by Steve | Aug 12, 1974 | Uncategorized
The Apostles’ Creed says it best
By Bishop Nolan B. Harmon
Fall 1974
Good News
Within comparatively recent years there have been placed in our Methodist orders of worship (in The Discipline, The Book of Worship and the Hymnal) along with the Apostles’ Creed, two other “Affirmations of faith.” These were the official formularies of the Methodist Episcopal Church previous to union, and went into The Discipline of the united church in 1939 and then into The Book of Worship when it was first issued in 1944 “for those who might wish to use them.”
One of these statements is called “A Modern Affirmation.” The other is “The Korean Creed.” Many ministers today seem to prefer one or the other of these statements to the august symbol of the Faith itself, if indeed they have their people repeat any creed at all.
Each of the affirmations is introduced by the impressive statement: Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is the one true Church, apostolic and universal, whose holy faith let us now declare. Then follow in place of the tremendous item by item declarations of the apostolic witness, a few carefully worded sentences, some of which are open to varied interpretations as they express certain Christian viewpoints, but all a long way removed from the comprehensive, unmistakable directness of the Apostles’ Creed itself.
Now no one can object to these modern affirmations being used occasionally as explanations of certain truths of the creed, provided – and this is an important proviso – that the one who uses them, and the people who are led to repeat them, know exactly how far they go and do not go. I for one can say these affirmations with a right goodwill, since I know what they mean, and that they are ex parte only. What I do object to is to give the impression by the sonorous introduction and the constant use of these affirmations in churchwide worship that they embody anything like the comprehensive faith of the Christian Church.
Let it be granted that the Apostles’ Creed itself does need amplification and explanation, and should have it in all sorts of sermonic and doctrinal teachings. The creed was not written to explain but to list in bare, terse, iron-ribbed language, the factual, actual fundamentals of the Christian faith. Each one of these fundamentals does need explaining, but at much greater length and in sermons and doctrinal teaching which every minister and Christian leader should be prepared to give, and that continuously.
Indeed the Korean Creed, which is much better than the Modern Affirmation, was written as Bishop Herbert Welch explained in The Christian Advocate [August 1, 1946, p. 973] to be “intended primarily as a teaching instrument.” It went into The Discipline of the Korean Methodist Church where it is published today as a “Statement of Belief.” It was the goal of those who drew up this statement to make if “brief, including only the few essentials of a practical Christian faith … simple, couched in non-technical language.” This was certainly an understandable move as Bishop Welch and Dr. J. S. Ryang, later bishop himself, worked out this short confession for the nascent church whose people could not then have taken in more.
As to the Modern Affirmation, Bishop Welch tells us in the same issue of The Christian Advocate that this was drawn up by Professor Edwin Lewis of Drew Theological Seminary at the request of Bishop W. P. Thirkield, then chairman of the Commission on Worship and Music of The Methodist Episcopal Church. It was to be “a brief statement of Christian faith which, in addition to the Apostles’ Creed (italics mine), might be recommended to the Church.” So Dr. Lewis wrote, “And the judgment of the commission … was so favorable that his (Dr. Lewis’) statement was adopted without change.”
As one who knew Dr. Lewis well and greatly admired him, and indeed acted as his editor for his later books (I was book editor of the church then), it can be said frankly that Dr. Lewis wrote this statement some years before he came to that ephocal point in his life when he admitted publicly that he had changed greatly in his fundamental theological viewpoint. The Edwin Lewis who wrote the Christian Manifesto of 1934 was not the Edwin Lewis who put out (and the General (Conference adopted) the ambiguities of the Modern Affirmation. Even had he been the same man, let it be noted that the Modern Affirmation was to be in addition to – not a substitute for – the Apostles’ Creed. If it and the Korean Creed also can be seen as formularies to supplement and not supplant the Apostles’ Creed, well and good. But full-bodied faith for the church today these affirmations certainly are not, and it will be a bad day for any congregation which is led to believe that they are.
Look at the differences: The Apostles’ Creed affirms belief in God the Father Almighty … and in Jesus Christ His Only Son our Lord; it affirms His Incarnation through the Virgin Mary, his appearance in time before Pontius Pilate, His Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, Session on the right hand of God, and declares that He will come to judge the quick and the dead. The whole Christology of the Christian faith is summed up in that one mighty paragraph.
But what says the Modern Affirmation: “We believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God and son of man.” That statement is, of course, correct, but it is exactly the one used by many Unitarians who explain that we are all “sons of God” as well as sons of men, and of course Jesus was also. No unique Sonship, no “only begotten” is herein affirmed.
The “gift of the Father’s unfailing love” goes on the Modern Affirmation. Yes, but how given? No birth, no date in time, no crucifixion, no death, no resurrection, and especially no second coming and no final judgment. What a truncated, lopped-off “holy faith” we are thus led to declare!
The Korean Creed does it much better, calling Jesus “God manifest in the flesh, our teacher, example, and Redeemer, and the Savior of the world.” All that yes, but how one would like to hear breaking in the long roll of the war-drum of the Nicene Creed with a Jesus Christ who is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made … Who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. In contrast with that mighty sentence these modern affirmations sound like the tinkling of ice cubes in a glass of water over against the roar of a heavy surf on the edge of the illimitable sea.
And what of Resurrection, what of Ascension, what of a final Judgment, what of life in the world to come? They just aren’t there. To be sure, the “life everlasting” is in the Korean Creed, but not much of the rest of the vast divine program which the Apostle’s Creed sets forth, and upon which the church rests the sureness of its hope.
As to the Holy Spirit, the Modern Affirmation declares belief in Him as “the divine presence in our lives.” The Korean has “God present with us for guidance, for comfort, and for strength.” Both these statements are true, but here comes in the troublesome ambiguity of the word “spirit.” I have known many a man refer to the “spirit of God,” or pray for “the spirit of Jesus to be upon us” whom I knew had not the slightest idea of affirming belief in the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. The Apostles’ Creed said flatly: I believe in the Holy Ghost.
