by Steve | Oct 21, 1971 | Archive - 1971
Words of Welcome
1971 Good News Convocation
Bishop F. Gerald Ensley
Columbus, Ohio
Good News
October /December 1971
It’s a great delight to be here tonight and to welcome you to this occasion, to this city and this state. I see a few friendly faces out there ….
Let me say first of all, I think that evangelicalism is authentic Christianity. And it comes at a time when it is greatly needed. Evangelicalism says basically, among other things, that all men sin and need to be saved. And that the way to salvation is faith in the grace of Christ. That was the Gospel in the beginning, and it is still the Gospel. When we depart from this we have departed from the Gospel. This was what the early Church had to say. It was centered in the idea of redemption. Christ centered his own ministry in people who were in need of being saved. The brazen sinner, like the woman at the well. The sexual sinner like the one the pharisees would do away with. Financial crooks like Zacchaeus. The boy in the far country, the sin of youth. You could name a long list.
Jesus Christ was concerned about people who had done things they ought not to do, and had failed to do things they should do. People who were without a redemptive Spirit or without a saving relationship to God or man. This is the Gospel. And this has been the Gospel that Methodism has preached when it has been authentic.
I heard my colleague, Bishop Roy Short, reporting on something he’d read in the literature of long ago. He said that back in the frontier community, when one particular denomination would come, the first question the preacher would ask this new community was, “Are there any men of wealth?”
There was another church, and the first question one of its preachers would ask was, “Are there any men of learning here?” But if a preacher came and said, “Are there any sinners here?” they knew he was a Methodist.
This has been the note that we have struck from the beginning. And in the degree that you, as the forefront of the evangelical movement, are sounding this note, you are preaching an authentic Gospel that comes down from the first century. And we need it. My word, how we need it in these days!
Oh, I don’t suppose we need perhaps the same Gospel that our fathers heard. A man said to me not long ago, speaking gratefully about his church, “Back in the days before my church got a hold of me, they swept me up every Saturday night and deposited me in jail. Drunk.” He was everlastingly grateful. Well, you’d be surprised how often that message is relevant, even today.
But I’m thinking also of those subtler and more pervading sins that we have. Sins of selfishness. Are there any selfish people in your town? The sins of cynicism. Of alienation. These are the sins to which we need also to address ourselves. And as long as the Gospel has a word for anybody, it has a word for us. Some of the long, sociological terms are really just synonyms for sin.
I was speaking in the south a while ago. I was entertained very kindly by a man who happened to be an auto financier. After dinner he was out showing me this car lot. I said, “Are you a car financier, or are you a car salesman?” He said, “You don’t finance cars very long before you’re in the car selling business. One leads inevitably into the other.”
You’re not very long talking about international affairs until you’re in the sin business. Or racial justice, until you’re in the sin business. And so in the degree that this evangelical movement centers on the redemption of God’s sons and daughters, praise the Lord! It is valid. And you don’t need to bow your head to anybody but the Lord. For this is the Gospel.
But let me say something else. The Gospel that’s needed for our time is the evangelical Gospel of salvation. But if I were to utter a criticism – and I don’t mean to be critical tonight because I identify so completely with you in this sense of need for the evangelical Gospel – if there is one shortcoming that the Church has, and I think that the evangelical movement has, it is that it hasn’t saved people enough. It has saved people, for example, in a part of their relationships, but not in others.
A man goes to the altar of the church – or did in the days when this was the common thing – and had his sins forgiven. He became honest, cleaned up his mouth, and perhaps warmed his relationships with his family and friends. He made restitution for things he’d done wrong.
But oh, there were so many things that didn’t seem to come under the label of being saved! And hardly a week passes but what I get a letter from somebody saying, “Why is the church messing around with the race issue? Why is the church fooling around with the economic order? That’s not religion.”
Well, now, dear friends, if we save people, but ignore their relations as a citizen of the United States; if we ignore the fact that they’re a white man or a black man; if we ignore the fact that they’ll have to go to war one of these days, or maybe won’t, then we’ve missed a good part of the man. We’re just saving a fragment of an individual. And so I’d say that the evangelical movement has got to save all of us, and the whole being.
