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
It is one peculiarity and glory of Christianity that it unites both of
those. Its faith is fixed upon One who "for us men and for our
salvation _came down from heaven_," and who is yet the eternal Word
through which all things were made, the indwelling principle of all
existence. Transcendence and immanence are here perfectly combined.
But because the former is the distinctively religious element, without
which the latter would have been in danger of relapsing into naturalism,
the deliberate emphasis was all laid on transcendence. We can see, as
we look back, that when once the Incarnation has actually taken place
upon the plane of history, it makes no jot of difference in logic,
provided only that the Life of the Incarnate is taken as the
starting-point and centre of thought, whether terms of transcendence or
of immanence are used. The life of Christ is at once the irruption of
the Divine into the world—(for the previous history of the world
certainly does not explain it)—and is also the manifestation of the
indwelling power which had all along sustained the world. In other
words, the God who redeems is the same God who creates and sustains.
But it is still true that the note of transcendence, of something given
to man by God as distinct from something emerging out of man in his
search of God, is the specifically religious note.
And the Church, as the divine creation and instrument, shares and must
express this character. It must be so constituted as to keep alive this
faith. That is the meaning of hierarchies and sacraments. Whether any
given order is the most adequate that can be designed, is of course a
perfectly legitimate question. But every order that aspires to be
catholic aims, at least, at expressing the truth that religion is a gift
of God, and not a discovery of man. And certainly it is only the gift
of God that can be truly catholic or universal. Man’s discoveries are
indefinitely various; the European finds one thing, the Arab another,
the Hindu yet another, and none finds satisfaction in the other’s
discovery, though in all of them God is operative. Only in His own gift
of Himself is it reasonable to expect that all men will find what they
need; only in a Church which is the vehicle of this gift, and is known
to be this, and not a mutual benefit society organised by its own
members for their several and collective advantage—only in a Church
expressive of Divine transcendence can all nations find a home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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