2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
2. Nature of this Union.We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”A. Negatively.—It is not:(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.[pg 800]Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.B. Positively.—It is:(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
We have here to do not only with a fact of life, but with a unique relation between the finite and the infinite. Our descriptions must therefore be inadequate. Yet in many respects we know what this union is not; in certain respects we can positively characterize it.
It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”
It should not surprise us if we find it far more difficult to give a scientific definition of this union, than to determine the fact of its existence. It is a fact of life with which we have to deal; and the secret of life, even in its lowest forms, no philosopher has ever yet discovered. The tiniest flower witnesses to two facts: first, that of its own relative independence, as an individual organism; and secondly, that of its ultimate dependence upon a life and power not its own. So every human soul has its proper powers of intellect, affection, and will; yet it lives, moves, and has its being in God (Acts 17:28).
Starting out from the truth of God's omnipresence, it might seem as if God's indwelling in the granite boulder was the last limit of his union with the finite. But we see the divine intelligence and goodness drawing nearer to us, by successive stages, in vegetable life, in the animal creation, and in the moral nature of man. And yet there are two stages beyond all these: first, in Christ's union with the believer; and secondly, in God's union with Christ. If this union of God with the believer be only one of several approximations of God to his finite creation, the fact that it is, equally with the others, not wholly comprehensible to reason, should not blind us either to its truth or to its importance.
It is easier to-day than at any other previous period of history to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.”John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:233-256—“God[pg 799]is united with nature, in the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul. The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes in man.”
A. Negatively.—It is not:
(a) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as held by rationalists.
In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”
In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily, whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,”and the Egyptians held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our salvation, upon the very ground that“it is God that worketh”in us,“both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.
The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church, humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible Christ, and knows him as its very life.”
(b) A merely moral union, or union of love and sympathy, like that between teacher and scholar, friend and friend,—as held by Socinians and Arminians.
There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”
There is a moral union between different souls:1 Sam. 18:1—“the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—here the Vulgate has:“Anima Jonathæ agglutinata Davidi.”Aristotle calls friends“one soul.”So in a higher sense, inActs 4:32, the early believers are said to have been“of one heart and soul.”But inJohn 17:21, 26, Christ's union with his people is distinguished from any mere union of love and sympathy:“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us;... that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in them, and I in them.”Jesus' aim, in the whole of his last discourse, is to show that no mere union of love and sympathy will be sufficient:“apart from me,”he says,“ye can do nothing”(John 15:5). That his disciples may be vitally joined to himself, is therefore the subject of his last prayer.
Dorner says well, that Arminianism (and with this doctrine Roman Catholics and the advocates of New School views substantially agree) makes man a mere tangent to the circle of the divine nature. It has no idea of the interpenetration of the one by the other. But the Lutheran Formula of Concord says much more correctly:“Damnamus sententiam quod non Deus ipse, sed dona Dei duntaxat, in credentibus habitent.”
Ritschl presents to us a historical Christ, and Pfleiderer presents to us an ideal Christ, but neither one gives us the living Christ who is the present spiritual life of the believer. Wendt, in his Teaching of Jesus, 2:310, comes equally far short of a serious interpretation of our Lord's promise, when he says:“This union to his person, as to its contents, is nothing else than adherence to the message of the kingdom of God brought by him.”It is not enough for me to be merelyin touchwith Christ. He must come to be“not so far as even to be near.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.”William Watson, The Unknown God:“Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know.”
(c) A union of essence, which destroys the distinct personality and subsistence of either Christ or the human spirit,—as held by many of the mystics.
Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.
Many of the mystics, as Schwenkfeld, Weigel, Sebastian Frank, held to anessentialunion between Christ and the believer. One of Weigel's followers, therefore, could say to another:“I am Christ Jesus, the living Word of God; I have redeemed thee by my sinless sufferings.”We are ever to remember that the indwelling of Christ only puts the believer more completely in possession of himself, and makes him more conscious of his own personality and power. Union with Christ must be taken in connection with the other truth of the personality and activity of the Christian; otherwise it tends to pantheism. Martineau, Study, 2:190—“In nature it is God's immanent life, in morals it is God's transcendent life, with which we commune.”
