SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER WAY
I
THE PSALMIST’S WAY
Emerson’s friend, Margaret Fuller, coined the phrase, “standing the
universe.” “I can stand the universe,” was her brave statement. But long
before Concord was discovered or “the transcendental school” was dreamed
of a school of Hebrew saints had learned how to stand the universe.
Canaan, with all its milk and honey, was never a land arranged by
preëstablished harmony as a paradise for the idealist. It enjoyed no
special millennium privileges. Whatever rainbow dreams may have filled
the mind of optimistic prophets were always quickly put to flight by the
iron facts of the rigid world which ringed them round. The Philistines
were pitiless neighbors. Like Gawain, they were spiritually too blind
even to have desires to _see_. Coats of mail, gigantic spear heads,
iron chariots, and Goliath champions were their arguments. How could a
nation like Israel be free to work out its spiritual career with these
crude materialistic Philistines always hanging on its borders and always
threatening its national existence? When the Philistines were temporarily
quiet there were Moabites, or Edomites, or Syrians ready to take a turn
at hampering the ideals of Israel. And worse still was ahead. From the
time of the battle of Karkar (854 B.C.) on, the armies of Assyria had to
be reckoned with. Here was another pitiless foe; efficient, militant,
inventive, with a culture and religion suited to its genius, but as
ruthless as a wolf toward everything in its path. It smashed whatever
it struck and in the course of events Jerusalem was ground in its
irresistible mill.
When a “return” was granted under the Persians, and the national and
religious life was restored in Jerusalem, new difficulties swarmed.
During the long period of “restoration” the half-breed peoples in
Palestine with their low ideals threatened to defeat the hopes of
the returned exiles and made their feeble beginnings as difficult as
possible. Then, again, the new nation was hardly firm in its re-found
life when it had to meet the forces of Hellenism which rose out of
the expansion policies of Alexander. A culture incompatible with the
ideals and passions of the Hebrews broke in and surrounded them. It was
a different enemy to any they had yet met but no less irreconcilable.
Under the Hellenized kings of Antioch all the hopes and ideals of this
long-suffering race were put in jeopardy, and the very existence of the
chosen nation was in desperate peril in the period of the Maccabean
struggle.
But through all these centuries of warfare with alien peoples, and during
all these hard periods of strain and anguish, there existed a school of
saints who were learning how to stand the universe and who were teaching
the world a way of victory even in the midst of outward defeat. Their
“way” was the fortification of the soul, the construction of the interior
life; and the literature which they produced has proved to be one of
the most precious treasures of the race. The gold dust words of these
saints are scattered through most of the early books of Israel, for in
all periods the poets of this race were mainly busy with this central
problem of life, the problem of standing the universe. But it is in the
collection which we call the _Psalms_ that we find the supreme literature
of this inner way of fortification and victory.
“Thou restorest my soul,” is the joyous testimony of one of these saints,
and this testimony of the best loved member of this school of saints is
the key to the Psalmist’s way of triumph in general. In the confusion
of events and the irrationality of things—_die Ohnmacht der Natur_—he
felt his way back, like a little child in the dark feeling for his
mother, until he found God as the rock on which his feet could stand.
The processes of reconstruction are never traced out. The logic of this
way back to the fortification of the soul through the discovery of God
is not given in detail. The moments when we shift the levels of life are
never quite describable. But somehow when the way outside goes on into
the valley of the shadow of death, and the table is set in the face of
enemies, the soul falls back upon God and is _restored_.
“I could not understand,” another Psalmist declares. Everything was
baffling. The wicked seemed to prosper and the righteous to suffer. The
world appeared out of joint and the whole web of life hopelessly tangled;
“but,” he adds with no further explanation, “I came into the sanctuary of
God and then I saw.” It is like the final solution in the great inner
drama of Job. _God answers_ and Job’s problem is solved: “I had heard
of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.” In the
great phrase of the book, “_God_ turned the captivity of Job.”
