In the question of the 'priesthood of believers' we are bound to become involved in the Doctrine of Grace. This doctrine has been very much misunderstood down the ages, and largely because it has been regarded as a legal transaction, at least since the day of St. Augustine and Pelagius. Augustine's doctrine of pre-venient and irresistible grace has been regarded as orthodox, and Pelagius' doctrine of religious and moral independence as heresy. As Daniel Day Williams says, "The imposition on experience of particular patterns which define for everyone what it should be like for him to be a Christian, has been a major vice, not only of theology, but of the church's approach to Christian nature."¹ This is the vice which has been prevalent, at least in this doctrine. It was attacked in 1917 by John Oman in his Grace and Personality,² but it still continues. The Christian life is a process in which the continuum of conditions and consequences is not escaped. Within this process God does effect a revolutionary transformation. This book is written from the point of view of the late A. D. Lindsay in his Two Moralities, who somewhere says,

The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain duties which ordinary people neglect. The things that saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all . . . . . 'gracious' conduct is somehow like the work of an artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not choice between presented alternatives, but the creation of something new.³

In these lectures all Christians are called to be saints or artistic procreators, not just the official clergy. [27]

      Grace is the matter of 'what God does' and 'what man does.' It is illustrated by the following story: After the first World War, in the days of the depression, one of the Rowntree family had started Allotment Gardens for the unemployed. When his scheme had been going for some time he was showing a clergyman around the allotments. They came to one, which a year before had been a rubbish tip, and was now a veritable Garden of Eden. The clergyman stopped to admire and said to the workman, "Yes, my man, it's wonderful what you and God can do working together." "Yes," said the working man, "but you ought to have seen what He made of it when He had it on His own!" This is the Doctrine of Grace in a nutshell.

      What is it that God wishes to preserve? Is it persons, or just sycophants, or toadies, or even robots? Surely He is saving us for fellowship (koinonia) and only persons are capable of fellowship. If His operations are marked by the legalistic way and not by love or grace, then we are bound to have only robots or toadies. If He works by irresistible grace, the result will be something like 'human robots.' But God, in creation and redemption, has been 'making a bid' for fellowship, and fellowship is the character of heaven. If He is forced to work by some other way than love (agape), this marks the failure of His purpose of redemption. He has then really become bankrupt. In whatever way He works, He must respect man's moral independence, for so He has created him. Whatever absolute religious dependence we give to Him, it cannot take away our moral independence, or we cease to be persons and become toadies. Almighty and powerful though He be, God is no dictator, but the Divine Lover. What Hosea calls 'loyal in love.' The fact that He in His condescension, has chosen to be in a love relationship with man, makes all the difference to the doctrine of grace. It means the following things:

1. You cannot in a love relationship neatly weigh what is of God and what is of man. You cannot, as Plato said (using a very free translation), 'strike a bargain with God as with some skinflint of a money-lender.'
2. God Himself cannot possess, overcome, or suborn personalities. In so doing He would destroy them.
3. You cannot hang gifts around the necks of persons as you do on statues. The doctrine of grace is based on the fact that God [28] gives, not gifts alone, but gives Himself. J. Russell Lowell refers to this in his 'The Vision of Sir Launfal:'⁴

   Not what we give, but what we share; For the gift without the giver is bare: Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungry neighbour, and Me!

   Only then, even in God's giving, is giving without embarrassment.

4. In a love relationship we have nothing except what we receive, but we receive nothing to profit except we receive it as our own.⁵ This is especially true of the gift of grace from God. God is never trying to 'buy' us with His gifts. The Chinese have a proverb, 'A rich man's gift is his demand.' To take such an attitude towards God is to belittle Him and to destroy our own freedom.
5. In a love relationship there can be no question of merit-making. In a legal system it is always possible to exceed the law and do more than we are required to do. Works of supererogation are always possible as well as 'other snares of the devil.' In a love relationship, as our Lord said, 'When you have done all, say to yourself, "we are unworthy servants; we have only done what is our duty".'⁶
6. A love relationship is one in which 'tit for tat' justice is transcended. Strictly speaking, 'justice' is not a Christian virtue. It is a pagan virtue and too much has been made of it.⁷
7. The legal phraseology of bondage and freedom is also transcended. Freedom becomes loyalty, and loyalty becomes freedom, as Josiah Royce said long ago.⁸ This is wholly true of loyalty to the Ultimate. Many other kinds of loyalty are a form of abject slavery. St. Paul could say, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who [29] lives in me."⁹ Not only St. Paul, but many other Christians have said the same. This is seen best of all in Matheson's famous hymn:

   Make me a captive, Lord, And then I shall be free, Teach me to render up my sword, And I shall conqueror be.

