A religion which has nothing to give to the world except what it takes out of the world, has nothing to give. It is bankrupt. At the heart of Christianity is the view that God is Creator and man is creature. You might say that this principle is taken out of the world if you make the term 'world' comprehensive enough. But this is not the sole truth which Christianity has to give. There is a more marvelous truth, that is the truth about the God-Man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. This truth Christianity proclaims as a 'mystery.' In a way it takes us out of the world, but it is so marvelous and unexpected a truth that if it had not actually happened, one could never have gathered it from the world. This is the 'stumbling block,' the 'rock of offense' with which Christianity begins. It has little to do with theories about the person of Christ, which are endless. It is not presented as something to be explained, but as a 'mystery.' It has much more to do with the doctrine of grace than with the doctrine of Christ; with the doctrine of vocation, rather than with the selection of moral choices. If the moral life is a life practiced by a 'man in Christ,' then, as Dr. Williams says,

There is, I suggest, a Christian answer to the moral problem, not in the form of a solution to every particular moral choice, but in the form of a deeper understanding of the moral life itself. This answer depends upon the theological insight that the God we serve is both Creator and Redeemer. The Christian answer lies in a conception which emerged in the Protestant Reformation, but which has yet to be appreciated in its full meaning: the conception of life as vocation.¹

With regard to vocation, the same writer sets it out later:

The divine call to us men, and our response to it means that we are [39] responsible for doing here and now in the situation in which we stand whatever will serve the work of God who is seeking to bring all life to fulfilment in that universal community of love which is the real good of every creature.²

As we have seen, grace has to do not only with favor; it has to do also with power, new power to lead the new life. We have perhaps become accustomed to thinking that to be a Christian makes little or no difference: or we have put the difference at the wrong place, and listed things like not playing cards, not going to the theatre or the 'movies,' not smoking or drinking, etc. Such things are still being listed as the characteristic marks of the Christian by certain ultra-evangelical preachers. But this negative way has little to do with the question. It is clouding the true issue and substituting an escapism for the activity of the Christian positive ethic. We certainly need something more positive to point the difference between the Christian and non-Christian life. Dr. Norman Pittinger gives us this in his book, Christ in the Haunted Wood, and summing up after the chapter on 'Life in Christ,' he says "At least we may have shown that to be a Christian means to be different from even the best of non-Christians."³ Unless Christianity brings about such a result in the life of all Christians, lay and cleric, it has failed. Unless it is more than Christian belief, but Christian character as well, it will cease to be the dynamic thing it has been and ought to be. The church lives by its character, the characters of its individual members, and not merely by its beliefs.

      That the church is the body of Christ in St. Paul's teaching cannot be gainsaid, but is it merely a metaphor or does the phrase refer to a spiritual reality? This question has been argued back and forth till many now assume the expression is a mere metaphor and can be dismissed. But this is too simple. If St. Paul is writing sense and not nonsense, especially about the ethical question, the phrase is something more than a mere metaphor. He assumes that the phrase 'the Body of Christ' means "an incorporation of the believer into Christ which becomes so real that one may properly say that 'we live in Him, and He in us'."⁴ On this point Paul and the Johannine writer are in accord, though the latter never uses the [40] expression the 'Body of Christ.' Obviously it means that the church is now the organ through which the glorified Christ performs His will through suasion and not through force, as He once performed it through His fleshly body, though then it was through the perfection of His own will whereas now it is through the imperfection of human wills.

So, then, Christians are sharers in the very life of God Himself, as this is brought to them in Christ. As sharers in that life, they are new creatures: 'He that hath the Son hath the life.' And the life which they share in Christ is eternal life, 'which was from the beginning' and 'was manifested,' and now is given freely to those who are in the fellowship.⁵

Here, too, is a corrective of the notion, often entertained, about 'Faith.'

Faith in the Christian sense is not believing 'that which is unproven,' although it includes belief in what cannot be demonstrated. It is primarily a giving of the self, an outward reach toward Christ, in which the faithful man responds with his entire personality--mind, will, emotion, soul, and body--to the action of God in Christ. Total commitment to Christ, surrender of life to Him, is the meaning of faith in the Christian sense.⁶

Here, too, is a definition of grace, not just favor but energizing,

But it can also mean both the forgiveness of God for our imperfection and weakness and unworthiness, and the dynamic energizing of God within us by virtue of which we are enabled to achieve the high calling which is ours in Christ. So, the Christian is one who, as he lives by faith within the fellowship of the church, is both aware of the forgiveness of God and strengthened by the power of God. 'Justified by faith' he is then 'sanctified in the Holy Spirit.' His relationship with God is made 'right' as he surrenders himself, without reservation, to the 'love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Thus, having become by that very fact a member of Christ, a branch in the Vine, he is day-by-day forgiven his sin and saved from himself, if he keeps constantly 'turned' to Christ and (as the old writers used to say) 'hangs on Him.' But this leads to a growth in grace, by which the church has meant a continued deepening and strengthening of his life in Christ, so that he can cry, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'⁷ [41]