Let me say a word too, about something else. We’ve got to save the whole of a man’s personality. We’ve got to save both his intellect and his feelings. Now one of our troubles is that we haven’t saved men’s intellects enough. The trouble with the decline of the church right now, dear friends, if I am any judge of it, is simply that we have millions of people in the United States who don’t believe the Gospel. It just isn’t true for them, that’s all. And when we have convinced them that it is true, we won’t have so much trouble melting and warming their hearts.
And on the other hand, we have a lot of people who believe it with their minds: O yes, there’s a God! There was a poll the other day, revealing 96 percent of the American people believed there is a God, a Supreme Being. But are those 96 percent the American people Christians? To ask that question is to answer it. We’ve got to convert a man’s mind, and we’ve got to convert his feelings. We’ve got to keep them together. And we might be surprised how effective our preaching could be to their minds if it were warmed with a feeling spirit. And how much more intense our feelings might be if we felt right down to the very heart that it was true.
I always remember a remark that Bishop Calvin McConnell made years ago. He was speaking about John Wesley having been a contemporary of David Hume, the skeptic, than whom there was no sharper. McConnell had written a life of Wesley, and had read everything about Wesley that was ever written. And he said the notable thing about Wesley was that he never tried to prove that Hume was wrong. What did he do?
“Why,” said McConnell, “He set England a-singing.” And the glory, the celebration through song of the redemption of God swept away their skepticism. We’ve got to save men’s minds, and we’ve also got to save their feelings.
We’ve got to save people’s views of the Bible. Now, we’re divided in the Church, unfortunately, between those who take a literal view of the Scriptures and those who take a liberal, critical view of the Scriptures. The trouble is, they don’t have much use for one another. Now let me say very frankly, I’m a liberal when it comes to interpretation of the Scripture. I couldn’t be a fundamentalist. But bless him, if a man can get help out of that, I’m not against him. But I do think a literal conception of the Scripture is narrowing and fails to appreciate the great riches that are in the Scripture.
When I was a student up at Ohio Wesleyan, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was then having a warm time with the fundamentalists in New York, came out to speak to the students. Fosdick was not a fundamentalist, and they were giving him a rather warm time. So he was ready to say some things about them that perhaps wouldn’t hold up on later reflection. He likened a fundamentalist to a mountaineer who gets up in the morning, peeks out from a chink in his cabin, sees the sunrise, and then says that anybody who wants to see the sunrise must come into his cabin and look out through his chink.
Well now, that’s a shortcoming of a lot of liberals too. And all of us need to realize that the sun is great enough that we can all get some good out of it, whether we approach it as a strict conservative, or as a liberal.
We’ve got to have a Gospel that has both Law and Grace. We have a lot of preaching these days that has a lot of Law in it. Talks about how you ought to do this and you ought to do that.
I had a letter the other day from a parishioner in one of my conferences. That good lady said, “I wish you could take our preacher away.” I guess every bishop recognizes this as a professional hazard around conference time, and I wondered what was wrong. Her letter continued, “He’s so negative. He holds up these things he says we’ve got to be and tells us we’re not. It takes me till about Thursday of every week to get over Sunday. I used to go to church to get built up, to take the week, but now I go into the world to recover from what I’ve had in church.”
Well, that’s the emphasis on the Law. And then, of course, we’ve got a lot of brethren running around who’ve found their own problems insoluble, but who are trying to solve ours.
We’ve got to have both the Law and the Gospel. We’ve got to hold up the moral code, but we’ve also got to say a word about hope. The hope of a man who comes within the orbit of Christ.
Wesley did this, you know. In one of his journal passages, Wesley reported that he had preached in the morning in a certain place, and talked about the glorious grace of God, and gave the altar call, and nobody came. Then in the evening he changed his tactic. He gave them the works on Law, and indicated in no uncertain terms their destination, and what they might have ahead of them. And then, as a closing appeal, over against the Law, he gave them the Gospel of God’s mighty grace. He says in his journal that the altars of the Church were full. And he says, “I should know always, that the Law and the Gospel must be preached together.”
Or take the matter of method. Ours must be a comprehensive view of things. We can’t say, “Now, this is Christian, ’cause my daddy did it that way; that’s the kind of appeal he made.” Nor can we go along with these folks that seem to be in every bush, who tell you that this is a new day: you’ve got to stand on your head, or do a thousand other things, because it’s a different day. Both of them are dreadfully one-sided in their approach.