These men who gave us our Psalms had learned how to bear adversity and
affliction without being overwhelmed or defeated. “All thy waves and thy
billows have gone over me,” one of them cries. He has lost his land and
has only the _memory_ of Jordan and Hermon and Mizar. His adversaries
are a constant “sword in his bones.” They jeer at him and ask, “Where
now is thy God?” but his trust holds steadily on: “The Lord will command
His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be
with me!” Even when the water-spouts of trouble break over him, when “the
waters roar and are troubled,” when the “nations rage and kingdoms are
moved,” when “desolations are abroad in the earth,” God abides for him “a
very present help in time of trouble,” “a refuge and strength” for his
soul. Dismay and trembling may be abroad; pain may come as on a woman in
travail, yet this deep soul can calmly say, “God is our God forever; He
will be our guide even unto death.”
This element of _trust_ and _confidence_ has never anywhere had grander
utterance. The Psalmist has got beyond reliance on “horses and chariots,”
beyond trust in “riches,” “princes,” in “the bow or the sword,” or
in “man, whose breath is in his nostrils.” He rests his case on God
alone, and builds on naked faith in His goodness and care: “_Thou_ hast
delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from
falling.” Puzzled he often is with the prosperity of the wicked, who
“flourish like green bay-trees”; perplexed he sometimes is with God’s
delay in coming to the help of the poor and needy and oppressed; but
his faith holds on and he does not “slide.” It gives us almost a sense
of awe as we see a valiant soul, hard pressed, hemmed around, deep in
affliction and sorrow, “standing the world” and saying in clear voice:
“Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; His loving-kindness
endureth forever!”
We understand when we read such words why this collection of Psalms
has held its place in the religious life of the world. It contains the
living, throbbing _experience_ of great souls, who cared absolutely for
one thing—to find God and to enjoy Him, and who, having found their one
precious jewel, could do without all else, and by this inner experience
could stand the world.
II
THE NEW AND LIVING WAY
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that Christ has
introduced into the world “a new and living way” to God. The concrete
problems confronting this writer to a Jewish circle of the first century
were very different from our own problems to-day, but he so succeeded in
seizing an eternal aspect of the issue that his word about the new and
living way is as vital now as it was then.
His “new and living way,” as the tenth chapter shows, is the way of
personal consecration as a substitute for the old way of sacrifice. The
manner of his exposition may seem to us now a little artificial, but
there can be no question of the religious significance of the conclusion.
Following his usual line of interpretation, he begins by treating the
great national system of sacrifices as a “shadow,” _i.e._ a parable, or
a figure, or a symbol, of a true and higher reality. Then he goes on
boldly to declare that “sacrifices” have become empty performances—it is
impossible, he says, that the blood of bulls and goats works any real
change in the nature or the attitude of the soul. Next he buttresses his
radical conclusion with a citation of Scripture to the effect that God
has never taken pleasure in burnt offerings and ritual sacrifices, and
on this Scripture text from the Psalms he rises to his new insight,
that Christ has come not to do the sacrificial work of a priest, not to
satisfy God by a sacrifice, but to reveal the personal power of a life of
consecration: “Then said I, lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” This way
of dedication to the divine will, this complete consecration of self out
of love for the will of God, the writer calls “the new and living way.”
Two very important conclusions are inherently bound up with this
transition from a religion of sacrifices to a religion of dedication.
First, if carries a wholly new conception of God and secondly, it
involves a complete reinterpretation of human ministry. If God does not
take any pleasure in sacrifice, then the whole idea that He is a Being
to be appeased by gifts, by offerings, by incense, by blood, or by
self-inflicted suffering of any sort, falls to the ground. These things
are not shadows or symbols; they are blunders and mistakes. The God for
whom they are intended needs and asks for no such form of approach.
That has always been the contention of the supreme prophets of the race,
and Christ in His unveiling of God has made the fact sun-clear that God
is not rightly conceived when He is thought of as needing any kind of
sacrifice or any inducement to make Him forgiving or loving. Love is His
nature. The new and living way leads first of all to this new revelation
of God.
