“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the certainty of
realities we do not see” (Heb.11:1, R.S.V. and N.E.B.).
The realities we do not see but of which faith gives us an
inner certainty are the existence of an almighty, entirely righteous and loving
God by whose word the world was made, and the power of His Son to save us-and
ultimately to save the world-from the domination of sin. And the things hoped
for of which faith gives us assurance are the coming again of that same Son from
heaven, the ensuing regeneration of the earth, the vindication of the
righteousness and love of God in the hearts of all who have served Him and the
perfecting of their fellowship with Him in the day when He is all in all. Other
things are inextricably involved in these, but these and the implications they
carry with them are the central features of belief and trust which distinguish
the Christian view of life from all others. And wherever they are held in faith
they are expressed through a way of life that is also distinctive.
Because this view of life presents a powerful challenge to the
natural thinking of the human mind it has always been threatened by the inroads
of the wisdom of this world; because this way of life imposes uncomfortable
restrictions on the natural impulses of the human heart it has always been in
danger of corruption from the self-interest and materialism of the world’s way.
In other words, the Christian faith is perpetually under attack – open or
insidious – from the influences of the alien world in which it has its
being.
Present Dangers
I am not going to suggest that the forces of evil, the
influences destructive of faith, are altogether more powerful today than they
have ever been: in some respects I have no doubt they are; in others I am quite
sure they are not (and one of the points I want to bring out later for our
comfort is that the evil forces tending to undermine faith today are in essence
no different from those that faced our brethren and sisters in the first
century). But two things are reasonably certain: the first, that since the
Christian religion became generally established in our western world (whether in
its purity or not need not concern us for the moment) its hold on men’s minds
has never been so weak as it is in this second half of the twentieth century;
and the second, that since the establishment of the Christadelphian community as
a distinctive, living witness to the Truth which is in Jesus that community has
never been surrounded by such powerful influences conducive to its
disintegration as it is now.
What I want to do in this booklet is to identify the more
significant of these influences; to point out some of the dangerous effects they
are already producing among us because of wrong responses to them; and finally
to indicate what I feel to be the positive, constructive, and only saving way of
meeting the challenges that face us.
There is no doubt in my mind that the threat to faith in our
generation comes from two primary sources, and if I were asked to identify these
sources each in a brief phrase I should call them scientic rationalism and
affluent materialism. These two forces are by no means separate and independent
of each other in their influence (as we shall see), and together they combine to
produce a most powerful and insidious threat to our individual and communal
faith. Let us look at them a little more closely, and first at what I have
called scientific rationalism.
The Rationalistic Approach
The rationalistic approach to the interpretation of the
universe is no new thing: theories and explanations of a world without God are
ages old, and even in the nominally Christian society of our western world such
interpretations have had prominent and eloquent exponents since at least the
middle of the seventeenth century. Nor, of course, is scientific thinking and
experimentation a modem thing in itself (though one recognizes readily enough
some significant differences between “modern science” and the science of the
ancient and mediaeval worlds). But what constitutes the particularly powerful
threat to the Christian faith today is the tremendous impetus given to basically
rationalistic and godless or agnostic views of life by modern scientific theory
and discovery, especially in such spheres as geology and biology; and side by
side with this the development of what purport to be scientific methods in the
approach to the interpretation of the scriptures themselves. (The so called
“higher criticism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was
perhaps the least reputable of these approaches; but there are other and later
ones, more genuinely scientific as far as they go, and more apparently
convincing.)
In both of these spheres-in scientific investigation outside
the Bible and in the scientific approach to the Bible itself-a tremendous mass
of thinking, experiment and writing has been going on during the past hundred
years or so. Much of it has been superficial, self-contradictory, unconvincing
and of but fleeting significance; some of it has had a greater appearance of
established truth; and some of it is true beyond any reasonable doubt. But the
total pressure of all this can almost overwhelm the mind by its sheer mass; and
since the direction of most of it is in effect, if not always by intention,
anti-Christian, it is no wonder that faith is disturbed and not infrequently
uprooted by its influence.