John Wesley was a conservative. If you ever found anything radical in John Wesley, it was a typographical error, you can be sure. He was at heart a conservative. But he also had on his heart the desire to save men and women. And so one day he did that which is awful. He stood out on his father’s tomb, outside the old parish church at Epworth, and preached to the people there. And my, the crowds came from all around to hear him preach! He said that he did more good in three days standing on his father’s tomb than in three years preaching inside the church. You see, that’s adjustment too. He didn’t give up preaching inside the church; but he believed in “both-and.”
Let me say one more thing. I think that evangelicalism must end in evangelism. When the experience those who are evangelicals proclaim takes hold of a man, he wants to go out. He becomes an evangelist. He’s first an evangelical and then he’s an evangelist. And he goes out himself to seek to restore and to redeem. I have a feeling that if some of us had the courage to preach the Gospel of loyalty to Christ, we just might be surprised at what might happen.
A few months ago I was at the British Methodist Conference, and they were celebrating the retiring class of ministers. They mentioned a man who had retired, saying a word of praise about him. One of the brothers said, “Well, old brother so and so, he didn’t seem to have much to say, except “Come to Jesus.” And another man said, “Well, they came, didn’t they?”
People might be surprised with us, sometime. They might come, if we ask them.
I hope you see what I’m saying. I’m not unsympathetic with what you stand for. The trouble with evangelicalism is, it just hasn’t gone far enough. It’s an authentic note. It’s in the right direction. And in some of its best advocates, it does go all the way. But it needs to get a hold of all of a man’s relationships. It needs to get a hold of all men. It needs to use every device and method that’s in the book. It needs to keep going on and on until the darkness turns to dawn.
There’s a great sentence in the book of Zechariah. I think it ought to be the text of every evangelical, of every preacher of every rank. That ancient prophet says that when the Lord finally comes, “Holiness unto the Lord shall be upon the bells of the horses.” That is to say, when God’s Kingdom finally comes, the horses pulling the dray down the street and the horses in the furrow with the plow, the bells on the harness will be ringing, “Holiness unto the Lord.”
The Gospel shall encompass everything. And it says, “And every pot and pan in Jerusalem shall be as sacred as the bowls upon the altar.” Well, that’s our goal. And to the degree we do that, we bless and sanctify the Church in the evangelical movement.
Well, I appreciate so much your listening to me. Hope you’ll have a good time here. Behave yourselves. And if you have a good time, come again. Thank you.
by Steve | Oct 1, 1971 | Archive - 1971
Archive: Finding a Voice
Reprinted from Christianity Today, interdenominational, evangelical magazine Washington, D.C.
United Methodists’ “silent minority” (evangelicals) began clearing its throat at the renewal group’s first national convention in Dallas last year. This year it found its voice at a four-day convocation (July 7-10) in Cincinnati, and the evangelicals plan to make that voice heard at the highest levels of Methodism.
“We have moved out of the criticizing stage into the action phase,” said Dr. Robert G. Mayfield, general chairman of the Convocation of United Methodists for Evangelical Christianity. “Evangelicals now have power within our own hands to gain representation on our national boards, commissions, and agencies.”
The evangelical strategy to influence the United Methodist hierarchy hinges on laymen. The plan is to elect evangelical laymen as delegates to jurisdictional and general conferences and encourage “selective giving” in the pews. As the convocation met, the denomination reported basic benevolence giving was down 10 per cent from a year ago.
“We are not promoting a cash boycott but regard selective giving as sound stewardship,” explains the Reverend Charles W. Keysor (Keysor’s article “The Silent Minority,” published in Christian Advocate magazine in 1966, launched the “Forum for Scriptural Christianity” and its publication, Good News magazine, which sponsored the Cincinnati and Dallas conventions. Keysor is pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois.)
Two of the twenty-eight convocation seminars were aimed directly at showing evangelicals how to “work within the decision-making processes” of the church. One workshop, conducted by two young Ohio pastors, was called “Strategies for Influencing Annual Conferences.” The other was led by a Dallas pastor on “The Fine Art of Selective Giving.”