Incidentally, it was a bad day for Trinitarian belief in Methodism when Holy Spirit was substituted for Holy Ghost in our copies of the creed. I am one who said so at the table when this was done, as I was on the Commission on Worship when the change was made. One distinguished leader argued that the word ghost had connotations that made it frightening to children; another stated that the word spirit out of the Latin Sanctus Spiritus had always been in the church. Old Dr. Forlines of the Methodist Protestant group, who combined vast erudition with practical sagacity, moved that we print two editions of the Creed, with Holy Spirit in one and Holy Ghost in the other. So we voted, but when the edition of the Creed came out in Ritual and Discipline of the early 1940’s it was Holy Spirit and that only. (I am glad to see that in our new Hymnal in the Creed we have got an asterisk which allows Holy Ghost as an alternative.)
The difficulty is that the word Spirit lends itself to all sorts of interpretations, as there may be 57 varieties of a holy spirit. The name Holy Ghost cannot possibly be mistaken for any emanation or effulgence, but denominates unmistakably the Ineffable Person who with the Father and the Son is to be worshiped forever.
And what of the church? Well, there is no church at all in the Modern Affirmation. In the Korean Creed it becomes a “fellowship for worship and for service.” It is that, of course, but the church, holy and catholic, far transcends earthly patterns of work and worship. It has an entity all its own apart from the fellowship of its earthly members, which fellowship of course is a precious matter. But the church is something vastly more. It is the “pillar and ground of the truth”; “purchased by the blood of Christ”; it is the “company of the first born in heaven”; it exemplifies and embodies the communion of the saints, those on earth and those in glory; it is the body of which Christ is the head, and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail; and this church, holy and catholic, is not even mentioned in the modern substitute creed.
One would not know there is a communion of saints and a forgiveness of sins. Neither are mentioned in the Modern Affirmation. Neither is there a resurrection of the body and a life everlasting in the Modern Affirmation. The goal of it all is “to the end that the kingdom of God may come upon the earth.’’ The Korean does do it better with a belief in the “final triumph of righteousness” – doesn’t say when or where – and while it affirms life everlasting, it leaves out the resurrection of the body.
The fact is, this Modern Affirmation (leave the Korean Creed aside a moment) was written and adopted in the heyday of that curious, optimistic, irresponsible liberalism that came to full flower in the first three or four decades of this century. Anyone could then see that the world was getting better and better. To stop war, you simply promised not to fight. (Hitler and Mussolini were waiting in the wings.) To bring in the kingdom, you got laws passed in Washington, and the idea that the spirit of man could be evil – well, this was our Father’s world, and “pie in the sky by and by” was the contemptuous way in which the whole concept of eternity was banished.
Then came on one world war and then came another and all that unthoughted, this-worldly optimism was swept away by genocide and torture on a cosmic scale worthy of the Dark Ages, and the emergence as world powers of proudly atheistic nations. It was realized anew what the church of the ages has always known – that there is a vast malevolent spirit of evil loose in the world (Edwin Lewis wrote God and the Adversary to express this powerfully), that it is a kingdom not of this world which the Lord came to bring and which remains always the true inheritance of the people of Christ. But 1910-1939 couldn’t see it.
Another thing that should be said is that when any item of the Apostles’ Creed is omitted, the whole corpus of belief is mutilated and denatured. Many people do not believe in the Virgin Birth and so do not repeat the creed in order to avoid affirming that. But see what happens when no mention is made of the Lord’s birth. There will be belief in “God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,” etc. No true Incarnation – God just picked out a good man, a normally born Jesus, and made him to be both Christ and Lord, redeemed the world by Him, and has “put all things under His feet!” No real Advent; no tidings of great joy; God to be father just used the body of a human male (proxy fatherhood!) to bring into the world His co-eternal Son! It simply does not add up, certainly not against Matthew and Luke. Admittedly the Virgin Birth is a matter of faith, as it is something which no man, living or dead, ever could or ever can prove or disprove, and which the Virgin Mary herself said she could not understand. But I do not think modern theologians see what they give up when they glibly say they cannot accept it.
Or try ending the Creed at: He ascended into heaven. Period. Period. No Session, no Return, no final Judgment “where the works of earth are tried by a juster judge than here.” Where does that leave us? Right with those modern novelists who clearly depict all the injustices of this world, and cry out against all its evils and wrongs, but not believing in any God, or any world where things will be righted, they take their shotgun and their life. And why not? If there be no God to “judge the living and the dead” why not a pistol or a bottle of sleeping tablets? No wonder the world lacks hope and purpose if it lacks the whole Gospel.
To be sure, we Methodists do leave out the “descent into hell,” but even those who affirm it never claim that it is of the esse of the Faith. John Wesley did keep the descent into hell in the text of the Creed he sent to American Methodism (in Adult Baptism), but he struck out the Article of Religion (Number III of the XXXIX) affirming it, when he picked out 24 of the articles for us here. But on this side, Coke and Asbury got the descent into hell out of the text of the creed in short order. Research shows it is not in the early copies of the creed; there is no sure Scripture for it; and whether it happened or did not happen, it is not relevant to the vast truths of Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Judgment to come, basic to the Gospel itself.
Analyzing these “modern” affirmations is not done to argue with brother ministers and leaders of worship over what they personally believe or do not believe. What is objected to is the public palming off as “the Holy Faith of the Church,” these 20th-century affirmations which sound so lofty and leave out so much. If they supplement, yes; if they supplant, no. Let the Apostles’ Creed be used and let its verities be explained and preached – the whole Gospel for the whole world.
Bishop Nolan B. Harmon (1892-1993) was a retired episcopal leader of the Methodist Church when this article was published. He retired from the active episcopacy in 1964. In retirement he edited the Encyclopedia of World Methodism and served as a visiting professor at Emory University, continuing there into his 96th year. This article was condensed from Christian Advocate August 22, 1968. Used by permission. Copyright © 1968 by The Methodist Publishing House.
by Steve | Sep 11, 1973 | Uncategorized
Many Hearts are with You: A warm episcopal welcome
September 1973
By Earl G. Hunt, Jr., Resident Bishop
Charlotte (NC) Area, United Methodist Church
We are honored and privileged and delighted to have you meeting within the boundaries of the Charlotte Area, the Western North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. I bring greetings not only as the Resident Bishop of this area, but also as the president of the College of Bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction.