Much scientific theory (and the evidence that is adduced to
support it) concerning the origins of life appears to render untenable the basic
human situation that is presented to us in the Bible. The fact that science has
been able to explain so many wonderful phenomena in man’s experience on a purely
natural and rational basis and without reference to the supernatural has led to
the calling in question of the divine origin of all things and to scepticism
concerning the miraculous element in the scripture records themselves: stories
like that of Jonah are widely ridiculed, and such fundamental miracles as the
virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus are discarded even among the ranks of
professing Christians. The scientific approach to the examination and
interpretation of the scriptures has had the effect of undermining faith in the
authenticity of the documents, in the genuineness of authorship and dating, in
the integrity of the writers-ultimately in the “inspiration” of the scriptures
in any distinctive and meaningful sense. And in the wake of these processes has
come, inevitably, the attenuating of the person of Jesus as Christ and Son of
God (even in some cases to the point of his disappearance as a historical
personage); and accompanying this the discrediting of Christian truth and of the
Christian challenge in the moral sphere.
I do not say that all these things had to be so, that some of
them are not due to misunderstanding, that science and the scientific approach
have nothing to teach us. I am saying that this is what in fact has happened and
that in all the circumstances it is very understandable that it should have
happened.
Materialism
I come now to a consideration of the second major threat to
faith that I have referred to-the threat of affluent materialism. Materialism,
in the sense of an outlook on life and a manner of life basically self-centred
and preoccupied with the satisfaction of selfish, personal and essentially
tangible desires and pleasures, is, like rationalism, almost as old as our race.
What has given it a special power in our modern world is the unprecedented
extent to which it has been able to find its characteristic satisfactions over a
wide area of society because of the affluence of our age; and the extent to
which it is ministered to by the arts-notably literature, the stage and the
visual arts generally (especially as these are conveyed to us through the medium
of television). When those who profess the Christian faith find themselves
sharing in the affluence of their times there is a grave danger that they may be
more ready than they should to be to some extent absorbed by the society which
provides them with such comforts; that they may begin to adjust themselves in
all kinds of subtle ways to its standards, and that in this as in other respects
they may come to lose their distinctive identity as a protesting
community.
I have dealt with the influences of scientific nationalism and
affluent materialism in separate categories. In practice
in the life of an individual or a community they interact in a
very complex way. Where Christian truths are held less firmly in our minds
because of the influence of this world’s wisdom it is easier to make compromises
in daily living in a society which provides us with ease and comfort; where, on
the other hand, ease and comfort have led us to make compromises in moral
principle our minds are the readier to modify the Christian truths that lie
behind the moral disciplines we have compromised-we are the readier to lean a
little towards philosophies that make us feel less uncomfortable about the
compromises we have made. Thus the combined influences of the two forces we have
been examining work insidiously in the mind to the destruction of vital and
robust and saving faith.
Now what in fact is happening in our own community in this
second half of the twentieth century by way of response to these threats to
faith from the world about us? What is happening to our thinking and to our way
of life? Let us consider first the impact upon us of the affluence and
materialism of our age.
Impact Upon Us
“Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and
have need of nothing … I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire.
that thou mayest be rich” (Rev. 3 : I 7-18). I suppose that of all the charges
levelled against the churches of Asia Minor in the first century that of
Laodicean affluence and materialism is among the last which our community would
have felt relevant to its condition prior to the Second World War. We cannot
deny its relevance today. We have certainly had our share in the affluence of
the affluent society; and though we may not say, or even consciously think, “I
am rich, and increased with goods”, the fact is that most of us are. And there
is every reason for us to be greatly concerned at the extent to which many of us
are engrossed in the affairs of this affluent world; at our waning consciousness
of our position as strangers and pilgrims, with no continuing city in this order
of things but rather with a primary obligation to bring home to its citizens
their dire need of the salvation which is in Jesus; and at the degree to which,
through preoccupation with the cares of this life and through compromise with
its standards, our minds have become dulled to the spiritual issues that should
he absorbing us, and our hands loath and slow to take up the tasks which life in
a community demands of us.
I come now to our community’s response to the threat of
scientific rationalism. Some among us, for whatever reasons (some good, I think,
and others bad), seem to be virtually untouched by it; quite a substantial
number seem able to sort out the wheat from the chaff, to hold on to what is
worth while and helpful and to reject the pretentious and the false. I feel
impelled, however, to comment in more detail upon two particular types of
reaction which, though they emanate from minorities, have been and are
remarkably vocal; both of them in their different ways, if undetected for what
they are and allowed to develop their characteristic influences among us, would
end by destroying us as a community making a true and distinctive witness for
Christ in the earth.