Advice given evangelicals attempting to influence church conferences coupled the spiritual with the practical: Read your Bible, pray, get a copy of the Methodist Discipline and Robert’s Rules of Order, watch the professionals—then speak up.
The strong possibility that bucking the establishment lessens a minister’s chances of getting appointed to the better churches was met with the blunt assertion: Where can an evangelical go but up anyway in the United Methodist Church? And where can a bishop send him that God can’t use him?
The bone in the gullet of evangelical United Methodists was described by the keynote speaker, Dr. Leslie H. Woodson, board chairman of the Forum. He told the 1,600 delegates: “Evangelicals have been given curriculum resources which we cannot use, assigned pastors we cannot follow, handed programs we cannot share, and given leaders we cannot trust. Yet we are told to give our tithes while we starve to death.”
The evangelicals are causing some concern—and obvious irritation—to certain church bureaucrats. At a press conference, representatives of United Methodist publications and agencies were so hostile to the panel of Convocation leaders that the religion writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer described it more as a “medieval inquisition than a press conference.” Referring to the public meetings—featuring swinging singers from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, inspirational messages, and hearty singing and loud “Amens”—one church publication representative said it made him “want to vomit.”
While most of the messages were inspirational, the Convocation was far from a “pie-in-the-sky” production. Dr. Gilbert James of the Department of Sociology of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, conducted a hard-hitting seminar on “The Evangelical Flight From the City.”
Dr. James’s address, “The Christian as the Agent of Change,” was laced with Scripture but highly critical of evangelicals who prefer joining “harmless knife-and-fork clubs” to confronting social ills in a way that could cause conflict with vested interests. It was widely applauded. Warned Dr. James:
“A ‘decision for Christ’ is not necessarily the regeneration of a believer, and saying ‘yes’ to a list of religious propositions does not necessarily result in the new birth. Where does social action start? At the Cross, and it could very well end there literally for us, If we take our commitment seriously.”
Even Arthur West of the United Methodist Office of Information—whose stomach apparently was feeling better at this point—ran up to Dr. James to declare: “You just saved the day for some of us.”
Young people at the convocation had separate meetings; they reflected the hyper-fundamentalist feeling of today’s “Jesus People”—and also their concern.
They began with a panel on racism in which a Cincinnati black pastor and a Mexican-American pastor from El Paso, Texas, both charged that blacks and Chicanos are “second-class citizens” in the church. The Reverend Robert Stamps, Methodist chaplain at Oral Roberts University, later gave a moving account of a “miraculous” healing he had witnessed and then delivered one of the hardest-hitting sermons on racism that this reporter has heard in years.
“Blacks and Chicanos should not just be included in the Church—they are the Church,” Stamps told about seventy-five young people. “It’s not enough to give somebody a tract. The saving gospel is always a social gospel.”
Had he attended the evangelical Methodist convocation in Cincinnati, John Wesley’s heart would have been warmed all over again.
by Steve | Jun 21, 1971 | Archive - 1971
Christ’s Mighty Victory
By Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr. (191-2005)
Good News Convocation 1971
Business often carried a friend of mine through the plant of a great foundry. He never missed the opportunity to study the workmen who labored there. One man, a furnace-tender, always fascinated him. The bones and muscles of this laborer were those of a giant. His face was as strong as granite, and his hands as big as hams. It was a striking sight to see him work with his shovel and coal, huge muscles rippling in unbroken rhythm, face florid with heated blood, and pools of perspiration glistening on his bare skin as the glow from the furnace played across his body. He was rough, uncouth, a man of brawn more than of mind.
Once my friend saw him stagger, almost overcome with the intense heat of the fires. He looked weary, ill, nearly beaten. But he regained his footing, stepped aside into the cooler shadows, lifted his goggles, and passed a great blackened hand in gentle reverence over something hanging around his neck. It seemed to strengthen him. His strained features relaxed, and in a moment he was back on the job. Curious to know what had happened in that brief respite, my friend peered more closely and discovered that the something around the big workman’s neck was a tiny golden crucifix suspended on a short chain. It looked strange against its background of hot, damp flesh. But it did something for this giant of a man with his furnace and fires to have that tiny likeness of the Christ on the job with him. He could touch it and brush weariness aside. It was a fountain of refreshment and strength for him.
