Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
It is easier to‐day than at any other previous period of history
to believe in the union of the believer with Christ. That God is
immanent in the universe, and that there is a divine element in
man, is familiar to our generation. All men are naturally one with
Christ, the immanent God, and this natural union prepares the way
for that spiritual union in which Christ joins himself to our
faith. Campbell, The Indwelling Christ, 131—“In the immanence of
Christ in nature we find the ground of his immanence in human
nature.... A man may be out of Christ, but Christ is never out of
him. Those who banish him he does not abandon.” John Caird, Fund.
Ideas of Christianity, 2:233‐256—“God is united with nature, in
the atoms, in the trees, in the planets. Science is seeing nature
full of the life of God. God is united to man in body and soul.
The beating of his heart and the voice of conscience witness to
God within. God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, wakes
in man.”
A. Negatively.—It is not:
(_a_) A merely natural union, like that of God with all human spirits,—as
held by rationalists.
In our physical life we are conscious of another life within us
which is not subject to our wills: the heart beats involuntarily,
whether we sleep or wake. But in our spiritual life we are still
more conscious of a life within our life. Even the heathen said:
“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo,” and the Egyptians
held to the identification of the departed with Osiris (Renouf,
Hibbert Lectures, 185). But Paul urges us to work out our
salvation, upon the very ground that “_it is God that worketh_” in
us, “_both to will and to work, for his good pleasure_” (_Phil.
2:12, 13_). This life of God in the soul is the life of Christ.
The movement of the electric car cannot be explained simply from
the working of its own motor apparatus. The electric current
throbbing through the wire, and the dynamo from which that energy
proceeds, are needed to explain the result. In like manner we need
a spiritual Christ to explain the spiritual activity of the
Christian. A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress
in London, 1905—“We had in America some years ago a steam engine
all whose working parts were made of glass. The steam came from
without, but, being hot enough to move machinery, this steam was
itself invisible, and there was presented the curious spectacle of
an engine, transparent, moving, and doing important work, while
yet no cause for this activity was perceptible. So the church,
humanity, the universe, are all in constant and progressive
movement, but the Christ who moves them is invisible. Faith comes
to believe where it cannot see. It joins itself to this invisible
Christ, and knows him as its very life.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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