But no less certainly it leads to a new type of minister. The priest was
conceived as an expert in ways of _satisfying_ God and of _appeasing_
Him. He was supposed to know what God required and how to perform the
things required. He was indispensable, because only an expert, duly
ordained, could do the work that was necessary for bringing God and man
into relation with each other. Under “the new and living way,” however,
the priest has lost his occupation and the minister becomes an expert
in ways of expanding human life and in bringing men to a dedication of
themselves to the will of God and to the spiritual tasks of the world. In
accordance with this new insight, everything that concerns religion must
in some way attach to life. It must promote, or advance life, increase
life, add to its height and depth, or, in some manner, make life richer
and more joyous. The minister of the new and living way may be called, as
he no doubt will be called, to make many sacrifices of things that are
precious, and surrenders of things as dear as life itself, but there will
be no inherent magic in these sacrifices. They will not be efficacious
as a satisfaction to God. They will be only means toward some larger
end of life, as was the case with Christ’s surrenders and sacrifices.
The ascetic temper will be left forever behind. Whatever is cut off, or
plucked out, will be removed only for the sake of increasing the quality
of life and the dynamic of it. The final test is always to be sought in
the expansion of capacity, in the increase of talents, in the formation
of personality, in dedication to the task of widening the area of life.
The true minister will, like the great apostle, present his body, his
entire being, in living dedication. He will be satisfied with nothing
short of a holy and acceptable service—acceptable, because Christlike—he
will endeavor to make all his service “reasonable service”; that is,
intelligent service, and he will strive earnestly not to become _set_
into the mold of the world or into any deadening groove of habit, but to
be _transformed_ by a steady increase of life and a renewing of spiritual
insight, so that he can prove what is the perfect will of God and so that
he can minister to the growing life of the world.
III
AN APOSTLE OF THE INNER WAY
It is always a foolish blunder to take half when it is just as easy to
have a whole, but the tendency to dichotomize all realities into halves
and to assume that we are shut up to an _either-or_ selection, is an
ancient tendency and one that very often keeps us from winning the full
richness of the life that is possible for us. Human history is strewn
with dualistic formulations which have sorted men into _either-or_
groups. Now it is “spirit” and “flesh” that are sharply antagonistic and
men are called upon to settle which of these two halves of man’s life is
to have their loyalty. Again, it is “this world” and “the next world”—the
here and the yonder—that bid for our heart’s suffrage. “The Church” and
“the world”; “faith” and “reason”; “the sacred” and “the secular” are
other twin pairs that call for a sharp decision of allegiance. So, too,
it has been customary to cut apart the outer life and the inner life and,
with a stern _either-or_, to put them into rivalry with one another.
One camp insists that religion is to be sought in deeds and effects;
the other camp asserts that religion is an inward condition of life—_to
be_ is more important than _to do_. But this method of cutting is like
that which the unnatural mother asked Solomon to perform upon the living
child. It sunders what was alive and throbbing into two dead fragments,
neither of which is a real half of the united living whole. In place of
all the _either-or_ formulations that force a choice between the halves
of great spiritual realities I should put the living and undivided whole.
Instead of selecting _either-or_, I prefer to take _both_. There is no
line that splits the outer life and the inner life into two compartments.
Nobody can _do_ without _being_ and nobody can _be_ without _doing_.
Personality is the most complete unity in the universe and it binds
forever into an indissoluble and integral whole the outer and the inner,
the spirit and the deed.
But at the same time it is interesting to see what a supremely great and
many-sided soul like St. Paul has to say of the inwardness and interior
depth of religion. That he was a man of action is plain enough to be
seen and nobody can easily miss his clarion call to arm _cap-a-pie_ for
the positive, moral battles of life. He was ethical in the noblest sense
of the word, but there was an inner core of religious experience in him
which is as unique and wonderful as is his athletic ethical purpose or
his imperial spirit of moral conquest.