This incident helps to point up the nearly incredible power of that Strange Man who, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it years ago, has “ploughed” his way into the “history of the world.” He and his mighty victory are the themes of New Testament Christianity, the roots of our religion. The tragic impoverishment of the Church’s witness in recent years is traceable to persistent ignoring, often in high places, of the naked spiritual power implicit in a full awareness of God’s work through Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death on the cross, and resurrection.
Dr. James S. Stewart (1896-1990) of the University of Edinburgh has reminded us that “the Christian religion is often today identified with pious ethical behavior and vague theistic belief, suffused with aesthetic emotionalism and a mild glow of humanitarian benevolence” (Thine is the Kingdom, 1956). It is simply impossible to account for the impact of the Christian faith in human experience and history apart from the Church’s ancient message of Jesus Christ and his mighty victory.
For example, we fail to understand St. Francis, whose saintliness casts a light even into the 20th century, if we do not see him as he kneels in the dilapidated Church of St. Damian outside the walls of Assisi and grasps for the first time the meaning of the Cross.
We glimpse the incentive that drove Horace Bushnell to bind the church and the home indissolubly together only when we visit the religious revival on Yale’s campus in 1831 and later, in 1848, spend the night with him as he responds to a radiant vision of Christ as the personal Revealer of God.
We look in vain for the secret of Walter Rauschenbusch, who stabbed the social conscience of Christendom awake in the days before World War I, until we find “the little pastern gate in the castle of his soul” and learn of the richness of his personal faith in the God revealed by Jesus Christ, which made prayer the dominant mood of his life.
Behind the deed forever stands the creed! As Christians, we act because God has already acted! To quote Stewart again, “The dynamic for our unaccomplished task is the accomplished deed of God” – or, put in other words, Christ’s mighty victory. There are three imperishable acts of God that constitute the core of our Lord’s triumph.
The Incarnation. “God was in Christ …” (II Corinthians 5:19a). How incongruous this assertion has seemed in recent years. One of the surprisingly prominent illusions of our era is that God is absent from his creation. As Professor William Hamilton has said: “We are not talking about the absence of the experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God.” Put another way, radical theology says simply, but not freshly, “God is dead.” Zarathustra, Nietzsche, William Blake, Hegel – even Martin Luther – said it in earlier days. Bonhoeffer speaks in our modern day, and out of a deep devotion, about God “allowing Himself to be edged out of the world.”
The beginnings of this view are complex. Certainly it is an effort to interpret, in terms of faith, a weird age of the world’s history. It undertakes to account for secularism’s triumph. Fearing that the older theistic and theological views of life and history cannot survive contemporary international and cultural revolutions, it seeks to make a new and radically different road. It is secular theology, religionless Christianity, contrived to satisfy the empty realism of Julian Huxley’s “God-shaped blank in the modern mind.” But most of all, this illusion of illusions is based upon man’s arrogant metaphysical and actual independence of God. It rests upon the assumption that modern man can get along very well indeed without God. What an illusion!
A man prays and knows an answer. A Marine, dying in Vietnam, is told of the love that will not let him go, and peace and hope shine in his eyes. A great congregation sings with enthusiasm, “A mighty fortress is my God,” and the atmosphere of worship is charged with living power. A man who has just learned that he has an inoperable cancer receives Holy Communion and rises with quiet courage to take up his tasks for the time that remains. A member of Congress talks frankly with his pastor and then goes to the House floor to vote his Christian conviction, aware that the deed may cost him an election. A student kneels to pray at night, taunted by some of those with whom he lives.
God absent from his creation? What an illusion! Only those who have allowed philosophical hogwash to befuddle their brains and blind their eyes could possibly overlook the voluminous evidences to the contrary.
Or take yourself – you who don’t always believe in him, who think you operate your life with reasonable efficiency and effectiveness without him. Can you be honest enough to recall a moment when some alluring temptation to dishonor brought your soul to the edge of a precipice – and something held you back? Can you remember an hour dark with human need when suddenly light and help appeared? Or what about a memory that rose at nighttime to rebuke you or to bless you? Or a great and ennobling thought that broke unexpectedly across the barren terrain of your mind? Or some strange and exhilarating exultation after you had seen a great play or read a memorable book? Or the warm glow somewhere within you as you shared intimate fellowship with a dear and trusted friend? Or the sorrow of some bereavement? Or the ecstatic gladness of a beautiful surprise?