Angelus Silesius, a German philosophical poet (1624-1677), audaciously wrote:“I know God cannot live an instant without me; He must give up the ghost, if I should cease to be.”Lowde, a disciple of Malebranche, used the phrase“Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,”and Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, quotes it with disapprobation, saying that“the saints do not become actually partakers of the divine essence, as would be inferred from this abominable and blasphemous language of heretics”(Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 224).“Self is not a mode of the divine: it is a principle of isolation. In order to religion, I must have a will to surrender....‘Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’... Though the self is, inknowledge, a principle of unification; inexistence, or metaphysically, it is a principle of isolation”(Seth).
Inge, Christian Mysticism, 30—“Some of the mystics went astray by teaching a realsubstitutionof the divine for human nature, thus depersonalizing man—a fatal mistake, for without human personality we cannot conceive of divine personality.”Lyman Abbott:“In Christ, God and man are united, not as the river is united with the sea, losing its personality therein, but as the child is united with the father, or the wife with the husband, whose personality and individuality are strengthened and increased by the union.”Here Dr. Abbott's view comes as far short of the truth as that of the mystics goes beyond the truth. As we shall see, the union of the believer with Christ is a vital union, surpassing in its intimacy any union of souls that we know. The union of child with father, or of wife with husband, is only a pointer which hints very imperfectly at the interpenetrating and energizing of the human spirit by the divine.
(d) A union mediated and conditioned by participation of the sacraments of the church,—as held by Romanists, Lutherans, and High-Church Episcopalians.
Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.
Perhaps the most pernicious misinterpretation of the nature of this union is that which conceives of it as a physical and material one, and which rears upon this basis the fabric of a sacramental and external Christianity. It is sufficient here to say that this union cannot be mediated by sacraments, since sacraments presuppose it as already existing; both Baptism and the Lord's Supper are designed only for believers. Only faith receives and retains Christ; and faith is the act of the soul grasping what is purely invisible and supersensible: not the act of the body, submitting to Baptism or partaking of the Supper.
William Lincoln:“The only way for the believer, if he wants to go rightly, is to remember that truth is always two-sided. If there is any truth that the Holy Spirit has specially pressed upon your heart, if you do not want to push it to the extreme, ask what is the counter-truth, and lean a little of your weight upon that; otherwise, if you bear so very much on one side of the truth, there is a danger of pushing it into a heresy. Heresy means selected truth; it does not mean error; heresy and error are very different things. Heresy is truth, but truth pushed into undue importance, to the disparagement of the truth upon the other side.”Heresy (αἵρεσις) = an act of choice, the picking and choosing of a part, instead of comprehensively embracing the whole of truth. Sacramentarians substitute the symbol for the thing symbolized.
B. Positively.—It is:
(a) An organic union,—in which we become members of Christ and partakers of his humanity.
Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.
Kant defines an organism, as that whose parts are reciprocally means and end. The body is an organism; since the limbs exist for the heart, and the heart for the limbs. So each member of Christ's body lives for him who is the head; and Christ the head equally lives for his members:Eph. 5:29, 30—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it,[pg 801]even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body.”The train-despatcher is a symbol of the concentration of energy; the switchmen and conductors who receive his orders are symbols of the localization of force; but it is all one organic system.
(b) A vital union,—in which Christ's life becomes the dominating principle within us.
This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.
This union is a vital one, in distinction from any union of mere juxtaposition or external influence. Christ does not work upon us from without, as one separated from us, but from within, as the very heart from which the life-blood of our spirits flows. SeeGal. 2:20—“it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me;”Col 3:3, 4—“For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Christ's life is not corrupted by the corruption of his members, any more than the ray of light is defiled by the filth with which it comes in contact. We may be unconscious of this union with Christ, as we often are of the circulation of the blood, yet it may be the very source and condition of our life.
(c) A spiritual union,—that is, a union whose source and author is the Holy Spirit.
By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”
By a spiritual union we mean a union not of body but of spirit,—a union, therefore, which only the Holy Spirit originates and maintains.Rom. 8:9, 10—“ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.”The indwelling of Christ involves a continual exercise of efficient power. InEph. 3:16, 17,“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”is immediately followed by“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”
(d) An indissoluble union,—that is, a union which, consistently with Christ's promise and grace, can never be dissolved.
Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.
