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‘The life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us; that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us; yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.’
1Jn_1:2-3 (R.V.)
I. Man’s questions and Christ’s answers.—The first is, What is the real nature of this unseen, infinite, eternal life which lies behind the things we see, creating, sustaining, controlling them? The second is, What is the life in man which can bring him into harmony with the infinite and eternal life? The third is, How can this life, if it may be known, be won and kept? He who is in doubt about the answer to these questions stumbles on in darkness. He who can find an answer has the light of life. And it was the light of life let in upon these great problems that Christ brought in His revelation. To the first of these questions He answered, by Himself coming forth from the unseen life in which eternally He was, and disclosing so far as human eyes can see it, or human minds can understand it—disclosing it as eternally a life of love, moving forth in the eternal relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; a life of which the most perfect human family knit together in the love of its members is only a faint and imperfect reflection. To the second of these questions He gave the answer by bringing that very Divine life into our human nature, living it under human conditions, revealing what it was to be a Son of the most high God, and thus bringing our humanity into union with the Divine life. To the third of these questions He gave the answer that His Spirit was ever dwelling within the heart of our humanity, leading it to respond to the Divine love, infusing into it the Divine life, and so gradually bringing all its energies, desires, and affections into union with God. And that life bestowed by the Spirit is given in a body; so that, by our birth into that body and by our fulfiment of its life and service, we know that the life is within us, even the Divine life which was for ever with the Father. God, infinite, eternal, unfathomable God was in Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ known and loved is eternally in God—the Spirit of the Father and of the Son is with us bringing that Divine life to us, raising us into fellowship with it. This is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is expressed for us in those words which I have chosen as the text—words which summarise from age to age the everlasting witness and message of the Church in every place and in every time.
II. The message of the Church.—This, then, is the revelation which is entrusted to the Christian Church. It is with this revelation in its hand that it goes forth to meet all the movements of human thought and human life in every country and in every age. The attitude of the Christian Church as it goes forth is not that of learning or of seeking: it is that of bearing witness. It knows that this revelation, the secret of Divine life coming down into the world, bringing the world into union with itself—that this is what the world when it comes to know itself wants and must find.
(a) The power with which the Church of Christ can give this witness to the world depends upon its recognising that this revelation cannot change. There is no room in it for development or alteration. It is in itself eternal, all-sufficient, final; and it is the finality of it, the completeness of it, that can alone give the Church that confidence with which it can bear up in its long toil to bring the movements of human life and thought into union with its Christ.
(b) The power of the Church’s witness will depend upon its recognising that while the revelation cannot change, the forms of thought and speech in which men try to explain it and to express it must inevitably change from age to age and clime to clime. In other words, put shortly, revelation is one and constant; theology is varied and variable. It is inevitable, of course, that men must try to put this revelation into words, to explain it to themselves by the use of the forms of thought with which they are familiar. A man must think out his life, even the Divine life, when it reaches him. He must relate it to the rest of his experiences, and in so doing he must use the modes of thought and of speech that are natural to him. And inevitably these modes of thought and speech will be coloured by his own temperament, by the race whose instincts he shares, by the time whose spirit he cannot fail to feel. Therefore these forms and methods of thought and of speech which are called the theology of the Church must shift and vary continually from age to age. There are indeed some forms of thought and speech which have an abiding authority of their own. There are, for example, (i) those forms, those symbols, those ideas which the eternal Christ was pleased in the days of His flesh to use. It was part of the reality of His human nature that they reflect, in many ways, the age in which He lived, the race from which after the flesh He sprang; and yet we must believe that there was a quite peculiar and unique correspondence between these, the forms of His thought and speech, and the everlasting revelation which He came to give. Then (ii) there are forms and words which were used by those whom He Himself instructed. It is true that the thought, for example, of St. Paul moves along the lines of Jewish theology, which are unfamiliar and often unreal to us. It is true that the thought of St. John more and more moved along the lines of thinking of Greece and Alexandria; but yet, who can doubt that the minds which themselves had been impressed by the power of the living Personality of the Divine Teacher Himself, must have expressed themselves in modes of thought and speech which once again have a very real correspondence with the revelation which He came to give. And (iii) there are forms of thought and speech with which the Christian Church has sought to summarise for its children the truth of the revelation. They are embodied in the Creeds. Of course, the language of the Creeds is limited—limited not only by the necessary limitations of human knowledge, but also by the circumstances of thought and language in which they were drawn up. But may we not believe that by the ordering of Divine Providence those modes of thought and of speech, which the Church found best to preserve the integrity and freshness of that first revelation when it was first challenged by the speculations of the human mind, must have always a special authority for every time and for every country?
III. Then this thought enables us to understand the spirit with which the Church should approach other races in the world than those here in the West, which have at least nominally accepted the Christian Faith. The business of the Church, let us say, in the East, to which, with ever-deepening fascination, our thoughts are attracted—the business of the Church in the East is to present the Revelation and leave the East to find out its own theology. We cannot wish—no one with any real vision of what Christ meant His Catholic Church to be can wish—that any race should lose itself in finding Christ, but rather that it should find itself, find all that is deepest and most characteristic in its own God-given attributes, interpreted, fulfilled, claimed, enriched, and deepened in the Divine life which was manifested in Jesus. It must be admitted that in past times this has not always been the spirit with which the Church has fulfilled its missionary vocation. Do we not find everywhere that among other races Christianity is accepted as the white man’s religion? Let me read to you these striking words by one well qualified by knowledge and sympathy to speak of the problems of India: ‘Our educated Christians and native clergy are too often undeveloped Europeans, and they present the gospel to their people in its foreign dress. Chunder Sen summed up the situation in the words, “England has sent to us after all a Western Christ. It seems that the Christ Who has come to us is an Englishman, with English manners and customs, and the temperament and the spirit of an Englishman. National feeling is against our Lord to-day, not because He is Holy, not because He is the Saviour, but because He is Western, and not seen to be the Son of Man and the Saviour of India.” ’ This is true. Before India can be Christianised, Christianity must be naturalised. In the old days when zeal was right in its instincts, but narrow in its outlook, the main thought was to rescue individuals from impending loss; and still, God knows, there must be this impulse to bring to individuals the knowledge of the Christ. But surely the conquest is infinitely the greater if the Indian, the Japanese, the Chinaman finds his way to Christ by his own methods, because he finds in Christ that which interprets best his own national self; and for the future the objective of the Church in its mission to the world must be not only the individual, but the race. It must feel that the object of Christianity is not to deepen but to fulfil all that is most ancient, most true, most deep in the life and thought of all races of the world.
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Archbishop Lang.