by A. A. Hodge
IT is a great blessing to be able to recognize the fact that all the great historical branches of the Christian Church are very much united in their faith as to the essentials of the gospel. As to who Christ was, as to what Christ did, as to his Person and as to his offices, as to his supreme lordship over the whole Church and over the whole universe as mediatorial King, Catholics and Protestants of every name agree. The differences chiefly relate to the application of Christ's redemption, to the method of its application and to the order in which the great benefits of salvation are communicated to us and realized in the experience and life of the believer.
In the first place, I would say that rationalists generally—and by this term I include all of a rationalizing tendency, all who would be comprehended generally in theological language as of a Pelagianizing or Semi-Pelagianizing tendency—maintain the principle that God's favor depends directly and immediately upon man's moral character; that as long as man is good God is favorable to him; that as soon as man sins God comes into opposition to him; and that the only condition required for restoration to the divine favor is genuine repentance and reformation.
The principle universally recognized by this class of thinkers is that becoming good is the necessary prerequisite of being received again into favor with God.
Romanists in general, of course, are free from this Pelagianizing and rationalistic spirit. The tendency of Romanism is to make everything supernatural. The tendency of Rationalism is to make everything natural.
The Romanists' doctrine in the first place differs from Pelagianizing and rationalistic notions by maintaining that salvation wrought by Jesus Christ our Lord is applied only by a supernatural operation of the Holy Ghost working through certain sacraments which he has appointed as means and instrumentalities. Their doctrine is, that without the sacrament there is no grace, and that all grace can be obtained through the sacrament without the knowledge of the truth, and very much without the co-operation of the subject.
The Society of Friends, as you know, go to the extreme, as we think it, of holding that grace may be adequately experienced without the use of this class of appointed means.
The position taken by the great historical churches since the Reformation is one intermediate between these two extremes.
We believe thoroughly that the grace may be given through the sovereign pleasure of God, and by an exercise of divine power experienced without the sacrament; but we believe the sacraments are also divine institutions of his appointment, and that they are therefore universally obligatory and necessary because of the obligation of precept, and that beyond this they are in their adaptation to our constitution and our condition very admirably fitted to be efficient means of grace when intelligently received in connection with the truth and accompanied with the gracious power of the Holy Ghost.
On the other side, the Romanist agrees in certain respects with the rationalist. This comes out in the historical fact that they confound the ideas which we emphasize by the words justification and sanctification.
The Romanist word justificatio, which has come down in the literature of the Roman Catholic Church, combines in its meaning all these ideas—to wit, the forgiveness of sins, the establishment of a state of favor, the removal of indwelling sin and the communication of indwelling grace; that is, all that is embraced in our terms justification, regeneration and sanctification. In the nomenclature of the Roman Catholic Church all these are embraced under one word, justification; and this opinion coincides with that which I have stated to be the common opinion of rationalists in general, though they differ from rationalists so much on the other side in regard to the position that the making of a man good must precede as a condition his reception into divine favor.
There are two principles, then, in which the Roman Catholic doctrine as to the application of redemption stands in direct contrast and opposition to what we call the doctrine of the Reformers—what we now call the evangelical doctrine.
The Romanist holds that every individual must be first united to the Church, and through the Church to Christ. The evangelical believer holds that every individual must be spiritually united to Christ, and through union with Christ united to the Church. The Romanist holds that through the grace of God we are to be made good, and then, being made good, we are to seek divine favor. Whereas the Protestant evangelical position is, that we must first be received into the divine favor, and in consequence of that reception be made good.
The Romanist doctrine of justification is that its final cause is the glory of God; its efficient cause is the powerful operation of the Holy Spirit; its formal cause, that in which it consists, the remission of sins and infusion of grace; its meritorious cause, the passion, death and merits of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that its instrumental cause is baptism.