When I pastored in the city of Atlanta many, many years ago, I had a dear old parishioner who was a widower. Every time I went to visit, he served me a memorable refreshment: a collard greens sandwich, without relief of mayonnaise. It was a sore trial, imposed on the fidelity of the pastoral spirit of a Christian minister. But the reason I remember this dear old gentleman is because of something that he said to me again and again: “I knowed you was coming because you was so long about it.”
Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with the trends within the Christian community ought to have known that a resurgence of interest in evangelical religion was coming—because it was so long about it.
I have already told you how welcome you are: now as a bishop of the church, I want to make three very simple observations. I trust these will find their way appropriately into the context of this high and holy and significant Convocation week.
First, our plight (that is, the plight of the Christian Church) is in many ways a plight for which we, ourselves, are primarily responsible. I’m aware that there is a kind of apocalyptic secularism round about us. This has created a climate in which it is difficult to think spiritual thoughts or to do spiritual things, but there are some other factors, not as far removed from the preachers as the lay people of the church. For example, there has been an overemphasis on organizational structure. Organization is essential, but it ought always to be kept to a silent minimum.
There has been a doctrinal dilution- a failure on the part of the Church to articulate the great truths about God, about His Son, about His Holy Spirit, about human sin, about salvation, about prayer, about judgment, about eternity. As a result we have produced a generation of spiritual pygmies instead of religious giants.
There has been an eclipse of preaching, but I thank God that it seems to be in the process of vanishing! I have never noticed that my Charlotte area churches have had serious attendance or budget problems when there was a messenger of God standing in the pulpit week after week, saying something in a language that the people could understand, about the Good News of Jesus Christ. Before we blame the times totally, for the problem in which we find ourselves, we ought, as honest men and women, to take a long look at those things for which we ourselves are responsible.
Second, the tides of the hour are with the evangelical movement. My dear friends, you have no idea how favorable the climate of the church is for those concerns in which you are interested. You have no idea how friendly the viewpoint and how great is the anxiety of the bishops about these concerns. I could go down the roster of episcopal leaders and give you name after name after name of your own bishops whose hearts are with you all the way.
However there are three perils that give me grave anxiety as I confront my own deep commitment to the evangelical cause—and as I view yours. The first of these is false doctrine. There isn’t anybody as badly mixed up in the Christian community as an evangelical Christian who is basically wrong on some of the things he believes. The charismatic movement has brought so many signs of hope to our move-in history. But it has also brought possibilities of real peril for those who misunderstand the truths of God about the Christian experience or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
I spent yesterday in Winston Salem with one of God’s great gentlemen, Dr. John R. Church. We were having dinner together and he said to me, “In this whole business of the modern tongues movement, we have to be very very careful to discern that which is of God, as opposed to that which is of the devil.”
He went on to say something which I, personally, believe to be extremely basic and important-that our safest course in determining the truth about the Holy Spirit is to follow the classical Biblical, Wesleyan position on this great doctrine. It is a corrective for some of the contemporary misinterpretations of this truth. We have to watch false doctrine.
Also, we have to guard against having only a superficial social consciousness and conscience. The time is past (if indeed it ever existed) when real religion could flourish apart from a redemptive ministry to the great agonies of mankind. You cannot live as a Christian apart from the problems of racism, poverty, and the moral revolution in our day. Where these great issues exist, God expects His children to take stands for righteousness. My friends, the only evangelical movement that can survive and bless this generation is the evangelical movement that has, without apology and with great courage, a forthright Christian position on the great social issues of our day. We mustn’t wear it as a veneer; we must acknowledge it as a part of the timber of our faith.
And then there is the age-old peril, the religious sin of pharisaism. I live with it every day. I realize that I’m so often right on things, don’t you? It’s very hard for me not to be judgmental where you’re concerned, when you don’t see it my way. Oh, God needs to give to every born-again Christian a fresh outpouring of the gift of humility. We need to remember that judgment is the prerogative of the Almighty, and not the privilege of His child. This pharisaism, it turns off the world we want to convert, before the world ever has a chance to hear the message of the Savior.
Three perils. This is the hour of evangelical religion, but these three things haunt us.
Finally, Heaven will bless this week, and this great movement within the United Methodist Church, if there is always integrity, and if there is always a compassion in the enterprise. That means that our proper objectives are the glory of God, the good of His Church, and the salvation of human beings. That’s all. That’s all. No self-glory, no self-aggrandizement, no vengeance upon a structure or a church that somehow did us wrong, just the glory of the Heavenly Father, and the strengthening and the good of the church, and the salvation of human beings.
If our hands and our hearts are pure, we are as certain to receive Heaven’s blessing as we are sitting here tonight.
Let me close with a text. Over in the book of Judges, 5th chapter, 20th verse, there is one of those great, startling sentences of Scripture. Across the years it has spoken to me and ministered to me as a Christian man. It’s part of the triumphant chant of a woman named Deborah, the warrior prophetess of Israel.
You remember the story—Sisera was the captain of the hosts of the King of Canaan. And it was Sisera who was leading the forces against God’s people. Suddenly Deborah cried out that the very stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
This is one of the great truths of the Christian faith. There’s something in God’s universe, there’s something in the very nature of His creation, that means all of the forces that He ever made ally themselves on the side of His righteousness. And so we do not stand alone! We do not battle in solitary agony. The stars in their courses fight for us. It’s still His Church, my friends. Not yours, not mine. It’s still His Church. And the stars in their courses fight for the causes of God.
by Steve | Sep 9, 1973 | Uncategorized
Many Hearts are with You: A warm episcopal welcome
September 1973
By Earl G. Hunt, Jr., Resident Bishop Charlotte (NC) Area, United Methodist Church
We are honored and privileged and delighted to have you meeting within the boundaries of the Charlotte Area, the Western North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. I bring greetings not only as the Resident Bishop of this area, but also as the president of the College of Bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction.