Fear and Insecurity
“The Church is racked by fear, insecurity and anxiety, with a
consequent intolerance and lack of love.” This is not a description of the
Christadelphian community: it is one of the reasons given by Charles Davis for
his departure from the Roman Catholic Church. It is not by any means a
description of the Christadelphian community as a whole; but it comes very near
to being an exact description of the way in which some members of the community
have reacted to the impact upon them of the scientific influences we have been
describing. The fears and anxieties we can well understand, and those of us who
can should be doing our utmost to remove them; the narrow, unscriptural
dogmatisms that often accompany the fears and anxieties are indefensible; so is
the lack of love; so are the tensions and contentions that arise when love is
absent.
These things are roundly condemned in the scriptures as being
incompatible with the true profession of Christian discipleship. James, for
example declares uncompromisingly:
“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let
him show by his good life his works in meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter
envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth.
This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish” (3 :
13-15).
And Jesus points firmly to the distinguishing quality without
which no man can call him Lord:
“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another;
as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know
that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another”
(John 13 : 34-35).
And in so far as the attitudes I am describing are supported
by narrow dogmatists that have their origins in human tradition rather than in
the clear teaching of scripture they must stand under the condemnation which was
pronounced on the Pharisees:
“This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and
honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain do
they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15 :
8-9).
One thing that has been especially borne in upon my
consciousness over recent years is the need for us all to have very great
humility before the whole of God’s revelation lest we impose on any one part of
it aims and meanings which it may not have had. And for the attitude I am now
describing I would say that the zeal it displays for God is not according to
knowledge, and that in its own way it constitutes as much of a threat to the
faith of some who encounter it as does the enemy from without which it seeks
destroy.
Dangers of Attenuation
There are, however, other elements in our community whose
reaction to scientific and rationalist influences is such as would ultimately
destroy faith by attenuating it and vapourizing away all its solid substance.
There are those among us who appear to equate love with a degree of tolerance
(sometimes of scientific theory, sometimes of doctrinal aberration, sometimes of
the one arising out of the other) which would first of all blur and then break
down the edges of demarcation between our own distinctive witness to the Truth
of God on the one hand and on the other the thinking of the world and of the
churches about us, which have already made significant compromises with the
moral and intellectual fashions of the day. The lesson of what has happened to
the churches is one that we should all take very much to heart. In his book
‘Religion in Secular Society’ Bryan Wilson demonstrates the
recurring historical tendency for Christian denominations to come into existence
with a view to making a new and independent witness to Christ, and then
gradually to become absorbed in the larger society about them so that their
originally distinctive witness is clouded and eventually lost:
“The denominations arising as protest movements in a
particular period have gained strength for a time, and then gradually come to
accept a place in the established order of society . . . They appear in large
measure to have lost their raison d’etre.”
And the danger is that the same thing might happen to
us.
This same tendency in the churches is commented upon in the
leading article of the Easter, 1967, issue of the Times Educational
Supplement:
“The Christian should try to preserve himself from the current
obsession with this world and its possibilities. Even among the clergy there is
a school which seems to proceed on the simple counsel ‘If you can’t beat them,
join them’. This ends in a whole series of follies, from trying to square
religion with science to jumping on every conceivable political and social
bandwagon, with the delighted exclamation ‘You see., we Christians are in on
this just like you’.”
The Lure of Social Welfare
We have not as a community gone that far yet, nor perhaps
anything like that far, but that is the direction in which some of us are
already quite plainly moving. And a word in passing about the “social
bandwagon”. It is of course a natural and indeed inevitable outcome of true
discipleship of Jesus that the Christian should do good to all men, and that
where it lies within his power he should alleviate the world’s sicknesses and
minister to its basic social needs. It is an entirely laudable thing that not a
few of Christ’s disciples should find their daily work in the various branches
of medicine and of social welfare. The danger arises when the Christian
gradually, almost without being aware of it, begins to see in such activities
(whether voluntary or professional) the essential satisfaction of his
obligations in Christ, the essential justification of his existence as a
committed Christian: and this happened all too often in the churches-almost
always when their alertness to their specifically spiritual obligations to the
world and within their own fellowship has become dulled. It is all too easy,
moreover, once one has become involved in such activities to find oneself being
influenced by the essentially non-Christian, humanistic philosophies and
moralities from which as often as not they draw their inspiration. And all these
dangers are the more subtle and insidious because they grow so imperceptibly out
of motives and promptings which in their original form are entirely and
blamelessly Christian. Let us beware of the wolf that may emerge from out of the
sheep’s clothing.