   I think with truer and warmer accents this is put in a hymn by Benjamin Waugh (1839-1908):

   'Tis by Thy loveliness we're won     To home and Thee again, And as we are Thy children true,     We are more truly men. Lord, it is coming to ourselves,     When thus we come to Thee; The bondage of Thy loveliness     Is perfect liberty.

   A hymn from the Middle Ages attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, if rightly translated from the Latin, as in most hymn books I fear it is not, puts the matter well:

   But what to those who find! Ah this,     Nor tongue nor pen can shew; The love of Jesus what it is     None but His lovers know.

   Philosophically speaking, the matter is stated, in a lecture by the late Professor De Burgh of London University. He closed his lecture with the words, "man can only reign in his kingdom by vacating the throne."¹⁰ What is being aimed at by God is that we should finally have "the glorious liberty of the children of God."¹¹ Often, I fear, we would rather aim at being slaves with the slave-mind. But Heaven will be no place for dictatorships and slave peoples--not if Jesus Christ is God. With Him we are not permitted to be sons-in-law. We are elected to be sons, partakers of Christ, possessing the fullness of Christ as He possessed the fullness of God, [30] fellow-heirs with Him. Certainly it is no position of son-in-lawship, and certainly not of that of being puppets pulled by strings. It is a freedom which is only allowed in a love relationship. This is the message of the whole Bible when properly read. The fact that God is Love and acts by Love is the deep mystery which formerly was partly hidden and has been made clear in the coming of Christ. So says St. Paul.

      I wish now to deal with the important question of worldliness and other-worldliness. Dr. Daniel Day Williams writes in his Preface of God's Grace and Man's Hope that "to try and establish the City of Man on anything other than faith in God is to build on quicksand,"¹² and he means this God, based on faith in the revelation in Christ Jesus. He is here attacking other-worldliness, which attack he expands, quoting Amos Wilder's The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry:

The Christian has not made clear for himself the paradox of world denial and abundance of life. He has lodged in an other-worldliness that has seemed, whether to a Nietzsche or a Lawrence, a blasphemy against the natural creation, or in a compromise with life that has lost any creative appeal, and so deserved the apostacy of those searching for reality.¹³

Williams criticizes Nygren's conception of agape, saying, "It sets forth evangelical truth, but in such an extreme form, as to constitute a reductio ad absurdum of this truth."¹⁴ Here he attacks one of the main problems of the great Doctrine of Grace illustrated in Burn's poem Holy Willie's Prayer.

      Williams then says,

The tendency of modern philosophical theology to interpret God's power and man's derived power as dynamically related in the ongoing of life is fundamentally sound, however it may have been oversimplified in the liberal period.¹⁵

The real problem is so to formulate the relationship of God and man as to keep clear the distinction between them and yet not to fall into the disparagement of man.¹⁶

At least man must remain a self-directive creature and as such a self-determined creature. He is not to be controlled by what is [31] outside him, neither by the State nor by God. He rejects any invasion of his self conscious personality by force or compulsion. As far as we are able to grasp matters something in the nature of a democracy is the best political order in which man should live in community. Neither oligarchy, aristocracy, anarchy, nor sheer individualism have much resemblance to the kingdom of God.

A universal community, then, in which each member is more free, more mature, more powerful through what he gives to and receives from every other member, is the best order we can think of. It is the real good. It is the meaning of the Kingdom of God for human experience. The will to this community and the spirit in which we intend it and receive it is love.¹⁷

Professor Williams goes on to point out how the final judgment is made by Christ on what appear to be this-worldly aspects:

According to St. Matthew's Gospel Jesus accepts in the final judgment those who have fed the hungry and clothed the naked. This is no defense of the secular spirit. It is the assertion of the religious meaning of the secular life. As Dean Willard Sperry has said, "Christianity, thus interpreted, becomes not an added entity outside the major tasks of daily life, . . . . . but the sum of all particulars of unselfish and sacrificial service in the day's work, and an experience of actual community of sustaining spirit."¹⁸

At one point in his argument Professor Williams discusses the question of conflict which constantly appears in the field of ethics. He argues neither for Social Darwinianism nor for a Nietzschian view of humanistic society, nor for an Hegelian over-simplification of the problem of evil. He says,