There was for him no kind of “doing” which could ever be a substitute for
the spiritual health of the soul. Nobody has ever lived who has been more
deeply concerned than was St. Paul over the primary problem of life: How
can my soul be saved? To be “saved” for him, however, does not mean to be
rescued from dire torment or from the consequences which follow sin and
dog the sinner. No transaction in another world can accomplish salvation
for him; no mere change from debit to credit side in the heavenly ledgers
can make him a saved man. To be saved for St. Paul is to become a new
kind of person, with a new inner nature, a new dimension of life, a new
joy and triumph of soul. There is a certain inner _feeling_ here which
systematic theology can no more convey than a botanical description of
a flower can convey what the poet feels in the presence of the flower
itself. There is no lack of books and articles which spread before us
St. Paul’s doctrines and which tell us his theory—his _gnosis_—of the
plan of salvation. The trouble with all these external accounts is that
they clank like hollow armor. They are like sounding brass and clanging
cymbals. We miss the _real thing_ that matters—the inner throbbing heart
of the living experience.
What he is always trying to tell us is that a new “nature” has been
formed within him, a new spirit has come to birth in his inmost self.
Once he was weak, now he is strong. Once he was permanently defeated,
now he is “led in a continual triumph.” Once he was at the mercy of the
forces of blind instinct and habit which dragged him whither he would
not, now he feels free from the dominion of sin and its inherent peril to
the soul. Once, with all his pride of pharisaism, he was an alien to the
commonwealth of God, now he is a fellow citizen with all the inward sense
of loyalty that makes citizenship real.
He traces the immense transformation to his personal discovery of a
mighty forgiving love, where he had least expected to find it, in the
heart of God—“We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us;”
“The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me
and gave Himself for me.” _Faith_, wherever St. Paul uses it to express
the central human fact of the religious life, is a word of tremendous
inward depth. It is bathed and saturated with personal experience, and it
proves to be a constructive life-principle of the first importance. Faith
_works_; it is something by which one lives: “The life I now live, I live
by faith.”
But the full measure—the length and breadth, depth and height—of his new
inner world does not come full into view until one sees how through faith
and love this man has come into conscious relation with the Spirit of God
inwardly revealed to him, and operative as a resident presence in his own
spirit. No forensic account of salvation can reach this central feature
of real salvation, which now appears as new inward life and power. St.
Paul takes religion out of the sphere of logic into the primary region
of life. There are ways of living upon the Life of God as direct and
verifiable as is the correspondence between the plant and its natural
environment. To _live_, in the full spiritual meaning of this word as St.
Paul uses it, is to be immersed in the living currents of the circulating
Life of God, and to be fed from within by those sources of creative Life
which feed the evolving world: “Beholding as in a mirror the glory of
the Lord, we are transformed into the same image by the Spirit of the
Lord;” “He hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying
Abba;” “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are sons of
God.” With the progress of his experience and the maturing of his thought
upon it, there came to St. Paul an extraordinary insight. He came to
identify Christ with the Spirit: “The Lord is the Spirit.” He no longer
thought of Him as merely the historical person of Galilee, but rather
as the eternal revelation of God, first in a definite form as Jesus
the Christ, and then, after the resurrection, as Christ the invisible
Spirit, working within men, recreating and renewing their spiritual
lives. The influence of Christ for salvation was, thus, with him far
more than a moral influence. It was of the nature of a real energism—a
spiritual power coöperating with the human will and remaking men by the
formation of a new Christ-natured self within him. The process has no
known or conceivable limits. Its goal is the formation of a man “after
Christ”: “Till Christ be formed in you.” “That you may grow up into Him
in all things who is the Head;” “Till we all come to the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ.” The “fruit” of the Spirit, matured
in the inward realm of man’s central being and expressed in common acts
of daily life, is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, meekness, self-control—a nature in all things like that
which was revealed in glory and fulness in the face of Jesus Christ.
IV
THE EPHESIAN GOSPEL
In his fresh, impressive book, _The Ephesian Gospel_, Dr. Percy
Gardner says that in the early period of Christianity no city, save
only Jerusalem, was more influential for the development of Christian
thought than was the city of Ephesus. It was here in Ephesus, scholars
are convinced, some time about the end of the first century, that the
life and message of Jesus received its most sublime and wonderful
interpretation, and it was through this Ephesian interpretation that the
gathered mysticism of Greece and the other ancient religions of the world
was indissolubly fused with the great ethical teachings of the Galilean.