When I pastored in the city of Atlanta many, many years ago, I had a dear old parishioner who was a widower. Every time I went to visit, he served me a memorable refreshment: a collard greens sandwich, without relief of mayonnaise. It was a sore trial, imposed on the fidelity of the pastoral spirit of a Christian minister. But the reason I remember this dear old gentleman is because of something that he said to me again and again: “I knowed you was coming because you was so long about it.”
Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with the trends within the Christian community ought to have known that a resurgence of interest in evangelical religion was coming—because it was so long about it.
I have already told you how welcome you are: now as a bishop of the church, I want to make three very simple observations. I trust these will find their way appropriately into the context of this high and holy and significant Convocation week.
First, our plight (that is, the plight of the Christian Church) is in many ways a plight for which we, ourselves, are primarily responsible. I’m aware that there is a kind of apocalyptic secularism round about us. This has created a climate in which it is difficult to think spiritual thoughts or to do spiritual things, but there are some other factors, not as far removed from the preachers as the lay people of the church. For example, there has been an overemphasis on organizational structure. Organization is essential, but it ought always to be kept to a silent minimum.
There has been a doctrinal dilution- a failure on the part of the Church to articulate the great truths about God, about His Son, about His Holy Spirit, about human sin, about salvation, about prayer, about judgment, about eternity. As a result we have produced a generation of spiritual pygmies instead of religious giants.
There has been an eclipse of preaching, but I thank God that it seems to be in the process of vanishing! I have never noticed that my Charlotte area churches have had serious attendance or budget problems when there was a messenger of God standing in the pulpit week after week, saying something in a language that the people could understand, about the Good News of Jesus Christ. Before we blame the times totally, for the problem in which we find ourselves, we ought, as honest men and women, to take a long look at those things for which we ourselves are responsible.
Second, the tides of the hour are with the evangelical movement. My dear friends, you have no idea how favorable the climate of the church is for those concerns in which you are interested. You have no idea how friendly the viewpoint and how great is the anxiety of the bishops about these concerns. I could go down the roster of episcopal leaders and give you name after name after name of your own bishops whose hearts are with you all the way.
However there are three perils that give me grave anxiety as I confront my own deep commitment to the evangelical cause—and as I view yours. The first of these is false doctrine. There isn’t anybody as badly mixed up in the Christian community as an evangelical Christian who is basically wrong on some of the things he believes. The charismatic movement has brought so many signs of hope to our move-in history. But it has also brought possibilities of real peril for those who misunderstand the truths of God about the Christian experience or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
I spent yesterday in Winston Salem with one of God’s great gentlemen, Dr. John R. Church. We were having dinner together and he said to me, “In this whole business of the modern tongues movement, we have to be very very careful to discern that which is of God, as opposed to that which is of the devil.”
He went on to say something which I, personally, believe to be extremely basic and important-that our safest course in determining the truth about the Holy Spirit is to follow the classical Biblical, Wesleyan position on this great doctrine. It is a corrective for some of the contemporary misinterpretations of this truth. We have to watch false doctrine.
Also, we have to guard against having only a superficial social consciousness and conscience. The time is past (if indeed it ever existed) when real religion could flourish apart from a redemptive ministry to the great agonies of mankind. You cannot live as a Christian apart from the problems of racism, poverty, and the moral revolution in our day. Where these great issues exist, God expects His children to take stands for righteousness. My friends, the only evangelical movement that can survive and bless this generation is the evangelical movement that has, without apology and with great courage, a forthright Christian position on the great social issues of our day. We mustn’t wear it as a veneer; we must acknowledge it as a part of the timber of our faith.
And then there is the age-old peril, the religious sin of pharisaism. I live with it every day. I realize that I’m so often right on things, don’t you? It’s very hard for me not to be judgmental where you’re concerned, when you don’t see it my way. Oh, God needs to give to every born-again Christian a fresh outpouring of the gift of humility. We need to remember that judgment is the prerogative of the Almighty, and not the privilege of His child. This pharisaism, it turns off the world we want to convert, before the world ever has a chance to hear the message of the Savior.
Three perils. This is the hour of evangelical religion, but these three things haunt us.
Finally, Heaven will bless this week, and this great movement within the United Methodist Church, if there is always integrity, and if there is always a compassion in the enterprise. That means that our proper objectives are the glory of God, the good of His Church, and the salvation of human beings. That’s all. That’s all. No self-glory, no self-aggrandizement, no vengeance upon a structure or a church that somehow did us wrong, just the glory of the Heavenly Father, and the strengthening and the good of the church, and the salvation of human beings.
If our hands and our hearts are pure, we are as certain to receive Heaven’s blessing as we are sitting here tonight.
Let me close with a text. Over in the book of Judges, 5th chapter, 20th verse, there is one of those great, startling sentences of Scripture. Across the years it has spoken to me and ministered to me as a Christian man. It’s part of the triumphant chant of a woman named Deborah, the warrior prophetess of Israel.
You remember the story—Sisera was the captain of the hosts of the King of Canaan. And it was Sisera who was leading the forces against God’s people. Suddenly Deborah cried out that the very stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
This is one of the great truths of the Christian faith. There’s something in God’s universe, there’s something in the very nature of His creation, that means all of the forces that He ever made ally themselves on the side of His righteousness. And so we do not stand alone! We do not battle in solitary agony. The stars in their courses fight for us. It’s still His Church, my friends. Not yours, not mine. It’s still His Church. And the stars in their courses fight for the causes of God.
by Steve | Aug 9, 1973 | Uncategorized
“Christ Above All?”
Condensed from an address by United Methodist Evangelist Ed Robb
From the St. Louis Good News Convocation
Good News Summer 1973
I think I would like first of all to give you a word of encouragement. I travel all over the United States, around the world. In recent years and the last two or three years particularly, I’ve seen the Spirit of God moving as I have never seen before in my lifetime. And of course, many of you have found this true also.