The truth that is revealed with glaring clarity from all these
considerations is that in one way or another, morally or intellectually or both,
some of us are in danger of trying to have the best of both worlds, like
Bunyan’s Mr. Facing-both-ways: and we might do well to remember that the name of
the community to which Mr. Facing-both-ways belonged was Vanity Fair.
Meeting the Challenge
This brings me to the last phase of my subject-a consideration
of the positive, constructive, and only saving way of meeting the challenges
that face us-the true grounds of faith. And I would begin by making two
preliminary points that seem to me to be of fundamental consequence in our
thinking about all this.
The first point is that faith involves total commitment. I
know that there are times in the experience of all of us, and of some more than
others, when we stand in our need beside the father who cried to Jesus, “Lord, I
believe: help thou mine unbelief!”. But basically a Christian is a committed
person, committed through the waters of baptism to a morality that is not of
this world, to a love that is not of self, to a wisdom that is from above. And
our community is a committed community; and if our faith is what we profess it
to be, and if we indeed belong where we profess to belong, then we are all of us
committed people-and we ought to think and to behave as such: the scriptures
make it trenchantly clear (and nowhere more clear than in John chapters I4-17
and in the Epistle of James) that fence-sitters and facers-both-ways have no
part nor lot in the committed community of Christ.
My second fundamental point is that the grounds of our faith
lie ultimately not in our ability to contend successfully with the forces which
oppose our faith from without (a very necessary but nevertheless secondary and
derivative feature of the spiritual life): our faith is grounded essentially in
the positive truths about God and His Son and His kingdom that we outlined in
our opening paragraph as the basic substance and content of our faith. And in
the end both our positive, forward spiritual growth as a living and witnessing
community, and our ability to contend with the destructive moral and
intellectual influences about us will depend on the extent and depth to which
the positive truths we distinctively stand for have taken possession of our
minds and hearts. This above all is the desperate need of our community in these
days, and in this lies the essential remedy for all our current ills-to
recapture the vision and the vitality of our first faith and to deepen our
awareness and understanding of the central truths that give it life and
meaning.
Let us see how some of the New Testament writers sought to
help their readers in this very thing.
Truths of the Faith
The second chapter of Peter’s Second Epistle describes the
extremes of moral licence to which Christian churches can descend even in the
course of their worship when they forget or become dulled to the truths on which
their faith and their very existence are grounded. How does Peter deal with this
situation? In his second chapter he condemns the immoral practices in some of
the most witheringly eloquent language in all scripture; but then, in the third
chapter, he justifies his condemnation by demonstrating the total
incompatibility of his reader’s behaviour with the positive grounds, the
fundamental truths, on which their professed faith is built-and in particular in
this case with the truth that God is righteous and that a day is coming in the
outworking of His purpose when that righteousness will be vindicated in all the
earth and all unrighteousness destroyed from before His face:
“The heavens and the earth which are now reserved unto fire
against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men . . . But we, according
to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousness.”
And it is these grounds of Christian faith that give sanction
to the Christian morality:
“Seeing that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner
of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness … Seeing that ye
look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without
spot, and blameless.”
So moral waywardness is rebuked and moral uprightness given
renewed encouragement and vigour by firm reminders of the established truths of
the faith once for all delivered to the saints of God. But Peter goes further
than this. In his letter as a whole he is concerned not merely to reaffirm the
grounds, the fundamentals, of his readers’ faith: he reaffirms also the grounds,
the evidences (or at any rate what was for him one of the most convincing of the
evidences), on the basis of which that faith is held with conviction:
“We have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made
known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were
eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and
glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we
heard, when we were with him in the holy mount” (1:16-18).
It is clear both from the records of the synoptic gospels and
from the writings of Peter and John that the transfiguration of Jesus made a
tremendous and overpowering impression on those who witnessed it, and that in
later years they cherished the unforgettable memory of it as one of the most
manifest and convincing evidences underlying their faith in him. And through
their witness it ought to loom large among our own grounds of faith.