The conclusion of our analysis is that Christian ethics ought to make most careful discrimination as to types of conflict and of harmony, and set forth the conditions under which both conflict and harmony may serve and those under which they may block the growth of mutuality.¹⁹

In other words I take it that there is good and even necessity for both conflict and harmony in a stage of nurture. He claims that "war, for example, is one type of conflict and it seems clear that [32] modern war involves such wholesale destruction that the most one can say is that its outcome may prevent worse evil, not that it serves any positive good."²⁰ This may be said of a 'just' war, but is there any such thing in this modern world? The pacifist will argue that all wars are evil today, and if we substitute 'worthless' for 'evil' the modern scientist is close on following him. In our day it is true that "The service of God in our time is in part a responsible participation in the political order, and in part the creation of an international political order. That is not merely idealism; it is Christian realism."²¹ But some will doubt if war is a Christian means of realizing this realism. The Christian who will have nothing to do with politics is mistaken and missing the boat. He has been deceived by the false Christianity of 'spiritualism' and other-worldliness which really denies the natural creation of God.

      The danger of the Neo-orthodox emphasis, as that of the old orthodoxy, on original sin and on what springs from it, is often leaning towards dualism. The sinfulness of man is a realistic fact, whatever its origin. The danger of this new emphasis is that it tends to place the wrong emphasis on what sin really is. "Redemption is no longer an actual transformation of life; it is primarily sheer forgiveness of sin and the promise of an ultimate reconciliation beyond history."²² It tends to deny our Lord's saying that 'if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.'²³ This is one of the hardest sayings of Jesus we have on record. It certainly speaks of forgiveness here and now and in the world to come. This does not encourage any kind of other-worldliness. It does not teach that Christianity proposes, 'Pie in the sky, when we die.' This is an un-Biblical kind of Christianity and so is any kind which puts all the emphasis in the other world. It was William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, who somewhere said that Christianity is the most materialistic religion in the world. It is not, however, a world-accepting religion, as it is not a world-denying religion. It is a world-transforming religion. Unless the lives of Christians are transforming the world, they are not Christian at all.

      There is of course something in the future set forth in poetic language as philosophical and poetic myth, which normally [33] betokens the 'second coming.' Professor Williams does not deny this aspect. His position on sin includes it. But this means that

Sin is doomed and its power is weakened, but it has not been actually destroyed; salvation has already been bestowed in Christ, but the fulfillment of that salvation awaits Christ's return in glorious power to bring to completion His victory over sin and death and to inaugurate fully and finally the Kingdom of God.²⁴

Professor Williams quotes this in order to support his useful distinction between 'The Reign of Christ' and 'The Kingdom of God.' This, here and now, is the 'Reign of Christ'; the 'Kingdom of God' awaits the 'second coming.' But "the religious life is always something more and deeper than the good life."²⁵ Going on to discuss the question of 'vocation,' Dr. Williams has a passage of great insight, with which I as a sort of Pacifist heartily agree. In a Pacifist article written for the British Fellowship of Reconciliation and rejected, I had written,

To maintain a Pacifist course of action in this world, is too often equivalent to following a course of appeasement, achieving a lesser and more immediate good by creating a greater evil. The peace of Munich in 1938 was a case in point. . . . . . . But not only Christian Pacifists approved it; it was approved by a large proportion of Christians in most churches in Britain, and Thanksgiving Services were held in most churches. . . . . . . There is a sense in which a non-Pacifist Christian can claim that he is acting nearer to the ethics of Jesus in joining the armed forces, and unless Christian Pacifists recognize this they are living in a dream-world.²⁶

No wonder the editor refused it! Dr. Williams says,

The policeman, the public executioner, the machine politician, the manufacturer of atomic bombs are no queer individuals with unique ethical problems. They are Everyman. Our debates over pacifism often obscure the fact that both the supporter of war who kills and the conscientious objector who risks allowing defenseless people to be killed both share the same fundamental dilemma in spite of their different ways of solving it.²⁷