It will never be known, with absolute certainty, who was the profound
genius that made this Ephesian interpretation, but it will always
continue to be called the gospel “according to John.” There will never be
any doubt, in the minds of those who read appreciatively, that, either
inwardly or outwardly, the writer of it had “lain on Christ’s bosom”;
that he had “received of His fulness,” and that he had “seen with his
eyes, and heard with his ears and handled with his hands the Word of
Life.” He was, we can almost certainly say, one of St. Paul’s men. He
has fully grasped the central ideas of the apostle who first planted the
truth in Ephesus, and he carries out in powerful fashion the Pauline
discovery that Christ has become an invisible, eternal presence in the
world. At the same time he possesses, either at first or second hand, a
large amount of narrative material for the expansion of the simple gospel
story as it had come from the three synoptic writers. But from first to
last everything in this gospel is told for a definite purpose and every
incident is loaded with a spiritual, interpretative content and meaning.
He does not undervalue history or the details of the Life lived in Judea
and Galilee, but he is concerned at every point to raise men’s thoughts
to the eternal meaning of Christ’s coming, to cultivate inward fellowship
with Him, and to reveal the last great _beatitude_, that those who have
not seen with outward eyes, but nevertheless have _believed_, are the
truly blessed ones.
The earliest of our gospel documents—the document now called Q—centers
upon the “message,” and gives us a collection of simple but bottomlessly
profound sayings of Jesus. Another document—the gospel of Mark—hardly
less primitive and no less wonderful, focuses upon the person of Jesus
and His doings. Here we have in very narrow compass the earliest story
of this Life, inexhaustible in its depth of love and grace, which has
ever since woven itself into the very tissue of human life and thought.
But now this final document, which we have been calling “the Ephesian
Gospel,” makes a unique contribution and carries us up to a new level
of life. It announces that Jesus who gave the message, the Jesus who
lived this extraordinary personal life and did the deeds of love and
sacrifice, has become an ever-living, environing, permeative Spirit,
continuing His revelation, reliving His life, extending His sway in men
of faith. He is no longer of one date and one locality, but is present to
open, responsive human hearts everywhere as the atmosphere is present to
breathing lungs, or the sea to swimming fish, or the sunlight to growing
plants. We can no more lose this Christ of experience than we can lose
the sky.
Christianity is in this interpretation vastly more than an historical
religion, bound up forever with the incidents of its temporal origin.
It is as much a present fact and a present power as electricity is. It
is rooted in an inexhaustible source of Life. It is as dynamic as the
central springs of the universe, and it is perpetually supplied from
within by invisible fountains of living energy. But this triumphant and
eternal principle of the spiritual life is, “according to John,” no
vague, abstract principle of logic, but instead a warm, tender, intimate,
concrete personification of Life, Light, and Love who has definitely
incarnated the Truth and revealed the nature of God and the possible
glory of man.
The great Ephesian makes no division between history and experience. The
Christ of his faith and of his account is alike the Christ of history and
of experience. He looks backward, and he looks inward, and the Christ of
his story is the seamless and invisible product of this double process.
This is wholly in the manner of the great apostle who declared “if we
have known Christ after the flesh we know Him so now no more,” and yet
neither the Ephesian disciple nor the apostolic master discounted the
importance of the facts of the Christ after the flesh. The transcendent
truth for them both is the truth that the Church still has its Christ,
who is leading it into all the truth and progressively revealing Himself
with the expanding ages.
Every Christian mystic for nineteen hundred years has felt the influence
of this great Ephesian prophet, and his message has become a part of
the necessary air we breathe. His gospel and his brief epistle, loaded
with its message of love, are, as Deissmann has well said, the greatest
monument of the appreciation of the mystical teaching of St. Paul that
has ever been reared in the world. The man who performed this immense
literary task for us of the after ages now
“Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God,”
but his _word_ is still quick and powerful and he has helped us more
than any other writer has done to interpret our own experience, and more
than any other prophet this Ephesian has inspired our faith in the real
presence and has given us the assurance, inwardly verified, that we are
not comfortless and alone, in a world of pain and loss and death, but are
bound as living twigs in one sap-giving Vine of Life, participants of the
vitalizing, refreshing, joy-bringing bread and water of Life, and with
open access to the infinite healing and comfort and fortification of the
Eternal Christ.