight to the Increasing volume of Christian evidences. The highest civilization shows abundant fruits of Christ's presence and Influence In the world. As another has said, " Christ has changed the map of the world." As you cannot classify Him, neither can you annihilate Him. The doubter and denier, not the believer. Is compelled to attempt the task of justifying himself In the eyes of men. Dr. Jesse B. Thomas has said, *' If Christians believe the Bible superhuman, and accept the revelation it makes of things beyond proof on its testimony, they show themselves neither unscientific nor unphllosophic." " Probability is the guide of life," as Bishop Butler long ago wisely said. Christianity, at first believed on reasonable evidence to be of divine authority, offers to demonstrate that authority In personal experience to him who will " do the will of God." Its eternal challenge is " come and see." Probability may be so convincing, when acted upon, as to become absolute certainty. If Christ and Christianity do not furnish a basis for certainty of faith, there is nothing trustworthy in human knowledge, history or experience, the history of men and of nations Is nothing but a dream, and the world Itself a great unreality.

There may be honest doubt In a mind willing to be convinced and honestly seeking after truth, but not yet wholly persuaded of Its validity. Such a mind Is never kept waiting long. Christ will come to It as to Thomas, and lead It from a state of painful uncertainty to a full confession and an assured peace. But It Is easy for a man to deceive himself. He may think he Is simply in doubt and In a state of uncertainty, when he Is already rooted and grounded In error. " The heart Is deceitful above all things." A Scotchman is reported to have said, " he was willing to be convinced, but he should like to see the man who could convince him." A man's so-called doubts may be little less than bald and obstinate denials. Dr. Van Dyke speaks of men " whose doubts were more dogmatic than dogmas." Prof. Shaller Mathews says, " There is no dogmatism so Intolerant as that of unbelief." To deny a truth Is to affirm Its opposite. A creed of negations, If It was possible, would be as useless as It would be morally indefensible. Faith, and faith alone, gives strength of character and of purpose.

The will to believe is a sacred right, and is as indicative of Intellectual freedom as the will to deny. In revealed religion, as well as in accepted science and accredited history, there are certain well established and unalterable facts, which constitute a creed. To hold such a creed is no sacrifice or infringement of personal liberty or intellectual freedom. Liberty is not lawlessness and unrestrained license. True freedom is not freedom to do wrong or to believe a falsehood. Civil liberty is liberty regulated by law. Intellectual liberty is liberty regulated by truth. If revealed truth, clearly enunciated and easily comprehended, does not hold men, their freedom is not the freedom that truth imparts. Openness of mind does not imply emptiness of mind, or a mind that contains no ascertained beliefs, and no deposit of sacred and verifiable truth. Unsettledness of conviction is no evidence of superior intellectuality. Great thinkers have been great believers from the days of Paul and Augustine to Jonathan Edwards, and from Jonathan Edwards until now, who have believed that God, in his infinite wisdom and grace, has given to the world a permanent and authoritative standard of faith, and have been unaffected by the ever changing, anti-evangelical Zeitgeist, which has been much more formidable and influential in other days than it is at the present time. Doubt is now, as Dr. Jesse B. Thomas has said, one manifestation of

" the universal restlessness of our time which protests against the intrusion of authority in any sphere. In politics, in Industrial life, In social ethics, in domestic relations, in fashion of dress, in amusement, in journalism. In literature, in personal behavior, there is a defiant and almost deafening outcry against the tyranny of ' tradition,' of conventionality, of custom, of fixity in law or institution. Every existing institution becomes the subject of criticism and of proposed readjustment to fit the needs of the Zeitgeist. It might well be expected, then, that a new fashion In religion would be also proposed." It Is claiming too much to assert that all present theological dissent is the result of accurate scholarship or of unusual mental acumen and a careful rewelghing of the grounds of religious belief. Many Biblical scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, of recognized standing, find the legitimate scholarship of the present time strongly confirmatory of faith in the Bible as the Word of God. Fresh attacks always call forth fresh and stronger defenses. To possess no fixed, settled convictions, Instead of being commendable and matter of boasting, may be proof of culpable neglect or Intellectual Impotence. Certainty of belief produces the truest spiritual liberty as well as abiding peace of mind. The possession of truth Is Infinitely better than the fruitless and endless search after truth.

