Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15Temple, William
Religion
Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
Temple, William
Church and state
The Church, then, is not a "voluntary organisation," but the creation of
God in Christ. In fact it is the one immediate result of our Lord’s
earthly ministry. When His physical presence was withdrawn, there
remained in the world, as fruit of His sojourn here, no volume of
writings, no elaborated organisation with codified aims and methods, but
a group of people who were united to one another because His Spirit
lived and worked in each. And the great marvel lay in this: whereas all
men realise that fellowship is better than rivalry, and yet fail to pass
from one to the other because they are radically selfish both
individually and corporately, in Christ men found themselves to be a
real community in spite of their as yet unpurged selfishness. By the
invasion of the Divine Life in Christ, the ideal itself, the life of
fellowship, is given, and is made into the means of destroying just
those qualities which had hitherto prevented its own realisation. The
ecclesiastical organisations of to-day are not fellowships of this sort,
but if the members of the Church lose their hold on this central
principle of fellowship, as they have largely done, we are thrown back
upon the futile effort to build up fellowship on the foundation of
unredeemed selfishness.
As it is not true to say that the Church is a "voluntary" organisation,
so also it is not true to say that it exists "for the maintenance of
public worship," at least in the sense that most Englishmen would give
to the words. Certainly the Church, consisting of men and women whom
God of His sheer goodness has delivered from the power of darkness and
translated into the kingdom of His dear Son, will find its first duty,
as also its first impulse, in an abandonment of adoration. But if the
God who is worshipped is not only some Jewish Jehovah or Mohammedan
Allah, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this love and
adoration of God will immediately express itself in the love and service
of men, and especially in the passionate desire to share with others the
supreme treasure of the knowledge of God. The Church, like its Master,
will be chiefly concerned to seek and to save that which is lost,
calling men everywhere to repent because the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Worship is indeed the very breath of its life, but service of the world
is the business of its life. It is the Body of Christ, that is to say,
the instrument of His will, and His will is to save the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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