God absent from his creation? What an illusion! Do you remember how Isaiah pictures God saying to Cyrus the Persian, King of Babylon: “I girdeth thee, though thou hast not known me.”
The Death-of-God philosophy, never a serious threat to Christianity but rather an extreme manifestation of our age’s strange affinity for the novel and the bizarre, has moved now into an oblivion fashioned from its own internal irresponsibility and spiritual stupidity. The Incarnation – foundational doctrine of the Christian religion – reminds us again and afresh that God has betrothed himself forever to humanity!
God is not only not absent from his creation, he is forever identified with it. When the Everlasting God planned a nearer visit to earth, he chose the utterly human trails of a mother’s deep anguish and a baby’s low, helpless cry for the divine pilgrimage. He might have come as a heavenly visitant in trappings of cosmic splendor with spirit-legions and a chariot made of the winds, but this was not his way. He chose the cattle-shelter, ‘‘swaddling clothes,” and the loneliness of a man and a woman. And into this situation he came in the person of his son, Jesus. This is the first glory of the Incarnation.
Christianity begins with the most stupendous idea man’s mind has ever been asked to enfold: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18).
Here is what Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889-1966) said about that text: “This statement, which would make every good Platonist’s hair stand on end, is the central article in the Christian theory of knowledge.”
That the God of creation, infinite, holy, omnipotent, should care enough to identify himself with his creatures, putting on for a while the garments of flesh in order that he might understand us and we might know Him – this is history’s supreme fact. And its message of nearly incredible hope and joy is a light for life’s dark valleys and a song in its long nights. The God who made us has come to save us.
Do you remember G.K. Chesterton’s beautiful words?
“To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome;
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.”
John Wesley preached no recorded sermon on the Person of Christ. A distinguished student of his life declares that the founder of Methodism simply assumed the centrality of Christ’s position in the plan of salvation. If someone had asked him to prove the divinity of Christ, “he would probably have pointed to some humble convert, to some little band of men and women whose sins were forgiven and in whose faces shone that light which was reflected from the face of Christ.”
Years ago I heard the great Episcopal clergyman Joseph Fort Newton say of Jesus Christ, “He entered into the soul of humanity like a dye, the tinge of which no acid can remove.” And Robert Oppenheimer, in a reference to religion rare for his agnostic mind, commented upon the place of Jesus in the Christian philosophy with these words: “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.”
These are authentic echoes of the chorus of the centuries in dealing with the great fact of the incarnation. If some of the early Christians came dangerously close to forgetting his humanity, then some of us, in nearer days, have come dangerously close to ignoring his deity. Too often have we of a more liberal tradition surrendered the doctrine of the incarnation to those extremists of the faith who subscribe only to fundamentalism and bibliolatry.
The vital nerve of the Church’s mission at the crossroads of life will be severed if our generation is permitted to believe that the voice of Jesus Christ is no longer the voice of God. Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884-1968), the great historian of Christianity, said that the centuries reveal a direct relationship between the magnifying of the name of Jesus Christ and a revival of religious faith. But much more than this is true. The incarnation is the authentic authority for Christian involvement in seeking a solution to the tormenting social problems of this moment.
If we believe that God walked the dusty paths of this planet in the garb of flesh, we have no right to preach a disembodied gospel which scorns human needs, earthly problems and all mundane concerns. If Jesus Christ, indeed, was both man and God, then his gospel is the silken cord that binds earth and heaven forever together, and that urges the application of the heavenly insights in the Sermon on the Mount to such problems as racism, poverty, war, population control, ecology, moral confusion.
Here is the initial aspect of Christ’s mighty victory!
- The Crucifixion
Years ago I first read these words of Bishop William Fraser McDowell (1858-1937): “I would not cross the street to give India a new theology; India has more theology than it can understand. I would not cross the street to give China a new code of ethics; China has a vastly better code than ethical life. I would not cross the street to give Japan a new religious literature, for Japan has a better religious literature than religious life. But I would go around the world again and yet again, if it pleased God, to tell India, China and Japan and the rest of the world:
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty stains.”