The Power of the Resurrection
We turn for our second scriptural case to the opening verses
of the sixth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Here the apostle is
dealing not so much with moral licence in itself as with a subtle and
soul-ensnaring philosophy which would seem to justify it and give it an
appearance even of religious sanction: “What shall we say then.? Shall we
continue in sin, that grace may abound?”.
Paul deals with this threat to the faith in essentially the
same way as Peter with that which concerned him. He vigorously rejects the
philosophy (“God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer
therein?”), and then proceeds to show its incompatibility with the faith his
readers profess. This involves him, like Peter, in a reaffirmation of certain of
the grounds, the fundamentals of their faith, and in the drawing out of some of
its further and deeper implications:
“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus
Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism
into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the
Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”
The philosophy that justifies moral licence is shown to stand
condemned by reference to the rite of baptism (which is here confirmed as a
central obligation of Christian faith and worship, and the significance of which
for Christian living is drawn out in the rest of the chapter); baptism in turn
is shown to derive its sanction and meaning from the cross itself-the very core
of the Christian gospel and the ultimate ground on which rests the salvation
which that gospel proclaims. But on what grounds does our faith rest that the
cross is indeed the cross and has the saving significance which Jesus and his
apostles ascribe to it? Like Peter, Paul goes beyond those grounds of faith
which are its fundamental constituent elements and points to those further
grounds which are the evidences on which that faith rests; he points in this
case to that event which is not only a fundamental element in the Christian
faith but which carries with it its own validation, its own manifest historical
sanction; namely, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead:
“Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the
Father.”
We see once again, then, as in the case of Peter, how a threat
to Christian faith and living is met by a firm reiteration of fundamental truths
and a drawing out of their deeper implications, and by a renewed and emphatic
affirmation of the evidences on which faith in those truths is itself
grounded.
The Ground of Assurance
There is something very impressive about the frequency and
consistency with which in the Acts of the Apostles and in the New Testament
Epistles the resurrection of Jesus is pointed to as the ultimate and
incontrovertible ground of assurance in Christian faith and living. In our next
scriptural passage, 1 Corinthians 15, it is referred to in refutation of
doctrinal error. The error is defined in verse 12: “How say some among you that
there is no resurrection of the dead?”. The apostle’s method is as before-to
refute error by a strong reaffirmation of the basic elements of faith which it
challenges, to draw out the implications of those elemental truths and show
their relevance to the present crisis, and to justify faith in those truths by
reference to the evidences on which they rest. In this case it is the
resurrection of Jesus himself which is called in question by a denial of
resurrection generally, and Paul points uncompromisingly to the implications for
faith of such a denial; without the resurrection of Jesus the cross itself would
have no meaning-it would not be the saving act it claimed to be:
“If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not
risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is
also vain . . . Ye are yet in your sins.”
That Christ is risen Paul demonstrates (verses 5-8) by
reference to an impressive list of witnesses, including himself; and he
concludes (verse 12) with a bold and challenging reaffirmation of this ultimate
ground of Christian faith:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and (the consequent
implication as far as the present heresy and personal faith are concerned)
become the firstfruits of them that are asleep.”
According to the Scriptures
Yet even this is not all. The resurrection of Jesus as a
historical event attested by many reliable witnesses is in itself a profoundly
satisfying assurance that truth is in Jesus; but what makes assurance doubly
sure and confirms faith to the uttermost is that the resurrection was not an
isolated event in time but that it took place in a certain context that, like
the cross itself, it was “according to the scriptures” (verses 3-4): it happened
in accordance with and in confirmation of Old Testament prophecies which
foretold in considerable detail the coming of Messiah, the Lord’s anointed one,
and the circumstances in which his life on earth should be lived out. It has
always seemed to me one of the most utterly convincing demonstrations of the
truth of the Christian gospel that the powerful historical evidences of the
resurrection of Jesus are combined with and arise out of a whole patterning of
divine purpose foretold long ages beforehand by the Old Testament prophets, the
cross itself being an integral and crucial part of the pattern. And I am at a
loss to understand how professing Christians can ever have thought it possible
to minirnize or spiritualize away this physical event in time and yet still
regard themselves as Christians. That such things can come to pass (and they are
to be seen on every hand today among the leaders of the churches about us) is
perhaps the most devastating demonstration in human experience of the power and
the subtlety of the wisdom of this world in first undermining and finally
destroying the grounds of meaningful faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We come now, and finally, in our consideration of scriptural
passages, to the First Epistle of John. The faith of John’s readers was being
radically disturbed by a particularly subtle and insidious fusion of Greek
philosophical speculation and superficially Christian theology. The result of
the fusion was a plausible pseudo-Christianity the ultimate implications of
which were, however, that Jesus of Nazareth was not the one, true and
only-begotten Son of God; or put another way, that the Messiah, the anointed one
of the Lord, had not made a real, physical appearance on earth as a true man in
the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Fundamental Truths
John’s method in dealing with this threat to his readers’
faith is in essence the same as Paul’s and Peter’s. He condemns the heresy as a
lie and its promoters as antichrists:
“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?