The sacrament acts as an opus operatum—i. e. by the simple grace inherent in the sacramental act itself. In every case in which the subject does not consciously and intelligently oppose an obstacle to the grace-effecting power of the sacrament, all sin is removed and saving grace is infused. Only concupiscence remains, which they deny to be true sin, properly so called, and regard only as the ashes or cinders, the result of past sin and the cause of future sin. But in every instance and under all ordinary conditions they admit that men do sin after baptism, and then they provide for them what they call their second justification, which is accomplished always through the instrumentality of the sacrament of penance.
If any of you want intelligently to form an opinion in regard to the Roman Catholic theology, you must remember the very first necessity is to recognize the fact that words are used in a different sense in the two systems. You would do them great injustice and bring to yourself great confusion if you should take, for instance, justification and give the Protestant definition of it, and then the Roman Catholic definition of it, and put those in opposition one to the other.
The analogue of our doctrine of justification is the Roman Catholic doctrine of penance. Romanists hold that when a man has sinned after baptism the condition of his being forgiven is that he shall experience and perform repentance.
Now, repentance, as an experience, may be defined as a virtue. That is, it is just what we call repentance, a grace wrought by the power of the Holy Spirit. But penance as a sacrament consists of three parts. It is confession made to the party having jurisdiction. It is an undergoing of satisfaction as defined and appointed by him. It is then, finally, receiving absolution. Romanists hold that upon a perfect confession and repentance, and upon due and adequate and legally appointed satisfaction, the absolution, which, as pronounced, is not declarative simply, but is efficient, really removes liability to the punishment of sin. They hold that God awards to all human sins two distinct penalties, one eternal and one temporal. Their doctrine of the eternal penalty of sin is that it has already been suffered and paid by Jesus Christ our Lord, and therefore removed absolutely and for ever from all these members; but the temporal penalty is retained, which must be endured proportionately by each sinner for himself. And thus God is represented as keeping a debit-and-credit account with all Christians, wherein their sins in their various degrees of turpitude shall be debit, and wherein their acts of benevolence of various degrees, either in this life or in purgatory, represent the credit, and a balance is struck between these; and in every case it must be finally adjusted on the side of credit to the individual before the final day of judgment.
We come now to the Protestant or evangelical position. The first principle that we hold is that all spiritual life in the creature is conditioned upon his intimate relation to and fellowship with God. If God is angry with us, we are cut off from him and spiritual life is impossible. If spiritual life is to be restored, it must be upon the condition that God shall be first reconciled to us, and then we shall be restored to his love.
The doctrine of the evangelical Church is that a man must first become reconciled to God, and be brought back into the sphere of divine favor, before he can receive the Holy Spirit and be brought into union with God and made spiritually good. That is, the favor of God is the essential precondition of grace and holiness.
Now, this is expressed by saying that justification must precede regeneration, and that regeneration must precede sanctification. All these graces are defined with wonderful precision and fullness in our Catechism, which is familiar to you all. Justification is there declared to be an act of God, accomplished by one single divine volition, completed by one single act in each instance. It is declared also to be an act—a forensic act; that is, an act of a Judge, not an act of God as Sovereign. It is not performed in the exercise of prerogative or of right as a Sovereign, but in the exercise of his infinite wisdom and justice in judging of objective facts. It is an act of God pronouncing that with respect to this person the law has no penal demands—that all its demands in the covenant of salvation have been satisfied. And this act of God proceeds upon his previous act of accrediting to the believer, as the ground of his acceptance, the righteousness—that is, all the result of the penal suffering and all the merit of the vicarious obedience—wrought out by our Lord Jesus Christ.
It consequently changes the relation of the justified person to the law, not only with regard to the past, not only with regard to the present, but with regard to the whole future. So that obedience to the law is no longer the condition of our acceptance. We are received into the favor of God for ever, and on the condition of righteousness, which has already been achieved and which has already been made ours, not simply in the purposes and covenants, but in the actual act of God in putting it to our account and making it actually ours.
