Hearsay Religion and the Religion of Experience
Hearsay Religion and the Religion of Experience
Have you had any religious experience? To very many professing Christians this question would be a puzzling one to answer. No one would think of bringing a pair of boots to be mended by a shoemaker who had had no experience, and indeed no one would call such a person a shoemaker. Is it not just as foolish to call oneself a Christian and to make no claim to having any religious experience? To be a Christian there is one experience which is primarily necessary. I am a sinner and I need a saviour and I have found that Saviour in Christ. If we begin there, then we go on to discover that our sinfulness becomes far bulkier in our eyes, and our Saviour appears increasingly wonderful and effective. But this and every other experience of the believer springs from the facts and teachings of Holy Scripture which are enshrined there for all time.
Modernists constantly refer to what has been learned from experience above and beyond what is to be found in the Bible, and people are apt to be awed by their exalted claims. For example, Prof. Davey while denying that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity is found in the New Testament, affirms at the same time that it is “deduced from Scripture and experience.” In exactly the same way the Koran is deduced from Scripture and experience, but the experience is that of Mohammed; and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” is also Scripture and experience, but the experience is that of Mrs Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. What right have Prof. Davey and the Modernists to foist their experience on us any more than Mohammed or Mrs Eddy? I believe in the Holy Spirit because I find the doctrine in the Scriptures, and having found it here I attribute to that Holy Spirit the feeling of sinfulness that is engendered in my heart and the assurance of Christ’s pardon and the hope of heaven.
The facts and doctrines of the faith give birth to all true Christian experience, and are unalterable to all time. That there is a heaven and that there is a hell remains true before people have been in the way of having any experience of them. That there are angels and demons is a fact without our having seen one or other, and when Prof. Davey tells us that Christ may be wrong in His teaching about them both, we may well ask what experience has he got that we should place his word above that of Christ.
That Christ rose from the dead is a well attested fact of history and can never be affected by the feeling or want of feeling of any one. When Dean Inge and Dr. Major and many of the Modernists deny that it ever took place, and the Rev Wm. McNeill, of Rostrevor, in one of his publications says he has not made up his mind about it, we simply say with Paul that “Jesus Christ our Lord was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of Holiness by the resurrection from the dead,” Rom. 1:4.
Whoever takes away the resurrection of Christ removes the proof of His divine Sonship, and we naturally refuse to receive their professions about Christ’s deity. Mr Whitehouse, the Belfast Unitarian minister, is quite justified in saying “If all the modern Churchmen are not preaching Unitarianism then I have never heard it preached.” When a Presbyterian minister in Ballymacarrett publicly expressed his dislike of the phrase “the blood of Christ,” which is used by three of the apostolic writers in the New Testament as well as by our Lord Himself in the institution of the Supper, there is no need for a Unitarian church beside his own. Take away the atonement and you cut the heart out of Christianity.
Through all eternity it will be impossible to imagine a love greater than that which bore the wrath of God due to me for my sin: it melts my frozen feelings and makes me hot for the atoning Lord. When the Modernist denies this doctrine he leaves God infinitely less than He might be, and not the Christian’s God at all. Christian experience is invariably built upon the unchanging foundations laid by the inspired writers. Professor Davey in naming his book “The Changing Vesture of the Faith” is affirming that saving trust is an unstable and varying thing, and in this he is in agreement with Dr Fosdick, who writes: “The liberalism of today is the orthodoxy of tomorrow, which gives way to a new liberalist.”
The Greeks represented their great hero Hercules as coming by his death through changing his vesture. He put on a cloak that was infected with the poison which, on his arrow, brought death to the monster Messus. Soon his frame was writhing in agony, and he committed suicide to end his pain. In moral agony that race will perish that puts off the resurrection and atonement of Christ and the doctrine of the Spirit, and clothes itself in the experiences of the false prophets of Modernism.
These men want rid of mystery. All the moving sights in nature robe themselves in mystery, sea and sky and mountain impressing us at once with the sense of immensity and of beauty, our own nothingness and the glory of the Creator. To understand fully the doctrines of a religion would prove their falsity. The cherubim veil their faces with their wings before the presence of their Lord. The investigator who in his research would dissect the dead body of his mother is one that we had better be without. But the best defence against error is the inward experience of the truth. A Hearsay Christianity is easily displaced. How then do we come by the real experience of divine truth? Consider and contrast the lives of four persons.