But another thing that encourages me is, more and more, I am seeing the Spirit of God working in the United Methodist Church. And I believe that this great Good News Movement has made a significant contribution toward that end. I believe that great things are going to happen yet in the United Methodist Church. I am seeing more evangelicals in positions of leadership and taking part in the structures of the church than I have ever known in my 26 years in the ministry. I am encouraged about this. I believe that there is a place for those of us who call ourselves conservatives in the United Methodist Church. I believe there is a place of leadership for us. I believe we have a contribution to make within the United Methodist Church.
I was ordained a good many years ago, and when I was ordained, I knew that the leadership of the United Methodist Church was dominated by liberalism. This would be the case of almost every man here tonight who is a United Methodist minister. Is that not right? You knew it was a liberal church.
But I have found a freedom to serve my lord in the United Methodist Church. I have never had a district superintendent or a bishop who has tried to tell me what to preach.
I also want to say this. I have been told for many years, that United Methodism is an “inclusive” church, a pluralistic church. I believe it is. And I appreciate this fact. There is room for me. But if this is a pluralistic church, why can we evangelicals not have representatives on the faculties of the theological seminaries of United Methodism? I would guess that a great percentage, if not the greater percentage, of money that is being given to United Methodist institutions is being given by evangelicals. By conservatives. I want to know why — if we are an inclusive church — we do not have our representatives within the institutions of our denomination? Recently a United Methodist institution had two vacancies in the department of religion. I submitted the names of five competent Ph.D’s who had degrees. from prestige schools. But not one of them was chosen. I ask you why. I ask you, United Methodist leaders, Give us a chance! Give us a place of expression. Give us a part in the decision-making processes of United Methodism.
If we do not have representatives in the religion departments of our colleges and our theological seminaries, you are going to see the money and the students going elsewhere.
We have come to St. Louis to give witness to the Church and to the world, “Above All Christ.” This is an attractive slogan. It is a proper theme for a Convocation of evangelical Christians. For we affirm that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself (II Corinthians 5:19}. The only God that we know is the God that has come to us in Jesus Christ. All other great religions are founded upon a system, upon ethics, upon philosophy; the Christian faith is founded upon a Person, Jesus Christ. He is our message. He is our hope. He is our religion. He is our salvation. He is our God. It is to Him that we owe our allegiance. We worship Him. We adore Him. We come to St. Louis to praise Him. He is our King. The best definition I ever heard for Christianity is this: Jesus Christ. He is our faith. So, we say, “Above All, Christ.”
Now what does this affirmation imply? It’s easy to have a motto, a theme. But if we really mean it, what does it demand of us? “Above all, Christ.” If we are going to put Christ above all, it is going to require courage. But I have discovered that when you really follow Christ, unapologetically, without reservation, He gives you the courage.
General William Booth was standing before a Methodist Conference, asking for an appointment as evangelist. They voted “no” and Katherine Booth stood up in the balcony and she cried out, “No, never! No, never, William.”
William Booth walked out of the conference without any security, but obeying God — and founded the great Salvation Army.
If we are going to put Christ above all, we will likely be controversial. This Convocation is controversial. This Movement, as most of you know, is controversial. But any vital movement is going to be a controversial movement. And any person who takes a clear stand for Jesus Christ is likely to be a controversial person. We are likely to challenge the status quo. And there’s too much vested self-interest, too many anxious to preserve the status quo.
We look back at such great men of the Church as Martin Luther. But don’t you ever forget that in his lifetime Luther was controversial, a most hated man. I see him standing before the Diet of Worms. They demand that he recant his Protestant faith, and Martin Luther cries out, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. Here I stand. I can do no other.”
Today John Wesley is universally respected, but it was not always so. He was invited to preach at Oxford University, and in the afternoon after his sermon he wrote, “I preached at Oxford today, but I fear it was for the last time. He was almost right; it was 30 years before he was invited back. They thought that they had invited a frustrated priest, but instead a flaming evangelist came to the campus. They did not want that; he was controversial.
The prophets of God, by their very nature, are controversial. They challenge the status quo. They probe our conscience. They make us uncomfortable. The Church has a history of killing her prophets and then 300 years later canonizing them. We love dead saints, but we don’t care for living prophets. But I would that God would raise up in our time the prophets of courage and boldness who would die to declare the truth of God.
If we are going to put Christ above all, then we are going to have a compassionate concern for the hurts, the heartaches, sins, and the suffering of this world. Oh, that as Christians, as evangelicals, we would be moved by the suffering of the world! It hurts me when my liberal friends are making a greater impression upon the world about their concern and about their care than you and I are making. We must carry a burden for the lostness of the world, if “Above All, Christ” is truly our theme. We must love the unlovely and the lonely, if we are truly going to be followers of Jesus Christ. Evangelicals are not going to make the impact that we want to on the Church and the world by witch-hunting for doctrinal heresy or by political manipulation. I have never read in the history of the Church where revival or renewal have ever come that way, have you? If we are going to experience renewal, and if God is going to use us in the Church today to glorify Christ, to bring needed reform in the Church, it is going to be because the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ is in us. Not only that we are orthodox. Not only that we believe the Book.
Hardnosed fundamentalists seeing a heresy behind every bush are a most unattractive people. There is nothing so dead as dead orthodoxy. Evangelicals maneuvering for political power tend to become like those they are seeking to replace.
I recognize the need of working through the structure. I recognize the need of participating in conference debates. But let us remember this: we have never yet had a revival because of a victory at General Conference. We have never seen renewal come to the Church because some individual was elected bishop. Revival and renewal follow Pentecost. When we have a Pentecost, then we are likely to see change in the Church. When you and I make a full surrender, make a complete dedication, when we have a new baptism with the Holy Ghost, then we are likely to have revival. Then we are likely to see changes at General Conference. Then we are likely to see some great men raised up by God, elected to the episcopacy, to lead us forward in a mighty way. It follows Pentecost, it does not precede Pentecost.
I challenge you today, fellow evangelicals, fellow United Methodists, fellow Christians, to put “Christ above all” in stewardship. I’ve been hearing something lately that disturbs me greatly: “God’s children deserve the best.”