I have chosen this passage because it states so well the real doctrine of grace along the lines of what Schweitzer called Paul's 'Christ mysticism.' It is a mysticism strangely ethical in character unlike so many popular mysticisms born out of our modern pantheism. Simply stated it runs like this. In the days of His flesh, if people wanted to know what God was like, they could say, 'Look at Jesus.' That was an ethical picture of God; for God was love and Jesus expressed love in His whole life--love to His Father and love to His fellow-men. Today if people ask, 'what is Jesus like?' we ought to be able to say, 'look at the church.' Alas for our failure!--both clergy and laity! It was some great Hindu who said, 'When Christians act like Jesus, Jesus Christ will have India at His feet.' Dr. Pittinger puts it as simply as expressing 'charity,' preferring that as a translation of agape. Truly the English word 'love' does not convey the adequate meaning of the Greek word agape, because in English the word 'love' may mean anything from 'canoodling up a back street' to the most heroic act of self-sacrifice. Certainly 'love' has a more emotional content than agape. It is pictured in I Corinthians 13 as something nearer to self-sacrifice. Let me use Dr. Pittinger's description; he is speaking of 'charity' (caritas).

'Charity' as I John uses the word, and as St. Paul in his wonderful hymn in I Cor. 13 describes it, is that overflowing, outgoing, single-hearted concern for others, that caring-interest, which like faith itself involves a total personal action and which is naturally and inevitably diffusive of itself.⁸

      This has been shown in the great saints down the ages, from Polycarp to John Woolman and Wilfred Grenfell. These were men and women who 'lived in Christ,' were 'partakers of Christ.' They needed no code of laws, not even any code of principles, but Christ only. They were committed to Him as Lord and His spirit they obeyed. Christ lives in His saints and the church lives in its saints. But all Christians should be saints. They ought to practice the 'fruit of the Spirit'--"love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."⁹ St. Paul says that 'against such things there is no law,' for the whole law (torah) is summed up in one phrase, 'love thy neighbor as thyself.'¹⁰ Christians become new [42] men and new women, and so society becomes a new society.

Obviously they are ordinary folk, in the sense that they are not, for the most part, particularly gifted or extraordinarily talented people. But the life in Christ takes their talents, whatever they may be, and transforms them in such a miraculous fashion that they become, to greater or less degree, entirely different people.¹¹

Christianity is neither world-denying, nor world-accepting. It is world-transforming and this transforming begins with the Christian individual. To be 'holy' means to be 'whole.' It has reference to 'wholeness'

Christianity does not dehumanize you: it makes you more truly human. It is not the denial of life: it is the abundance of life. You get up with Christ in the morning and He is with you all day. He haunts you and you cannot escape Him. That is true Christian living to be shared by every church member. All the way along there are helps. First there is the Christian community itself. That is a tremendous help: you are not alone. Then there is the Bible which is full of history, examples worth copying, and of great devotional literature. Supreme in this is the Gospel. Added to this there is prayer which is most sincere when no fuss is made about it. Did not our Lord urge us to enter our closets and pray silently? You can pray whilst you are about your work. Finally there are the sacraments, either witnessing to or partaking, especially the Eucharist. As a young man, I was literally saved from atheism and humanism through the sacrament of the Eucharist which in my own church in that city celebrated weekly. When later in another city and university, I had no church of my own, I often witnessed the mass in Roman Catholic Churches or the Eucharist in high Anglican churches. I cannot stress too much my being helped and literally saved from shipwreck through the sacrament of the Eucharist. These are all helps and no Christian need be without them. Do we give time enough or energy enough to fulfilling our Christian task? We know that 'the sons of this world are wiser in their own generation than the sons of light.'¹² The prudence and energy [43] expounded in getting on in the world are terrific. What of Christian prudence and energy, for both are enjoined. We are taught to be 'as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.'¹³ We are not to forget that we are 'as sheep amongst wolves.'¹⁴ In most things the Christian should be different from even the best non-Christian: and in many things he must actually excel the best non-Christian, but this is no denial of being 'in Christ' which Dr. Norman Pittinger aptly describes as "the distinctive tang in Christianity" which "we dare not deny. For if we do, we shall deny the Christian religion itself."¹⁵ Dr. Pittinger refers to Dr. Francis Landley Patton, a former President of Princeton University, as saying 'when you take from anything that which makes it something, what you have left is nothing.' He goes on to say,

It is this point which we have sought to make clear. To be a Christian is to be something. We must not whittle away the 'scandal' of Christian faith, of Christian prayer, nor of Christian life. We must not, on the other hand, add obstacles that are needless and even absurd. But it is of all things most silly to expect that the futility and frustration of modern man's experience can be met and answered by a kind of religion which is in effect nothing but the restatement of his natural and unredeemed prejudices and predilections. Far too much of our Christian preaching and teaching in recent years, has been of this sort. Is it any wonder that we have come to feel that Christianity makes no difference?¹⁶