Now, regeneration follows immediately upon this. It is also an act of God, wherein he exercises his mighty power in one single volition; but it is not the act of God as Judge. It is an act of divine creative power, analogous to that which he put forth when he created man originally, when he said, "Let there be light, and there was light," or when our Lord Jesus Christ called Lazarus out of the grave. It is an act in which he communicates to us in the centre of our soul a new spiritual life, which, acting from within, involves the whole nature, communicates a new principle of activity and a new mode of action to all the faculties in all their functions and in all their relations.
Sanctification necessarily begins with, and indefinitely continues as a consequent of regeneration. It is not an act, but a work of God's grace, wherein he sustains and develops, perfects and continues, the work which he has commenced. He himself teaches us the relation of these graces, one to the other, by metaphors and analogies between the natural and the spiritual life. Regeneration is begetting, or, on the other hand, it is the new birth, and therein we are born babes in Christ. Sanctification is a growth under the sustaining and supporting influences of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. It proceeds in a twofold process, in the mortification of the old man and in the vivification of the new man. All that remains of the old corruption is subdued, and the principle of life which has been implanted in us is gradually-developed in us in every faculty and in every function. It involves the intellect, because sin is blindness. The new birth involves spiritual relations, and the process of sanctification is a process of illumination whereby we come more and more to understand the revelations of God as they illuminate both hemispheres—both the earthly and the spiritual horizon.
Hence it involves the affections. These new affections go forth to new objects, and gradually these affections, in their entirety and in all their exercise and in all their functions, are made pure and spiritual. It involves also the voluntary faculties, the desires, the affections, all the faculties of connation which go out to their object and issue in volition, in choice and purpose. A man is thus enabled to choose the highest end and to resist the evil, so that he gradually becomes, not only more illuminated with it, but more and more in love with it in his affections, and he becomes stronger and stronger in the habitual understanding, detection and rejection of all evil, and in the choice and in the achievement of all good.
Now, every Christian who really has experienced the grace of Christ must, unless very greatly prejudiced, recognize the fact that this work of sanctification is the end and the crown of the whole process of salvation. We insist upon and put forward distinctly the great doctrine of justification as a means to an end. It is absolutely necessary as the condition of that faith which is the necessary source of regeneration and sanctification, and every person who is a Christian must recognize the fact that not only will it issue in sanctification, but it must begin in sanctification. This element must be recognized as characteristic of the Christian experience from the first to the last. And any man who thinks that he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept Christ for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience. He is in danger of falling under that judgment of which Paul admonishes when he speaks of the wrath of God coming down from heaven upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and with special reference to those who "hold the truth in unrighteousness."
Now, this process, however, from its very nature must be a gradual process. Of course, I would not deny that just as God might take a pebble and make a man out of it, so he might take the greatest sinner in the world and by the exercise of his mighty power make him in an instant the greatest saint in the world. But I do say, from all we do know of God, either in the works of creation or in the works of providence or in the Bible, that any such conception is utterly incongruous and outside of all analogy and all probability. All God's working, so far as we know anything about it, is historico-genetic. He works by means. He works according to the lines and sequences of natural law.
Now, that justification should be an act, that it should be begun and accomplished by one divine volition, is very natural because it is unavoidable. There can be no degree between condemnation as a sinner and acceptance as a justified man through the righteousness of Christ. If I stand before God in my own right, I am utterly condemned. If I stand represented in the vicarious righteousness of Jesus Christ, then in one instant I stand divinely justified, and far beyond what I would have been if Adam had kept his first estate and sin had never invaded this world.