When I was in Chile a while back, I was preaching at a community called Libertad. A humble, frame, unpainted Methodist Church. It was 40 degrees, and they didn’t have heat in the building. They had no organ. They didn’t have a piano, and they had little rough benches that people sat on. I ‘II always remember the day I walked up to that little church. There, standing in the mud, in the rain, in 40-degree weather, was a little 10-year-old Chilean girl barefooted. When I go back to Chile, I ‘II tell that little girl (and the tens of thousands like her all over the world) that American evangelical Christians deserve the best. I’m sorry we couldn’t send you any shoes. I’m sorry we couldn’t help you paint your Church. American evangelical Christians deserve the best.
I was in India last year. We went up to a typical Indian village. And we went into a typical Indian village home. Open fire with no chimney. Two dark rooms with no ventilation. Seven children sleeping on the cow-dung floor beside their father and mother. Two water buffaloes, their most prized possession, in that same room sleeping with them there. Their annual income was $60.00. When I go back to India, I’ll tell them that American Christians deserve the best.
A prominent author recently said that any Christian minister who has more than two suits is a hustler. There’s just enough truth in that statement to make me feel rather uncomfortable. Does it you?
“Above all, Christ” . . . in stewardship. We have professed the faith, but we have not always lived it. We have talked humility, sacrifice, but our hearts have shrunk from them. We have lived to see militant atheists stagger us with the utterness of their self-giving.
Have you read Dr. Sangster’s The Pure in Heart? It’s a great book. He tells of Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers, an editor of Time magazine and a former communist. One of the grand jurors asked, “Mr. Chambers, what does it mean to be a Communist?”
He answered that when he was a Communist, he had three heroes. One was a Pole, one was a German Jew, and the third was a Russian. He said the Pole was arrested for taking part in the Red terror of Warsaw. When he was put into prison, he requested that he be given the job of cleaning the latrines of the other prisoners, for he said, “It is a Communist philosophy that the highest and most developed of the party must be willing to do the lowliest of tasks.” This is one of the things it means to be a Communist, Whitaker Chambers said. His second hero, a German Jew, was arrested for participating in a revolt. He stood before the military tribunal; the judge sentenced him to death. Eugene Levine said proudly, “We Communists are always under the sentence of death.” Mr. Chambers said, “That, too, is what it means to be a Communist.”
He said his third hero was a Russian pro-revolutionary who had been arrested for his part in attempting to assassinate the Czarist Prime Minister. He was sent to Siberia. He wanted to bring to the attention of the world the awful conditions of Siberian labor, so one day he drenched his body in gasoline and became a living torch.
Whitaker Chambers said, “This, too, is what it means to be a Communist.”
While we have been talking about commitment, while we have been playing church, while we have been mouthing the words, while we have been going through the motions, the Communists have become more committed, and they have conquered more than 1/3 of the world – while we have been in retreat.
I’ve got a minister friend with a large church. One day one of his inactive members called him and said, “I’d like to come by for coffee.” While they were drinking coffee, the layman said, “Do you happen to have a pledge card?”
Now if you want to make your pastor happy, just ask for a pledge card! The pastor gave him a card and the man signed the pledge for $600 a month. The pastor was rather astounded. He said, “Would you mind telling me why you made this generous pledge? You haven’t been giving anything to the church.”
The layman said, “I’ve been successful at making a living, but I’ve been a failure at making a life. I have a son who has a rather meager salary, but he is giving $600 a month to the cause of Communism. I cannot allow my son to outgive me,”
Are we going to allow a pagan world to outgive us? To outlove us? Are we going to be committed to Jesus Christ? Are we truly going to put “Christ Above All” in our lives?
I have been studying some conference journals. They reveal some interesting facts. I have discovered that churches with evangelical pastors have the best record in missionary giving. Their Advance Special record is impressive. I have also discovered that these same churches have a better evangelistic record. Evangelicals have the motivation to win the world to Christ.
Lest we smugly wrap the robes of self-righteousness around ourselves, we should look more closely at the facts. I have a liberal friend of whom I have been most critical. The other day I was visiting with him and discovered that he goes to the jail every Sunday to share Christ’s love with the prisoners. I have not witnessed in a jail in years. Also, I learned that he has been actively involved in the black churches of our city. Before we throw stones, we had better examine ourselves.
Have we put “Christ Above All?”
Some time ago I read a novel about a young married woman who was having severe personal problems. She had a brother who was a renowned priest. Someone suggested that she discuss her problem with her brother. “Oh, no,” she said, “I could not do that. He is too busy with important things like ecumenicity to be bothered with me.”
Is that the story of some of us? Have we been so busy with important things like church renewal that we have no time for persons?
I know an evangelist who has traveled around the world preaching the Gospel. He has preached from some of the great pulpits, coast to coast. Last month he was working in his yard. Two young boys aged seven and three stopped and visited with him. He asked them if they went to church.
“No!”
He asked them if they knew who Jesus was.
“No!”
They lived across the back alley from the evangelist — I am that evangelist.
Are we witnessing? Are we witnessing where we are?
If we are serious about putting “Christ Above All” we must carry Him out into the world. Too long we have proclaimed the Gospel from the captivity of the sanctuary! Too long we have been satisfied to convince the convinced! Too long we have moved in the isolation of a Christian ghetto! Are we frightened by the world? Are we inhibited by the world? Are we insecure in the world? Is our concept of the Kingdom of God and the duty of a Christian too limited?
Some time ago I was in the home of a Presbyterian elder. Some friends called and asked him to go to the precinct convention of his political party the following week. He answered that he did not have the time because he was going to a Christian meeting that particular night.
I submit to you that the political convention might have demanded his Christian concern more than the committee meeting scheduled at his church. The Kingdom of God does not stop at the front door of our churches. Our faith demands involvement in the world, in the name of Christ.
Three years ago, last January I was in Kansas City. One afternoon I was having coffee with three young ministers. One said to me, “Ed, last summer I was in Chicago at the Democratic Convention and participated in the demonstrations.”
I said to him, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
He answered, “Ed, I have chosen the way of radical obedience. I am completely dedicated to Jesus Christ.”