Moreover, Instead of vainly exploring the unknown and the unknowable, and Indulging In unverlfiable and useless speculations, men should rejoice that so much has been made known, and hold fast to the truth which has been plainly revealed. An aged minister once said to my youthful mind, perplexed by the mysteries of life and death, of God and the future, as we came away from a funeral-service In which we both had participated, " Let us not be troubled about the unknown, which a wise God has not seen fit to reveal; let us rather thank God that we know so much."

Christ's mission was not a failure. He said, " I speak the things which I have seen with my Father," and declared Himself to be " the way and the truth and the life." He was " God manifest In the flesh." He conditioned disclpleship, spiritual freedom, salvation, eternal life upon the knowledge of his Word and continuance therein. He Is still " the light that llghteth every man that Cometh Into the world." His light can never be dimmed or superseded. All human lights pale before It. He Is the. central sun In the moral and spiritual heavens. To be his disciples and learn of Him Is to walk In the light, which can never lose its illuminating and life-giving power, and is destined to dispel the darkness of doubt and ignorance and sin, which now beclouds human minds. Certainty of faith can be found in Jesus Christ, and is ever authenticating itself in Christian experience.

The fathers had great strength of faith and clearness of faith, because they had deep and thorough experiences. It is not only true, as Goethe says, that '' What you have inherited from your fathers, you must earn for yourself before you can call it yours," but it is also true that whatever of religious faith you have inherited from your fathers you must experience for yourself before you can truly call it yours. Experience not only holds the title deed of faith, but it Is its test and its certain verification. " Now we believe," said the Samaritan villagers, *' not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world."

Robertson Smith makes this confession, " If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word o'f God and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant Church, because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because In the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man In Christ

Jesus, and declaring to us In Him his will for our salvation, and this record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul."

An experimental religion Is the only religion that has value, and the only religion that gives promise of permanence. No man Is qualified to judge Christian truth, or to determine Its reality and genuineness, unless he has seen Its fruits and felt Its power In his own soul. His spiritual sensibilities must be first quickened and his spiritual eye opened. " These things are spiritually discerned." A faith which Is deeply rooted In personal experience Is not likely to weaken or change or perish. Modern doubt and Infidelity are often born of a lack of experience or of a religion of form and ceremony, which lays the supreme emphasis upon some outward act or rite, and Ignores the Inward life. What Is needed In our time and In all times to preserve our Christianity as a divine a,nd authoritative religion for the world Is not a new Interpretation or a new philosophy of religion or a progressive revelation (If such a thing were possible and within the power of man to accomplish), but a deeper and richer experience of the truth as It Is In Jesus, men who believe because they have tasted and tested, and have felt their souls responding penitently, humbly, affectionately and approvingly to the great unchanging verities of revealed truth. We are not straitened in God or In his truth, which is able to save to the utmost in this and every generation, but we are straitened in ourselves.

The deeper experience will give certainty to faith in the pulpit and in the pew. Ministers will then be Indeed ambassadors for Christ, bearing a certain, distinct message. They will " preach the Word," not human opinion which changes from year to year, and possibly from week to week, but God's truth, divine, authoritative, unalterable, and divinely adapted to the spiritual needs of men. Whether the hearers believe what the preacher preaches or not, they must believe that he believes It, and that he believes it to be God's message entrusted to him. Otherwise the influence of his preaching will be nil, and worse than nil. A minister without definite faith, born of a vital Christian experience and certified as to its divine character, would be out of place in a Christian pulpit. He has mistaken his calling. President Henry Churchill King does not hesitate to say, " The moral or spiritual prophet, who speaks, as out of his own insight, what he has only caught up from another. Is himself a fraud, and cannot help another Into reality of life."

