Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times: Preached in the Parish Church of Crathie, fifth September and in the College Church, St AndrewsTulloch, John
Religion
Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times: Preached in the Parish Church of Crathie, fifth September and in the College Church, St Andrews
Tulloch, John
Bible. Corinthians, 2nd, XI, 3 -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
I. It is so, first of all, in the comparatively simple order of facts
with which it deals. Nothing can be simpler or more comprehensive than
our Lord's teaching. He knew what was in man. He knew, moreover, what
was in God towards man as a living power of love, who had sent Him
forth "to seek and save the lost;" and beyond these great facts, of a
fallen life to be restored, and of a higher life of divine love and
sacrifice, willing and able to restore and purify this fallen life,
our Lord seldom traversed. Unceasingly He proclaimed the reality of a
spiritual life in man, however obscured by sin, and the reality of a
divine life above him, which had never forsaken him nor left him to
perish in his sin. He held forth the need of man, and the grace and
sacrifice of God on behalf of man. And within this double order of
spiritual facts His teaching may be said to circulate. He dealt, in
other words, with the great ideas of God and the soul, which can alone
live in Him, however it may have sunk away from Him. These were to Him
the realities of all life and all religion. There are those, I know,
in our day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions--"dogmas of a
tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with
this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The
questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They
were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere
of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was
to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to all who live in
Him and know in Him. The soul and God are, if you will, dogmas to
science. They cannot well be anything else to a vision which is
outside of them, and cannot from their very nature ever reach them.
But within the religious sphere they are primary experiences, original
and simple data from which all others come. And our present argument
is, that Christ dealt almost exclusively with these broad and simple
elements of religion, and that He believed the life of religion to
rest within them. He spoke to men and women as having souls to be
saved; and He spoke of Himself and of God as able and willing to save
them. This was the "simplicity" that was in Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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