Mat. 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”;John 10:28—“they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand”;Rom. 8:35, 39—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?... nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”;1 Thess. 4:14, 17—“them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him ... then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
Christ's omnipresence makes it possible for him to be united to, and to be present in, each believer, as perfectly and fully as if that believer were the only one to receive Christ's fulness. As Christ's omnipresence makes the whole Christ present in every place, each believer has the whole Christ with him, as his source of strength, purity, life; so that each may say: Christ gives all his time and wisdom and care to me. Such a union as this lacks every element of instability. Once formed, the union is indissoluble. Many of the ties of earth are rudely broken,—not so with our union with Christ,—that endures forever.
Since there is now an unchangeable and divine element in us, our salvation depends no longer upon our unstable wills, but upon Christ's purpose and power. By temporary declension from duty, or by our causeless unbelief, we may banish Christ to the barest and most remote room of the soul's house; but he does not suffer us wholly to exclude him; and when we are willing to unbar the doors, he is still there, ready to fill the whole mansion with his light and love.
(e) An inscrutable union,—mystical, however, only in the sense of surpassing in its intimacy and value any other union of souls which we know.
This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.
This union is inscrutable, indeed; but it is not mystical, in the sense of being unintelligible to the Christian or beyond the reach of his experience. If we call it mystical at all, it should be only because, in the intimacy of its communion and in the transforming power of its influence, it surpasses any other union of souls that we know, and so cannot be fully described or understood by earthly analogies.Eph. 5:32—“This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church”;Col. 1:27—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
See Diman, Theistic Argument, 380—“As physical science has brought us to the conclusion that back of all the phenomena of the material universe there lies an invisible universe of forces, and that these forces may ultimately be reduced to one all-pervading[pg 802]force in which the unity of the physical universe consists; and as philosophy has advanced the rational conjecture that this ultimate all-pervading force is simply will-force; so the great Teacher holds up to us the spiritual universe as pervaded by one omnipotent life—a life which was revealed in him as its highest manifestation, but which is shared by all who by faith become partakers of his nature. He was Son of God: they too had power to become sons of God. The incarnation is wholly within the natural course and tendency of things. It was prepared for, it came, in the fulness of times. Christ's life is not something sporadic and individual, having its source in the personal conviction of each disciple; it implies a real connection with Christ, the head. Behind all nature there is one force; behind all varieties of Christian life and character there is one spiritual power. All nature is not inert matter,—it is pervaded by a living presence. So all the body of believers live by virtue of the all-working Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.”An epitaph at Silton, in Dorsetshire, reads:“Here lies a piece of Christ—a star in dust, A vein of gold, a china dish, that must Be used in heaven when God shall feed the just.”
A. H. Strong, in Examiner, 1880:“Such is the nature of union with Christ,—such I mean, is the nature of every believer's union with Christ. For, whether he knows it or not, every Christian has entered into just such a partnership as this. It is this and this only which constitutes him a Christian, and which makes possible a Christian church. We may, indeed, be thus united to Christ, without being fully conscious of the real nature of our relation to him. We may actually possess the kernel, while as yet we have regard only to the shell; we may seem to ourselves to be united to Christ only by an external bond, while after all it is an inward and spiritual bond that makes us his. God often reveals to the Christian the mystery of the gospel, which is Christinhim the hope of glory, at the very time that he is seeking only some nearer access to a Redeemer outside of him. Trying to find a union of coöperation or of sympathy, he is amazed to learn that there is already established a union with Christ more glorious and blessed, namely, a union of life; and so, like the miners in the Rocky Mountains, while he is looking only for silver, he finds gold. Christ and the believer have the same life. They are not separate persons linked together by some temporary bond of friendship,—they are united by a tie as close and indissoluble as if the same blood ran in their veins. Yet the Christian may never have suspected how intimate a union he has with his Savior; and the first understanding of this truth may be the gateway through which he passes into a holier and happier stage of the Christian life.”
So the Way leads, through the Truth, to the Life (John 14:6). Apprehension of an external Savior prepares for the reception and experience of the internal Savior. Christ is first the Door of the sheep, but in him, after they have once entered in, they find pasture (John 10:7-9). On the nature of this union, see H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, 531-539; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 601; Wilberforce, Incarnation, 208-272, and New Birth of Man's Nature, 1-30.Per contra, see Park, Discourses, 117-136.