If Adam had not fallen we would have been justified by Adamic righteousness. Angels and archangels now stand before God justified by angelic righteousness. But Jehovah Tsidkenu, Jehovah is our righteousness. It is not what you or I have done or will do, it is not our services in the past or promises for the future, but it is what the eternal Son of God, in the likeness of sinful flesh, did suffer and accomplish in the flesh, which is the ground of our justification and of our acceptance before God. And therefore it is that the instant the sinner believes and trusts in the pardoning Lord his righteousness becomes his, and it is by one instant act which cannot be divided, in a moment which cannot be analyzed into degrees, that the condemned sinner becomes a justified saint.
The same must be true, from its very nature, of regeneration. There must be an absolute commencement somewhere when God was moved to come forth out of the solitude and isolation of his infinitude to lay the foundations of the heavens and the earth. There must have been an absolute beginning; there must have been one instant when the energy of God went forth from without and acted in the objective world and brought something into existence that was not there before. So regeneration must be an instant act. There must be a time, an instant, when the soul is dead. There must be another instant when the soul is living. You know how it is expressed in the divine Word. It is creation—that is, an instant act. It is a begetting—that is, an instant act. It is a new birth. It is a quickening of the dead—that is, an instantaneous act. But when this new life is implanted in us, is it not evident to all men that unless God shall work, nothing of this kind can take place? This, then, is a simple act of his power, and from the very nature of the case must be instantaneous. But after it is implanted in us there must be a gradual process by which that grace that is implanted in us, exhibiting itself as an energy in every one of the faculties, takes possession of the whole being, shows its gradual and repeated action in all the habits of the life, and at last comes forth in its spontaneity as a complete and finished result.
The same is clear from the precepts of God wherein he commands us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; in which he commands us to avail ourselves of all the means of grace which he has especially appointed as the great means of sanctification.
The truth of God acts upon us, of course, in every way according to the nature of the truth which acts. The commands act upon us in one way, the threatenings act upon us in another way, and the promises act upon us in another way, and the glimpses of divine glory act upon us in another way. Retrospects of the past and the prospects of the future all act upon the regenerated Christian and stimulate his activity in various ways. And so it is with the providences of God. The Lord leads us, you know, by devious ways through our pilgrimage, and he appoints for us all our changes.
Now, under all these conditions God is carrying on the process of sanctification. We are gradually growing up and adding grace to grace, going from one degree of knowledge to another, from the acquisition of one increment of strength to another, from the development of one faculty to another, just as a child grows, just as Jesus grew himself, in wisdom and stature. First we are babes in Christ, and come at last to the measure of the stature of perfect manhood in Christ.
But every one can see that a Christian, while he recognizes that this work must be a growth, recognizes that we cannot compromise with any evil. It is perfectly evident that the standard of sanctification in the Christian life, which is at once placed before him when he first receives Christ, is the standard of infinite and of absolute perfection. There can be from the very nature of the case no compromise here, and it must be recognized as such from the first.
This results from the nature of moral principle and moral obligation. It is very plain that all that is moral is obligatory. That is what the word means. If a thing is right, it ought to be; and if it is right in its entirety, then it ought to be in its entirety.
St. Augustine said fourteen hundred years ago—and the language has never been improved—"Every lesser good has an essential element of sin." Now, for instance, suppose that you love God. Suppose that there is nothing in your heart but love to God. It does not follow that you do not sin. You say, "I love God, and there is nothing in my heart but love to God. Is not love right?" Yes, if you love God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength and with all your manhood. But if there be in this love any defect; if it come short in quality; if it come short in quantity,—then it partakes of the nature of sin, for every lesser good, as well as every degree of good short of perfection, is of the essential nature of sin itself. Therefore if any Christian should say, "Why, we cannot be perfect—that is impossible. Nobody is perfect. I will not succeed if I try, and therefore I will sit down with a qualified obedience; I will mix water with my milk; I will mix half-heartedness with my endeavor; I will compromise the standard, because the perfect standard is absolutely impossible,"—why, that man is selling his soul to the devil in doing this; he is making a compact with sin in the very nature of it. Any permitted sin, any sitting down willingly to imperfectness, is of the nature of sin, and unallowable.
