Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day ThinkingCoffin, Henry Sloane
Religion
Some Christian Convictions: A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking
Coffin, Henry Sloane
Christianity -- 20th century; Theology, Doctrinal -- Popular works
Christians never stopped with the view of God drawn from "Natural
Religion." They made this their basis, and then added to it the God of
"Revealed Religion," contained in the Bible. They selected all the
texts that spoke of God, drawing them from _Leviticus_ and
_Ecclesiastes_ as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and
constructed a Biblical doctrine of God, which they added to the
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from
Nature. The God and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various,
often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further
obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature.
It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian
view of God.
Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are
not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one
path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of
Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust
and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fashion an image of
Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave
it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God's
disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as
faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "God," writes
Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not
man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest
inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God's
Self-unveiling to us, God's "Frankness," His Word made flesh.
Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover:
First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus
experienced His love and Himself was love.
Second, that God is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether
He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us
to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His
children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But
trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is
sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His
will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the
servant of man,--to control disease, to harness electricity, to
understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature
and conform it to the likeness of His Son. God's complete lordship waits
until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present
we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men
defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work
together for good unto them that love Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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