The Cross, for me at least, is not ultimately subject to minute theological analysis. Men have seen many ideas in it – sacrifice, atonement, expiation, ransom, substitution, and propitiation – each with at least a modicum of truth to contribute to the whole.
The Cross is vastly bigger than the ideas men have had about it. It towers in magnificent mystery above Hugo Grotius and Anselm and Peter Abelard and all the others who have sought to reduce it to theories. Its message is beyond theological formulae. Emil Brunner comes as close as words may approach when he declares that we see three realities on Calvary: “The inviolable holiness of God; the absolute impossibility of overlooking man’s sin; and the illimitable mercy of God.”
In 1848, three Englishmen, all destined to become famous, were on a Paris holiday during the Revolution which overthrew King Louis Philippe. The men were Jowett, a future master of Balliol; Stanley, later Dean of Westminster; and Palgrave, a poet. Palgrave kept a diary and in it is an entry describing the sack of the Palace of the Tuileries by the mob. Everything was being smashed, when suddenly the mob reached the Chapel, broke in the doors, and found themselves staring at the huge painting of Christ crucified behind the altar. Someone called out, “Hats off!” Heads were bared, most of the crowd knelt down, and the picture was carried out to a neighboring church in utter silence.
This is the power of the Cross.
Years ago a Boston preacher set this couplet in my heart: “Christ, the Son of God, hath sent me o’er the widespread lands; Mine the mighty ordination of the pierced hands.”
The rugged, rigid disciplines of Christianity, by which the saints have been made, issue from an understanding of the Cross. Willingness to bear scorn courageously, to make sacrifice daily, to endure hardship and to face danger – these are the attributes of those who have taken a long look at Calvary.
Essential dedication will not – cannot – come to our generation of Christians without a fresh glimpse of the Cross. This is our message – not the dialectic of human philosophy – but Jesus Christ and him crucified, forgiveness of sin, redemption for lost and lonely mankind.
“Nothing in my hand I bring/ Simply to thy Cross I cling.” Here, again, is Christ’s mighty victory!
- The Resurrection
In the little book Interrupted By His Death, Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942) wrote, “God always finishes his sentences.” The resurrection is the final, necessary clause of the sentence whose earlier parts have dealt with the incarnation and the crucifixion – the crescendo of Christ’s mighty victory. If the identity of Jesus Christ is our authority for the Christian enterprise and the redemption of the Cross is our message, then the resurrection is our hope and our triumph.
I know the resurrection has meaning at the point of abolishing the icy dread of death in the Christian’s heart. One great historian insists that the almost incredible accomplishments of the early Christians were due in large measure to their complete scorn of danger and death.
But I would have us think particularly of the resurrection as God’s ringing pledge of victory for his gospel’s cause and for those who labor in it. A great contemporary Christian thinker has said, ‘‘There had now appeared, in the midst of time, life in a new dimension … The early Christians were not merely preaching the resurrection as a fact; they were living in it as in a new country.”
In one of my pastorates there was a lovely and radiant young woman upon whose life heavy sufferings converged. Her husband was an alcoholic whose tragic condition defied the corrective efforts of successive ministers and a regiment of friends, and made him insensitive to the claims of responsibility, honor and love.
Debts rocketed, community derision for the man she loved cut her to the quick, financial duress kept her working though physically ill and decreed that she must not use her earnings for herself. But there was something memorably buoyant about her. She never lost hope. Others did for her, but not she. The commonest kindness, the tiniest scrap of good news became a harbinger of better things ahead in her perennially confident heart.
Each new morning was a magic scroll, a parchment of reverent optimism. Life was new and something marvelous might happen before nightfall! One day I had preached on “The Christian Hope” and her eyes danced in excitement as she thanked me for letting her hear a fresh utterance of the message God had given to her long before!
She died – all too soon, we thought – but with the banners of ecstatic expectancy flying yet over a debris of terrible heartaches. She was our lady of the resurrection hope. She used to make me think of Wordsworth’s lines: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky …. “ She was living Christ’s mighty victory!