This is the passage with which I heartily agree. The truth of it is dependent on seeing that in this world we are faced with situations [34] one of which is never absolutely good and the other absolutely evil. Often we have to choose between two evils and different judgments are allowable as to which evil is a 'relative good.' There are relative goods which at least are in the social circumstances really evils and relative evils which in the social structure may become good. To obey the Golden Rule 'Do to others as you would that they should do to you' may be an impossible thing for both parties in a concrete situation. Let us suppose such a situation which I myself witnessed during the Second World War. On the Cumbrian coast of England there is a local railroad which skirts the coast. A station was just south of where a river estuary broke the coast line. It was carried over the estuary by a railroad bridge. On the north side of the estuary was a government factory. A train going north entered the station. The factory hooter sounded and a stream of workmen began running to catch the train which was due to start. They were on the line crossing the bridge when the train was signalled by station-master and conductor to leave. Faster ran the men but in vain. Now if the running men had wanted to do to the conductor as they would be done by, they would actually have wished the train to start on time. But if the conductor had wanted to do to the men as he would be done by, he would have kept the train waiting. Both could not have fulfilled the golden rule in this concrete situation. We are so accustomed to look at things in the abstract that we forget this. Of course there are cases in which the golden rule can be fulfilled in the concrete but as Wieman has somewhere said God is the only being who can work perfectly in the concrete as well as in the abstract.

      Finally, as to the origin of sin, I have been reading John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden--described as his masterpiece on the jacket--and came across some Chinese philosophy on the Hebrew story of the 'fall' in Genesis III and IV. In chapter XXIV of the novel there is introduced a discussion on the Hebrew word timshel introduced earlier in the story of the 'fall,' and translated 'thou shalt' in the Authorized Version. This is translated in the A.S.R.V. as 'thou shalt' and 'do thou' as if it is a command that man triumphs over sin and murder. But in the story the old Chinese philosophers say it should be translated 'thou mayest' implying that the negative alternative is possible but not commanded. Man may or may not triumph over sin. Whether he does or not depends [36] partly on his own desire and effort and partly on God's succour. It does not depend wholly on his own effort, nor can it possibly depend wholly on God's succor, though that is important enough. Note that the whole third and fourth chapters of Genesis include generations after Adam and Eve. The arguments about the imago Dei which have been constantly built on it, often are couched as if the imago Dei disappeared from man immediately, in the twinkling of an eye so to speak. But even in the offspring of Cain there is some evidence that it still existed. The sheer 'fall' of Barth into 'total depravity' is too fierce for reality. As Dr. Williams says "a conscientious effort to bring a better order into the world is one of the continuing signs of the image of God in man."²⁸ There is a sense in which Pelagius was right in asserting that man had power of choice to reject sin, and this is part of the 'image of God' in him. That he was, of all creatures, made in the image of God means first that he was a being capable of fellowship with God; second, he had the capacity to choose good and reject evil, and thirdly he had the ability to become a 'son of God.' But all these he had and has by God's grace or God's condescension. Even before the 'fall' man was a creature and God the Creator. In making a being who bore His image, this was God's most dangerous and courageous experiment. If the Bible cuts off human moral free-will, it denies its whole story, for it is the great book in which religious decision is moral decision. No book is so clear in denying magic in ordinances and later in the New Testament in sacraments. The Hebrews and the Christians lived in worlds dominated by magic, rather than by morality. Often the layman has been the guardian of morality down the ages, and if Calvin is right in claiming that humility is the first, second and third requisite of the Christian life, one can see why this has been the case. Usually the layman is more ready to believe in the 'good earth' than the cleric; though he must never forget that he deals also more intimately with the bad earth, and this he must never ignore when he faces the moral issues. But his power is great if he is really committed to Christ and to Christ alone. He does not have to say with Henley:

Such optimism is outmoded. But he does have to say:

That is a different kind of optimism, and no mere fatalism nor humanism. The man who takes Christ as captain of his soul has committed himself to the soundest option in life and is safe on the journey of life. He will never extract all of the Sermon on the Mount into his life. He will never become poverty stricken in life. He will have enough to last the whole of life.

      Karl Barth has proclaimed an amazingly simple definition of what is required of human law in the 'good earth.' He says "All that can be said from the standpoint of divine justification on the question of human law, is summed up in this one statement: 'the church must have freedom to proclaim divine justification'."²⁹ Dr. Williams says

The one principle by which Christianity judges any social order may seem an absurd over-simplification. Probably it does say too little, but it is far from absurd. Justification means making righteous. What Barth says is that where the church is free to proclaim God's righteousness above all human righteousness; where the church can call men to worship the God who is the Judge of every state; and where the church can publicly interpret the demand of righteousness in relation to the life about it; here we have the most fundamental of all freedoms, and the one absolute condition of the better social order.³⁰

If Dr. Williams had lived in my own country (Britain) I think he would have been less dubious of an established church to perform the task of speaking the Word of God to the nation, as it was so nobly performed in the darkest days of the Second World War by Archbishop William Temple. The pie is proved in the eating of it and not in gazing at it from afar. [37]

[CTR 27-37]