I felt rebuked. For while I disagreed with this young man very much, I had to respect his dedication. He was willing to put his reputation, his ministry, his future, his very life on the line for what he believed. And where were most of us moderates and conservatives? At home watching our color television sets in the comfort of our airconditioned homes, wringing our hands and crying out, “What is the world corning to?”
Some time ago I received a magazine with a statement by Jonathan Edwards on the cover. I liked it so well that I pinned it on my clothes closet wall. This is the statement. “Resolved, to live with all my might while I do live.” I like that, don’t you? I see so many people vegetating, not really living. There are so many who are carefully protecting themselves. I want to live with all my might!
So, I have changed the statement and made it my own. It now has been painted by an artist, is framed, and hangs on my study wall. It reads: “Resolved, to live with all my might for Christ, while I do live.” □
by Steve | Aug 9, 1973 | Uncategorized
Supremacy of Christ
By Bishop Kenneth W. Copeland
Summer 1973 (died at the age of 61 in August of 1973)
“And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way. (Ephesians 1:22-23)
Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, His Body. This is the message Paul is affirming without any reservation whatsoever. The Church has been at its best at those times when it has been most committed to this irreversible truth. When the Church fails to be the Church, when it fails in its witness to the world, it is because it fails at the point of recognizing and responding to Jesus Christ as Head of the Church.
Today the divine call is for the Church to see with the eyes of Christ, to hear with the ears of Christ, to think with the mind of Christ, to love with the heart of Christ, to heal with the hands of Christ and to speak with the voice of Christ. If I read the mind of this Convocation correctly, I believe that is why we’re here. And what we believe the mission of the Church is all about. I believe this truth is absolutely basic to everything we talk about, hope for, pray and work for with respect to the renewal of the Church. What does concern us is that the Church will make a vivid and vital rediscovery of Jesus Christ as its Head and recommit the message and mission of the Church to His will in our day.
There is far more in these verses than any one human being can fully comprehend. However, it is both our duty and our privilege to examine what Paul is trying to say here under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
First, Paul is proclaiming the supremacy of Christ, the preeminence of Christ. The Layman’s Bible Commentary paraphrases part of verse 18 in this manner: “Christ is the source of the Church’s life, since He rose first from the dead that others might rise through Him. Thus in all things, in Church as well a.s universe, He shows Himself supreme.”
How very important this is – and always has been – to any adequate understanding of the Church and its witness in the world! In the days of his flesh, our blessed Lord confronted his disciples with this question, “Who do you say I am?” On the answer to that question, the Christian and the Church either stand or fall. Nothing else matters very much if that question is not answered correctly, within the limits of our own humanity and the limits of our faith.
No creeds, no activism, no philosophy, no resolution, no dialogue, no restructuring of organizations, no church program nor policy will avail much which does not arise out of a firm conviction that “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
It makes a great deal of difference who we believe Jesus Christ is. Here is the profound and decisive difference between the Christian faith and all other religions. It separates them not in degree but in kind. Religions are man’s search for God; the Gospel is God’s search for man.
The Revised Standard Version has it that “in everything He might be preeminent.” Everything! “For in Him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell.” The Greek word translated “fulness” means totality. That is, the totality of divine powers chose to make their abode in Him. This phrase, therefore, claims full deity for Christ.
There’s a difference between divinity and deity. Not many people debate the divinity of Jesus Christ. Divinity is an attribute of God. Therefore, love is divine. Truth is divine. Beauty is divine. The Christian home is divine. The Church is divine. Divinity is an attribute of God, but Deity is God. The incarnation is the one great irreversible fact of history. God revealed himself in the human dimensions of Jesus. Witness the question of Philip, for example, at the Last Supper, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied” (John 14:8). Jesus answered, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father … ”
Dr. John Lawson is Professor of Church History at Candler School of Theology. In his book An Evangelical Faith for Today, he said, “The evangelical must insist that a further essential to the Christian system (without which the whole falls and upon which there can be no compromise) is that our Lord is the unique, divine incarnation in the full historic sense of the word. He’s the divine son made man, fully human, fully divine, one real Person, the permanent union of God with his handiwork, and the personal entry of God into the history of this world.” Let us reaffirm our unquestioned belief in the supremacy, the preeminence of Jesus Christ. The effectiveness of the Church’s witness in the world, in both the personal and the social dimensions of human life and society, depends upon the full acceptance of this truth, and our obedience to it.
Another great truth which comes to us from this Colossian passage is the power of Christ. It’s not accidental, my dear friends, that the Great Commission of our Lord is predicated by Jesus’ affirmation that all power had been given to Him, both in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). Then follows his promise that he will be with us always, even unto the end of the world.
The intimacy of His divine companionship and the promise and provision of His power are set within the context of mission. Now let us add to the promises inherent in the Great Commission, the promise that he gave his disciples just before his Ascension to the Father “You will receive power after the Holy Spirit is come upon you, and you will be witnesses unto me in all Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The greatest need of the Church today is this power Jesus promised us we could have. Yet perhaps no dimension of the Church’s life and ministry is quite so misunderstood. It is popular, relevant and contemporary to talk about power structures within the Church. It’s also popular to demand a “piece of that pie.” For some, it is the “in” thing to organize our own power structures to fight the established power structures, fighting fire with fire. The end result is that all of us are severely burned in the process, and the Kingdom of God grinds down to a slow walk.
I hold no brief for persons who seek to dominate the program and the progress of the Church. I do not believe in dictatorships of any kind, whether of bishops or boards, of pastors or presidents, of lay or ordained persons. It would be presumption of the worst sort for any one of us to assume that he or she could take over the powers of the Head of the Church. One thing is clear: we’re on a dead end street if we believe that’s the way to become empowered. The Church cannot grant power to persons. I want to say this again because you’re going to have to think very deeply at this moment The Church cannot grant power to people – that is, the kind of power Jesus was talking about, and the kind of power the Church must have to be the Church. The Church itself does not empower persons, it cannot empower ordained or unordained persons, laity or clergy, women or men, youth or age, white or nonwhite, rich or poor. The Church does not empower; only the Holy Spirit empowers.
