The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer — John Shaqi
The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and PrayerJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Atonement; Prayer -- Christianity
I shall not use the language or the methods of theology. I shall feel
my way along the great arteries of human experience and try to throw
light and suggestion rather than to establish some final and complete
dogma. To begin at once with the problem before us, how shall we think
of Christ? Was He man? Was He God? Was He some miraculous union of two
essentially unrelated natures? Here are the questions which have split
the Christian world up into camps and which have busied schoolmen in
all the centuries.
The difficulty in almost all the theological discussions on the
subject has been that they started with God and man isolated,
separated, unrelated. No true revelation of such a God ever could be
made through a human life, for divinity and humanity on this theory
are conceived as two totally diverse natures. Modern psychology and
recent studies of social life have made us familiar with a deeper
view of human personality and have prepared for a more adequate study
of Divine personality than was possible when the historic creeds were
formulated. We know that God and man are _conjunct_ and that neither
can be separated absolutely from the other. There never has been any
doubt of man’s need of God, but we now know that God also needs us and
that our lives are mutually organic. Every clew which leads us to God
shows Him to us as a spiritual and social Being--in no sense solitary
and self-sufficient. Our own self-consciousness, our own ideals, our
passion for the unrealized, imply and involve more than an impersonal
energy at the heart of things. There must be a spiritual matrix for
this living, throbbing, growing social organism in which personal
life is formed. Our own experience carries in itself the implication
of a genuinely spiritual Person at the heart of the universe of whom
we all partake. The spiritual history of the race has forever settled
this elemental fact, at least for all who feel the full significance of
life. It is not an assumption, it is not a mere belief--it is involved
in all we feel and know and are. But a spiritual, personal Being must
reveal Himself. An unmanifested God--unknown and unknowable--is no God
at all. He would be abstract and unreal. The least human person who
poured his life out into those about him--who loved and suffered for
the sake of another--would be a higher being than an infinite God shut
up in the closed circle of His own self life. It is a law as old as
the morning star that one must lose himself to find himself, must give
to get, must go forth bearing precious seed in order to come again with
sheaves of harvest. The moment it is settled that there is a divine
Person as the ultimate reality of the universe, it is also settled
that He will reveal Himself, that He will put His Life into manifold
manifestations and that He will find His joy in “working all things up
to better,” to use Clement’s phrase.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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