I am not lowering the standard. Now, the Perfectionist people lower the standard to themselves. I remember that I had a Perfectionist a member of my church when I was a very young man, and in conversation she said to me, "Mr. Hodge, you must keep up the standard."—"Oh yes," said I, "you must keep up the standard. You say Mr. Smith is perfect—that is your standard. I say that only Jesus Christ is perfect—that is my standard. Which of us, then, keeps up the standard?"
The Perfectionists, all of them, confound justification and sanctification miserably, just as Roman Catholics do; only they do it in an informal, illogical way; but they do it.
They hold that the Lord Jesus Christ, or that God, for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, has graciously lowered the demands of the law. They admit that we cannot fulfill the Adamic law under which God created man; but they say that we can fulfill the gospel law, that we can render a perfect love, and the evangelical standard is lowered to conform to our standard. This is an act of substitution of a new thing. That is a miserable lowering of the standard. It is putting a new and lower standard in the place of the old and higher standard.
Now, the truth is that this law has never been lowered, the principle of the law by which moral character is to be measured having its norm in the absolutely perfect moral constitution of God himself. God's law is an utterance, it is an expression of God himself in the forms of human thought and language; it reveals to man the infinitely perfect moral nature of God himself. And when God's law is altered, and so altered and modified that God is compromised, that moral character has been modified and has been compromised in the very throne of the universe itself. It is true that the law has been satisfied for us for our justification, that the Lord Jesus Christ has been substituted in our place. But the law was not lowered—it was magnified, it was made honorable; so that what a man could not do in that he was weak through the flesh, God has done by giving his Son in the flesh. But it was by perfect obedience and by the vicarious sufferings of Jesus Christ that this debt was paid, and fully paid by the terms of the law. But this refers to the law as a covenant of salvation; it does not refer to the law as a moral standard of character. St. Paul said, in his Epistle to the Romans (6:14), "Sin shall not have dominion over you, because you are not under the law, but under grace." He is referring to justification; he is not referring to sanctification. He does not say that the Lord Jesus Christ satisfied the law in your behalf, and that therefore the law has no more demands upon you; but he says the Lord Jesus Christ satisfied the law as a covenant in your behalf. But the law, as a standard of character, remains the same infinite, perfect law, having its ground and norm in the infinite and perfect, in the absolutely unchangeable, nature of God himself.
The same thing is proved by the fact that the Bible tells us that God himself is the standard. How can anybody claim to be perfect when God is the standard, or claim that the law is to be lowered? We are to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy. We are told to lay aside every weight and the sin that doth most easily beset us, and run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus as our standard and our aim and glory. Then, as Christ's perfection was an absolute perfection, why of course the perfection of the Christian can be nothing less than absolute perfection. As Christians, therefore, we cannot compromise with sin. No man can serve God and Mammon. No service is admitted from the first, not even in the recruits, from those who come with a divided heart. We are to leave the things which are behind, and to reach forward always to the things which are before, in order that we may apprehend and realize that whereunto we have been apprehended in the purposes and in the design of Christ.
Especially is it our privilege and duty to go forward to the attainment of perfect assurance, making our calling and election sure.
There are two different positions occupied in Christendom on this subject of faith and assurance. Some have held that assurance is of the essence of faith, and that a man, if he is a Christian at all, will know that he is a Christian. This was a form of thinking very prevalent at the time of the Reformation. It grew out of the fact that they were more earnest, spontaneous men than they were reflective Christian divines. It is a matter of fact that at that period of Church history there were men in whom this grace of assurance of salvation was very prominent. They did have it, and God gave it to them, because he gave them an herculean work to do which demanded heroes for its performance.
In direct opposition to this the Romanists take the position that assurance of personal salvation is impossible, and they take it on this ground: assurance means absolute certitude, grounded upon divine revelation. The Romanists point out the fact that there is no text in the Bible where it is said that John Smith is a Christian. The fact that any man is a Christian is not a matter of divine revelation.
