Bible Commentaries

TEST OF PERMANENCE IN CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

‘Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the Son.’

2 John 1:9 (R.V.)

The time we live in is a time of widespread religious unsettlement. It would, indeed, be hard to exaggerate the uncertainty of belief in many classes of society. This is due in part to what is our weakness—that the faculty of criticism far outruns the constructive faculty of our minds; and that in a period of diffused education the materials of criticism are presented to all kinds of minds and are sufficient to overturn positive beliefs without leading on to any reconstruction.

Since so many things have been taught as Christian truth, and afterwards proved false or uncertain, how do I propose to distinguish essential Christianity from the variable or uncertain or false accompaniments to it?

I. The test of authority.—The first and to some minds the most obvious test is that of authority in its broadest sense. There has been a common, a universal faith of Christendom, which has, most authoritatively, expressed itself in the Catholic Creeds, the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds. There are features in the common faith which are only slightly or by implication touched on in these formulas of faith; but at least in what they contain they represent what has been universal Christianity.

II. The test of history.—If the Creeds stand, with their historical and doctrinal statements, it must be because the Gospels stand. No fair historical criticism can dissolve the force of the historical evidence we have to such propositions as the following: that Jesus Christ was, and knew Himself to be, sinless in the midst of a sinful world of which He came to be the Saviour; that, moreover, He encouraged in His disciples towards Himself and claimed from them the sort of allegiance and faith which only God can rightly claim and which can only be rendered without impiety to God; that He worked miracles which no reasoning can allow us to ascribe to anything else than the creative power of God working with Him to authorise His teaching; that after His death and burial His tomb was found empty on the third (or, as we should say, the second) day, and His disciples were raised from despondency and despair to a sure faith and confident hope by repeated manifestations of Himself risen, in a body transformed and spiritualised, but the same. Further, I see the best reasons for thinking that in the early circle of believers the fact of our Lord’s birth of a Virgin was believed on the evidence of the only first-hand witnesses, Joseph and Mary, and that it is Joseph and Mary whose testimony is embodied in the first and third Gospels. I believe, therefore, that the faith of the Creeds is supported by free inquiry into historical facts.

III. The test of rational coherence.—The whole set of ideas about sin and redemption and the Incarnation and the Trinity which belonged to the Catholic Creeds, and are the commonplaces of historical Christianity, cohere and are practically indissoluble. It suggests what I am sure is true, that to abandon our maintenance of miracles as an integral part of our creed, is simply due to lack of perception. In fact, the writers who ask for the particular surrender make it manifest enough that what they are asking for is something much more than a single surrender; it is the substitution of one whole set of ideas for another. And if we examine wherein lies the secret of the difference between the Catholic and the Unitarian set of ideas, we shall find it in the different views of what sin is and what it needs. The deeper, severer view of sin is the clue to the whole Catholic sequence of ideas.

IV. In an age of change and criticism and new knowledge, what are we to regard as permanent Christianity?—What are we to regard as the permanent faith for which we are to contend to death—any ‘advance’ out of which, to use St. John’s phrase, is only advance along a road which separates from God and Christ? I reply, first of all the faith summarised and expressed in the Catholic Creeds—that faith in God and man and man’s destiny; in the Incarnation and the Person of Christ and the accompanying miracles, and the eternal Triune Being of God disclosed in Christ’s revelation. And my reason is, because in a remarkable manner it obeys all those three tests which I may restate in a different order. And if the mind is already furnished with the ideas which render it susceptible of the evidence, it will not fail to find the evidence convincing.

—Bishop Gore.