Today’s headlines and telecasts have little of a hopeful nature to suggest about the coming of the Kingdom! The debilitating intrigues of continuing ideological struggles; the diabolically mad nuclear armament race still raging; the devastating revolution in morals – crime, sex perversion, drugs, alcohol; the generation gap; the lingering, senseless terror of the war in Vietnam; mind and behavior manipulation; genetic engineering; the ethical implications of organ transplants; racism of all colors; violence; lawlessness – and so it goes. But in the midst of all of this, the perceptive Christian senses a strange and wonderful wistfulness about our tragic moment in history. We begin to wonder with tremulous hope if the long tide is turning.
Dr. George Arthur Buttrick reminds us in one of his later works that the sea of faith has been ebbing for four centuries – we are the victims and not the authors of modern skepticism.
Another writes of our present day as an “age of longing.” Perhaps we are almost ready to doubt our doubts and to believe our beliefs again; perhaps we have discovered that our easy answers do not answer at all. Existentialism, in proper perspective, may help us to place our sense measurements of truth in a correctly subordinate position; for a true existentialist knows that a sailor’s knowledge of the weather is a deeper kind of knowing than that of the meteorologist, and that truth is to be found in the events of history rather than in the dialectics of the mind. We may be moving into a new age of faith.
There is a famous story of Faust gambling with his soul, about which an artist has painted a picture of a game of chess with Faust at one side and Satan at the other. In the picture the game is almost over Faust has left only a king, a knight and one or two pawns. He wears on his face a look of utter despair, while at the other side of the board the Devil leers in contemplation of his coming triumph. Many a chess player, looking at the picture, has agreed that the position is hopeless – a checkmate. But one day a master of the game stood in the picture gallery gazing at the scene. He was fascinated at Faust’s expression of utter despair. Then his gaze went to the pieces on the board and he stared at them absorbed as other people came and went. Then, suddenly, the gallery was startled by a ringing shout: “It is a lie! The king and the knight have another move!”
To us who are sons and daughters of the Resurrection faith, it is a parable of our situation. No matter how hopeless the times may seem to be, the King and the knight do have another move! This is the meaning of the Resurrection for the 20th century. And so hope surges again within us, moral muscles tighten, spiritual vision clears, and fear’s palpitations know a great calm. As someone has said, “We cannot be children of the resurrection and not see all the world bathed in resurrection light.”
The resurrection was the divine fiat that validated the facts and the philosophies of the incarnation and the cross. Someone said, “It is no epilogue to the Gospel, no codicil to the divine last will and testament, no appendix to the faith.” It is the triumphant concluding clause in God’s great sentence to man, and without it all that has gone before about the Incarnation and the crucifixion is but a weird jumble of words without meaning. Here is Christ’s mighty victory brought to tremendous and triumphant climax.
In my mind’s eye I see once more the big, brawny furnace-tender pausing in the heat of his task to pass his blackened hand in reverence over the golden crucifix which hung about his neck and receiving from this simple motion the strength and renewal needed to continue his work.
Religion is not just philosophy. When the human mind begins to develop its clever dialectics of God and man, sin and redemption, death and life, it is not necessarily dealing with the gospel. Sermons, even sermons, can prove to be exciting intellectual encounters with intriguing ideas, even ideas about the Bible, lofty philosophical monologues in which the holy, transforming presence of the living, loving, compassionate Lord is totally missing. There is no burning bush, no cry from Calvary, and there are rarely changed lives in the wake of such preaching.
No, the gospel is no dialectic of logic, no system of ethics, no musty set of morals, no book of platitudes. The Gospel is love’s aching arms when life is lonely and barren. The gospel is inconceivable forgiveness when sin has been bleak and persistent. The gospel is hope when hope is long gone, dawning’s bright fingers clutching at the throat of night. The gospel is life when death has done its hideous worst. The gospel is the everlasting light of Christ’s mighty victory in the Incarnation, on the cross and in the resurrection. This – and only this – is the foundation for our message about both personal and social religion. Let us proclaim it with new confidence!
Earl G. Hunt (1918-2005) was a United Methodist bishop for 24 years before retiring in 1988. He was the keynote speaker at the 1976 World Methodist Conference in Dublin, Ireland in 1976. In retirement, Hunt served as president of the Foundation for Evangelism.
