Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine
purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.
God has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable
suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry
"Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be
saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of God, and its bearing
{xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was
given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers
herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of
adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with
its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new
humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they
re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love
and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original
gospel of divine Fatherhood.
Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered
account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their
profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life
and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as
terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the
lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward
conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit
toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be
eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present
realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of
deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the
condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of God; it is joy in
the prevalence of His goodness; peace through harmonious correspondence
with His purposes; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of
an inward nature that loves what God loves and enjoys what He enjoys.
Hell, here or elsewhere, is a disordered life, out of adjustment with
the universal will of God; it is concentration upon self and self-ends;
the contraction of love; the shrinking of inward resources; the
formation of a spirit of hate, the creation of an inward nature that
hates what God loves. Hell is the inner condition inherently attaching
to the kind of life that displays and exhibits the spirit and attitude
which must be overcome before God with His purposes of goodness can be
{xlix} ultimately triumphant and all in all. Salvation, therefore,
cannot be thought of in terms of escape from a place that is dreaded to
a place that is desired as a haven. It is through and through a
spiritual process--escape from a wrongly fashioned will to a will
rightly fashioned. It is complete spiritual health and wholeness of
life, brought into operation and function by the soul's recovery of God
and by joyous correspondence with Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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