George Grote was a brilliant man, a banker by profession, who made himself a distinguished classical scholar and writer. The Christian who looks into the life published by his wife is disappointed and saddened to find no trace of reference to religion. Either he took no personal interest in it, or his wife was of a type to pass it over as unimportant.
In strange contrast to this is the life of one of the leading German critics. Here you find religion to be the one absorbing interest, but on the other hand, there is nothing to indicate that with his incessant study of religion he possessed a particle of spirituality.
Take as the third case the Person of our Lord and Saviour and His biography in the Gospels. Here you find the record steeped not only in religious interest, but in spirituality. “The Son of Man which is in heaven” might be taken to describe the atmosphere which He carried with Him continually, as well as to state the fact of His existence in heaven while He was on earth. But it startles one to hear it said, and said most truly, that Jesus was not a Christian. A Christian is one who needs and has found his Saviour, but Jesus being without sin required no Saviour.
Then take the case of Paul the apostle, whose writings are all about religion and whose spirit flames with spiritual fire. In him you have the deep consciousness of sin and the fervent passion for that Saviour and Lord whom he had found in Christ. Before his conversion he had been as religious as after it, but then it was a hearsay affair and now it was a real experience in Christ Jesus. Towards the end of his life he writes: “I know Whom I have believed,” affirming a personal acquaintance with Him on Whom he placed his trust, a warm statement of his spiritual experience.
An Eastern potentate has said that the distance between trust and falsehood is only a handbreadth, the distance, that is to say, between the ear and the eye. But there is a great distance between hearing about Christ and seeing Him. “I believed not the words, until I came and mine eyes had seen it; and behold the half was not told me,” was the conclusion of the Queen of Sheba when she had communed with Solomon. “Behold, a greater than Solomon is here” was Christ’s witness to Himself, as the sun in the sky bears witness to itself. The lover of Christ can put it more strongly than the Queen of Sheba. “The love of Jesus, what it is none but His loved ones know.” The photograph of a friend is treasured and we look on it with avidity, but we place it to the one side when the friend enters our presence.
The Bible tells us all about Him that it is possible to know in this life, but it is in prayer that we relish His presence. “The world seeth Me no more but ye see Me,” are words in which our Lord insists upon the believer’s vision of Himself as the privilege of faith. The doctrine of His presence is very delightful to reflect upon, but the presence itself goes far beyond it. His love is an endless theme, but to feel it beaming upon us is far more. We may be moved with awe as we talk about the holiness of God, but there is something higher than communion with men. “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee,” said Job, “wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Job speaks of seeing God, but there is no mention in the narrative of any vision: What does he mean? What new experience had he obtained? He had previously made remarkable confessions of his faith in God, and testimony had been given to him as “a perfect man.” What is he now and what more has he learned? His creed is just the same as it was before, but he has had a further sense of his own imperfection, and to that extent he is more perfect than he had been: and this new discovery of his imperfection has been obtained through a further discovery of the majesty of God. The advance in his spiritual life is compared by him to the difference between hearing and seeing.
Surely such an advance is not only possible for us but eminently desirable. Faith in its first beginnings is the word of God the Holy Spirit, though there is no appreciation of that fact at the moment, and when faith increases and zeal and activity in the spiritual life are manifested, it is the same Holy Spirit Who is behind it all. That is encouragement to us, for if left to ourselves we could neither begin nor continue. Lazarus lay cold and dead till Jesus shouted, “Come forth”: and when the Holy Spirit says, “Thou shalt love the Lord” (Deut 6:5), the heart begins to warm and the currents of love to circulate. Begin that life of love this moment, saying “O Christ, my risen Lord, Who didst die for me upon the cross, I love Thee, and I will confess Thee before men.”
In particular detail John Wesley describes how at about 8.45 pm on Wednesday, May the 24th, 1738, in the small meeting house of the Moravians in Aldersgate Street, “where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt in my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Of the next morning he writes, “The moment I awakened, ‘Jesus, Master,’ was in my heart and in my mouth.”
To that change in the life of John Wesley is attributed the long and marvellous career of missionary activity that altered the tone and temperature of religion throughout the English speaking world.
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