He is antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son (i.e. the true Father-Son
relationship) . . . Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits
whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world
. . . Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is
not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it
should come; and even now already is it in the world” (2 : 22, 4
:1,3).
The antidote to the heresy is, as in the other cases we have
examined, a bold reaffirmation of the fundamental truths that were threatened by
the new teaching.
“This is his commandment, That we should believe on the name
of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment” (3 :
23).
In these words we have a kind of compressed credal statement
of the essential grounds of our faith; and the fundamental truths involved in
this statement are reiterated again and again in John’s letter:
“Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God
dwelleth in him, and he in God . . . Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the
Christ is born of God . . . This is the victory that overcometh the world, even
our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus
is the Son of God?” (4 : I.5; 5 4-5).
These assertions and reassertions rise to a tremendously
powerful climax in the final affirmation of faith with which the letter
closes:
“We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he
that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.
And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we
know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we
know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus
Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”
This powerful affirmation reminds us of the triumphant climax
of Paul’s argument concerning the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians I5:
“Now is Christ risen from the dead.” And it is supported by the same kind of
tangible evidence: once more the fundamental elements of faith are shown to be
grounded in historical realities testified by eye-witnesses:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which
we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the Word of life: that which we have seen and heard declare we unto
you” (1 : 1, 3).
It is as though John cannot sufficiently emphasize the
tangible reality of the evidences he and his fellow-apostles had received that
Jesus of Nazareth was indeed from above and not from beneath, the true and
only-begotten Son of God. He comes back to the same kind of testimony in chapter
4:
“We have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to
be the Saviour of the world” (verse I4).
And all this reminds us of the similar declaration at the
beginning of the Gospel of John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father) full of grace
and truth.”
Boldness of Conviction
These four scriptural passages we have now looked at are but a
few of those we could turn to for the guidance and vision we need in facing the
challenges of our time but here at any rate are some of the bedrock truths we
profess to stand for, and here are some of the solid evidences that give them
their validity. And the boldness of utterance and conviction that we have seen
in Peter, in Paul and in John should be ours also: they are in fact the only
justification for our existence as a separate witnessing Christian community. If
we really hold these things in our hearts as assured and burning convictions of
things unseen and hoped for, most of the contention and lovelessness that from
time to time mars our worship, most of the moral compromise that dulls our
spiritual sensibilities, most of the uncertainty and bewilderment that attends
our contact with the wisdom of this world-most of all this would disappear at
once from among us; and we might hope to develop such an intensity of inner
certainty and loving kindness and joy in the gospel as would inevitably radiate
outwards from ourselves and do something positive and elective towards
transforming the outlook of the world we live in and preparing it for the
consummation of God’s purpose in Christ Jesus.
When the World has Failed
I conclude with a further quotation from the Times leader
already referred to:
“Above and beyond the stuff of this life the Christian is
concerned with God and His Kingdom which is not of this world … When men turn
to a Christian priest it is not to hear how Vietnam may be resolved, but to hear
about God. And God is not lightly discovered. When men are more than ever taken
up with the world in which they live, then it would seem right for the Christian
churches to disassociate themselves from this absorption. ‘Here we have no
abiding city.’ This is part of the Christian message. When men find that this
world has failed them, it is to those who have not committed themselves to it
that they will turn.”
And our prayer and our striving should be that whenever and
wherever men turn in disillusionment from a world that has failed them to find
rest for their souls, they may find in us a community that has not only not
committed itself to the wisdom and the way of this world but one that is
positively committed in full assurance of faith to the Truth which is in
Jesus.