      While I have quoted Dr. Pittinger because in the main I agree with him, especially in that the first step is to get committed Christian men and women, I yet see the problem of actual Christian ethics as much more complex. It is nothing like so simple in our day as it was in the day of Phillips Brooks who in an address on 'The Christ' could say in a day of complete serenity:

The wonder of the life of Jesus is this . . . . that there is not a single action that you are called upon to do of which you need be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for ten minutes as to what Jesus Christ . . . . would have you to do under those circumstances and with the material upon which you are called to act.¹⁷ [44]

The situation today is more as it was described by Dean Willard Sperry in 'Our Moral Chaos,' an article contributed to Fortune in May 1942 and again quoted by Dr. Williams: "All of us--manufacturers, industrialists, bankers, brokers, hand workers, professors, doctors, ministers--are involved together in the moral muddle and the moral tragedy of our time."¹⁸ This sounds like moral despair, and that is how we might have seen it in 1942, but already we can look back upon it with a different viewpoint. Nevertheless the chaos is there; for it is due to the fact that we can no longer look upon society and social action in the same simple way we did in the nineteenth century. We now know that in most cases the security and comfort we have is possessed at someone else's expense. We are living in a world of plenty and a world of want. In our plenty we may actually waste enough food to feed half a nation in need and in want. Amidst the 'goods' with which ethical purists present us, we hardly know what to choose if we are to do good to our neighbors. Some are better than others and we are not sure that some are not relative evils. Certainly few of the 'goods' are what might be called absolutes. But in the midst of this chaos we do know that to love our neighbor as ourselves is an absolute; providing we know the meaning of 'loving our neighbor as ourselves.' Also we do know that we have got to the heart of the matter when we realize that it is our business to accept life as a vocation--a Christian vocation.

      The Roman Catholics have a standard of appeal in what the church says. It has a pretty complete moral code made chiefly of Aristotelian ethics and Stoic ethics garnished with church tradition and the moral teaching of the Bible. In this the Roman Catholic Church has shown a real genius. The system has the virtues and the faults of all legislated codes, but apart from this, it is a magnificent structure.

      But, magnificent as it is, this system cannot and will not do for the Protestant. It will not do because the Protestant places little or no value on the church. He ought to place more. One of my Disciple forbears said in 1881, "It is as important to obey the bride as to obey the Bridegroom."¹⁹ But the Roman Catholic position will not do because, in the history of God's dealings with His people, [45] He has always raised up prophets who speak a word of judgment on the institution. This is the same thing as saying that we must always be prepared for such a revolution occurring in the church that much of the past is rejected and the present and the future taken into consideration. Tradition is not enough. It may even be misleading. 'The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.'²⁰ Thus the Protestant man has often, without the help of tradition, to face entirely new situations, and he requires a quickened conscience. He faces a more difficult task than the Roman Catholic. But as for the fact that the decisions of the Roman Catholic Church are made by fallible men, or a fallible man, I cannot see how that is to be avoided by any church other than the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church gives to them the sanction of an infallible decree. The Pope, however, is a man and no more than a man, though he may be an extraordinary man. But how can Protestantism have Heavenly decisions except where the extravagant claim is made that they still possess inspired men. But it can have its decisions made by changed men and made in a devotional atmosphere. Then they are on a different level from mere political decisions. There can be such a thing as a consensus fidelium, and it need not be a managed consensus. Such a consensus must be the voice of the church, and if so it must represent the whole church, clergy and laity. Even in Protestantism there is too much reliance on the clergy. But the laity must be included. Further it must be a decision in the spirit of prayer and communion--in worship. It is then that the earthly and the heavenly planes intermingle. Surely Quakerism teaches this lesson to Protestants. The voice of the church is not just a fallible voice: it is intermingled by heavenly tones. Thus as the man who is sensitive to art or music can distinguish the true from the false, so the man or woman sensitive to religion, can know when the church is speaking a 'sure word of God,' and always there is the word of God in Scripture to guide and help the judgment. Above there is the Word Incarnate in the Gospels which becomes a kind of final judgment.

      The Roman Church has something to teach us. We need to purify its teaching; not to deny its value. The chief difficulty is that in [46] abiding by a legal system, we yield ourselves to a fixed static thing; whereas life, especially social life, constantly brings new problems to the front. There constantly appear new 'goods' and new 'evils' to which, reference to the past, i.e. to tradition, is of no avail. Dr. Williams fully recognizes this difficulty while he sees the value of such situations in developing the sense of responsibility. "The call to adjust our human ways to the demands of new good is as truly a part of the Christian vocation as is the call to maintain the abiding values in the orders which sustain and guide us."²¹ It is not even enough to urge having a quick conscience because, "Conscience itself is a social product."²² Can we get any further back than the Summary of the Law--love God and love man? St. Augustine was prepared to put the matter in a looser but perhaps more inclusive way; "Love God and do what you like."²³ In following this rule, you will act as if you knew what responsibility meant, and if this is the rule of both clergy and laity, we are well on the way to John Wesley's doctrine of perfection, which though he preached it, he never claimed that he himself had it. His integrity was applied to himself. [47]

[CTR 39-47]