Some Christian Convictions | Page 2

CONTENTS
Introduction--Some Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Which Have Affected Christian Beliefs 1
Chapter 1.
Religion 23
Chapter 2.
The Bible 49
Chapter 3.
Jesus Christ 78
Chapter 4.
God 118

Chapter 5.
The Cross 140
Chapter 6.
The New Life--Individual and Social 160
Chapter 7.
The Church 181
Chapter 8.
The Christian Life Everlasting 205

SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS

INTRODUCTION
SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED CHRISTIAN BELIEFS
When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the
stone was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor
axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of
intellectual beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries
to house their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of
materials they found already prepared by other movements of the
human mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some
of the quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to
understand the construction of the forms of Christian convictions as
they appear in many minds. Some of the quarries named have been
worked for more than a century; but they were rich to begin with, and
they have not yet been exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins

of rock, but new openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their
present form cannot be certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no
longer bear an identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than
a very few of the principal sources whence the materials have been
taken. The plan of the temple and the arrangement of the stones are the
work of the Spirit of the Christian Faith, which always erects a
dwelling of its own out of the thought of each age.
Romanticism has been one rich source of material. This literary
movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia
at the opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some
degree by the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English
Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer
expression to all the elements in human nature. It brought a new feeling
towards nature as alive with a spiritual Presence--
Something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of
setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky,
and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking
things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for
them miraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and
sent writers, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the
pages of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an
inner Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to
Carlyle, who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be
spoken in words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and
man symbols of the ineffable God.
To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in
the structure of our present Christian thought:
(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct,
that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in
feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and
express. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of this
movement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was like

finding names for your feelings."
(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "from
within" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, but
penetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Him
as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to us
He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five
thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more
startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with
bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to
speak of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that
were joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of
the Almighty," and Christ is not so much God and man, as God in man.
(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more
parts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnell entitled
an essay that still repays careful reading, _The Gospel a Gift to the
Imagination._ One of our chief complaints with the historic creeds and