The Church does, however, have the right and responsibility to grant authority to certain persons to speak and act in the name of the Church, in the pursuit of its witness in the world. The discipline of our church spells out these areas of authority and responsibility given to ordained and unordained persons, and we’re cautioned in Christian conscience to give a good account of our stewardship of this authority. However, at no point in the Discipline nor in the practice of the Church does the Church promise it can empower any one of us.
The power I speak of here, of course, is that power that Jesus promised would come – the power of redeeming, reconciling, recreating love. In relation to this power our lord affirms three great truths. First, He possesses it: “All power is given unto me.” Second, He promises it: “You will receive power.” Third, He provides it: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
A bishop cannot increase a minister’s power by moving him or her to a larger parish. A person does not suddenly come into possession of this power when elected and consecrated a bishop. The opportunity to serve on some board or agency of the Church may give a person an enlarged opportunity to let the power of God flow through him or her in different and sometimes more creative channels. However, serving on boards and agencies of the church does not, in itself, grant a person spiritual power. Neither can spiritual power be gained by a struggle or a shrewd manipulation of the minds and wills of other persons for our own selfish ends. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. This is the pathway to power, the only pathway.
It should be clear to those who read the Scripture and study the experience of the Church that the Holy Spirit is a gift from the Father. Read those precious promises in the 14th, 15th and 16th Chapters of John’s Gospel, where Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit’s coming. Let me just pick out phrases: “I will ask the Father and he will give you another to be your Advocate.” And then again He refers to the Holy Spirit “whom the Father will send In my name,” and still again, “when your Advocate is come whom I will send you from the Father,” and then again, “When he comes, who Is the Spirit of all truth.”
These are promises of a divine gift from the Father, not of something one earns, works for, deserves, or for whom ritual preconditions must be met. The Holy Spirit is a gift! The power of God is a gift! However, he must be received through faith; in confidence that He meant what he said, and He will do what he promised. That he initiates the offer of himself, that he stands at the door and knocks, that he will come in if we but open the door, that he will sup with us and we with him. Blessed, blessed promises, indeed!
The Holy Spirit comes as a gift from the Father and must be received through faith. Then he will abide in our hearts, and in the Church, and empower us and the Church as we obey Him. Jesus declared that the standard at the judgment would simply be “inasmuch as ye did it or did it not unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it or did it not unto me.” Here are both the personal and the social, the individual and the corporate, both the local and the world-wide implications of the Gospel. These have never been separated; they are dimensions of one Gospel, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.
We see in this picture of Christ as the Head of the Church, not only preeminence and power but also his place in the unity of the believers. Paul emphasizes Christ’s headship of the Body, his Church, in his Colossian letter, and emphasizes the individual responsibilities of the various parts of the Body in his 1st Corinthian Letter, Chapter 12. Three things need to be said quickly about the different parts of the Body as this truth applies to the Churches. First, the parts of the body have different functions and different responsibilities. The hand can do many things the foot cannot do. The foot has individual responsibilities other parts of the body cannot perform.
So it is with the Church – not only with different persons of the Church but with different ministries and different congregations. The gifts of the Spirit differ. Some are given the gift of prophecy. Others have the gift of proclamation, others the gift of teaching, others a diversity of responsibilities. This we come to call “pluralism,” at least in some applications of the term.
However, the individual parts function only as they remain within the Body. In his Corinthian Letter, Paul emphasizes the fact that a body is not one single organ but many. And no single organ is the whole body.
No Christian has either the right or the authority simply to “do his own thing” without regard to what it means to the Body. Pluralism is one thing; polarization is another. The one cooperates toward a common goal and brings all the diversities together, making its own distinctive contribution toward that end. But polarization is divisive, hostile, and ultimately destructive.
This truth needs to dawn anew and afresh in our hearts this day, my dear friends. We need to pray for renewal of the sense of belonging to each other. Let us, in the name of God, cease this cold war that exists among us.
The Head is the center of unity for all the parts. For 2,000 years the Church has read and reread our Lord’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed that they might all be one, even as God the Father, and Jesus Christ the Son are one. I do not speak here of organic union, even though I could do so without apology, for the United Methodist Church and its predecessors have long been in the forefront of discussions of organic union and actualizations of union. We’ll continue to dialogue with our Christian brothers and sisters in other denominations about these possibilities.
However, far more important than organic union is the unity we already have in Jesus Christ. No reshuffling of the structure can compensate for the rejection of that unity. No amount of mergers can substitute for unity in Christ. And I’m sure that those who are most committed to the ecumenical movement believe this as much as we do here tonight.
We need not unite in customs or cultures. The Church of Jesus Christ does not require its members to have political or philosophical sameness. No race has any right to attempt to swallow up another race or subordinate its culture. However, all of us who claim the name of Jesus Christ had better learn what it means to co~ together in the Spirit of Jesus Christ and work together under one banner of His redeeming love-and we’d better do it pretty soon or the forces of evil will destroy us before we know what’s happening to us. It is only “in Christ” that there’s no East nor West, no North nor South, no bond or free, no male or female. Equality is in him, unity is in him. And when any two of us come close enough to touch him, we’re close enough to touch each other. The saints have done it; God’s people can do it again.
Finally, it seems to me that Paul’s picture of Christ as the Head of the Church has to do not only with his preeminence, his power and his place as the center of unity, but also with His peace. Here the apostle is speaking about a cosmic Christ. Let me quote it again, “his is the primacy over all created things. Through Him God chose to reconcile the whole universe unto himself, making peace through the shedding of His blood upon the cross” {Colossians 1 :20}.
He charges us to be ministers of that peace and reconciliation. If you read II Corinthians in the New English Bible, you will read these words, “The love of Christ leaves us no choice.” He’s the author of peace in the inner life, for He brings the peace of God to dwell in us through faith. He’s the author of peace between persons by breaking down the middle wall of partition that we’ve allowed our selfishness to build. He’s the author of peace in our world through His lordship of all of life. It remains now for us to let him do his perfect work through us and through the Church, His Body!
by Steve | Aug 9, 1971 | Uncategorized
Christ’s Mighty Victory
By Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr.
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 the words of my theme tonight, 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 dose 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 was a United Methodist bishop in North Carolina.