A minister of Christ cannot know everything. There are vast realms of knowledge beyond his ken. But there are some things which he must know, and know for a certainty, If he would be a faithful steward of the grace of God. The Christian pulpit stands for a distinct something in all lands and In all ages. It Is founded upon a definite message, which has created it and justifies its existence. It is to give no uncertain sound, but an authentic proclamation of prescribed truth. It is not a searcher after truth or a discoverer of new truth, but a possessor and proclaimer of accepted truth. It Is not an Interrogation point, or a weather-cock veering with the changing wind. Its finger is the magnetized needle, pointing invariably and surely to the star in the heavens. The true minister Is to be a safe leader who knows the way through the wilderness of conflicting opinions, and Is able to guide others In it, a competent instructor who has himself been instructed and is not carried about by every wind of doctrine, and a believer whose faith rests securely upon the solid rock of revealed and experienced truth, and who can say with humble assurance, " I know whom I have believed."

Professor William Adams Brown of Union Theological Seminary says, " The world has a right to ask of the Christian minister that he knows what he believes and why he believes it. . . . It has a right to ask of the man who speaks to it of God's continuing power to renew and to transform, that his own life should evidence the truth of his words," in others words, that the truth preached should be illustrated and confirmed in the experience of every preacher.

A church that would save the world from the dominion and penalty of sin, and introduce it into the fellowship and peace of God, that would reform and purify society in all its diseased conditions and bring in the kingdom of Heaven, must know how to sing in the future as the church has loved to sing in the victorious past, that old eighteenth century hymn of unshaken confidence,

" How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in his excellent Word."

If there is no certainty of faith, that hymn by George Keith must be discarded and expunged from our hymn books, as a past superstition, and its echoes only come down to us from a happier time. " Interpreted in terms of modern doubt " (a slight change in words, but possessing the old meaning as often used) , it would read,

You have no foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Laid up for your faith in his uncertain Word.

But we are assured that the faith of Christ's true followers is much more precious to Him than gold that perisheth, that the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord knoweth them that are his, and that the faith once delivered to the saints, unchanged and regnant, will continue to triumph over all error and denial, as well as over all the changing theories of so-called progressive thought. A faith that has wrought such marvelous transformations in human character and life, and has produced such conspicuous results in moral sentiment, in legislation and government, in social customs and civilization itself, has proved its divine origin, and established its claim to be worthy of all acceptation. It needs not to be exchanged, and cannot be improved upon. It is to continue to be supreme in the realm of moral and religious thought. As unfolded at the beginning, having upon it the stamp of Heaven's mint, it is to dominate all thinking, however modern, and to pass current to the end of the world. Like its divine Author it is the same yesterday, to-day and forever.

Principal Fairbairn says, " You will find many a beautiful proverb in Seneca; you will get many a fine ethical principle in Plato; you will find in Stoicism some of the most exalted precepts that human ethics have ever known. But mark you one thing, you will never discover that these elevated the common life of man, . . . made the bad good or the Impure holy. Where they failed, Christ succeeded with splendid, glorious success. He made out of the very outcasts men that became saints of God." The late Dr. James Orr, to quote again from his able work on " The Christian View of God and the World," uses these significant words: ''I do not believe that the Christian view Is obsolete; that It Is doomed to go down like a faded constellation In the west of the sky of humanity. I do not believe that In order to preserve It, one single truth we have been accustomed to see shining in that constellation, will require to be withdrawn. The world needs them all, and will one day acknowledge it. It is not with a sense of failure, therefore, but with a sense of triumph, that I see the progress of the battle between faith and unbelief. I have no fear that the conflict will issue in defeat. Like the ark above the waters, Christ's religion will ride in safety the waves of present-day unbelief, as it has ridden the waves of unbelief in days gone by, bearing in It the hopes of the future of humanity."