Now, our Confession of Faith takes the middle ground, and I think the right ground, that assurance is not of the essence of faith. And this is very plain, because the Bible makes the distinction between the assurance of faith and the assurance of hope. Assurance of faith is strong, full faith; assurance of hope is an inference from that. Faith terminates on the ground of assurance; hope terminates upon the object desired. Faith is the foundation of hope, but faith and hope are not the same thing; they do not go out in parallel lines with one another and take hold of the same object. Assurance of faith is assured faith, but assurance of hope is the conviction that we are Christians and that we are objects of divine love and heirs of divine glory. It can be put, like any other point of reasoning, in the form of a syllogism. It is a matter of absolute revelation that he that believes in Christ is saved. This is the major proposition of the syllogism. The minor proposition is, "I believe." That has no need of revelation; it belongs to the inner consciousness. Am I not just as sure that I believe as I am sure that my pulses beat? You put the minor under the major proposition, and the infallible conclusion is, "Therefore I am saved."
Our Confession says that this infallible assurance springs up in the heart in consequence of three elements meeting together. The first is strong faith in the Word of God; second, the consciousness of the possession of those graces to which the promises are annexed. It is not simply faith; the Bible is full of promises, and they are addressed, not to persons named, but to characters. Whosoever loveth, whosoever believeth, whosoever obeyeth, whosoever trusteth, whosoever hopeth. Well, if I hope and trust and obey and love, the consciousness of possessing these graces gives me the assurance of the promises which God has annexed to the graces. Then, in the third place, there is that mysterious and royal gift, the witness together with our spirit of the Holy Spirit.
Like all similar truths, this may be abused fanatically and claimed ignorantly by very stupid persons to whom it does not apply. But it is in the Word of God; it does belong to some person, and there must be a way of finding out and testing this. It is the witnessing together of our spirit with the Spirit of God. You cannot confound these two personalities; my spirit and Jehovah's Spirit—we are two. But if the Spirit of God as a Person comes to my spirit as a person, and bears witness together with my spirit that I am a child of God, I have the utmost certitude. Of course we must guard against misconception; there is no point in which it is more necessary for us to apply critical tests. There is no state of mind which is more to be desired, which more immediately tends to sanctification, which develops more power, and is in a wider sense the precondition of great usefulness, than that which is characterized by the words assurance of hope, and which results from the witnessing with our spirit of the Spirit of God. Per contra, there is no state of mind so dangerous and profane, and which leads more to sin, than that wicked, conceited assumption which we meet sometimes in unholy and godless persons, when they claim to know that they are the favorites of Heaven, because they have conceived they had the witness of the Spirit. We are all liable to this abuse; we are moved to it by the natural operation of self-love. We all want to be "the sons of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ." We all want to have the question settled.
Then, again, it is not only the tendency of an innocent self-love, but also of pride, and it may be the seduction of Satan; because when he wants to take a person into his grasp entirely, what better thing can he do than to render him morally callous and fill him with presumptuous self-assurance?
How are you and I to know? I think the first essential mark of the difference between true and false assurance is to be found in the fact that the true works humility. There is nothing in the world that works such satanic, profound, God-defiant pride as false assurance; nothing works such utter humility or brings to such utter self-emptiness as the child-like spirit of true assurance. Surely this can be known. If a person is self-confident, there is self-assurance; if there is any evidence of pride in connection with his claim, it is a most deadly mark; it is the plague-spot which marks death and corruption. But if there is utter humility you have the sign of the true spirit.
This will manifest itself in connection with another mark. If one is really united to Christ in a union so established that Christ is indeed in possession of the soul, the whole consciousness will be taken up with what I would call Christ-consciousness, and there will be no self-consciousness. Little children are very prompt to show their character. There is a great difference in them. Bring a child into the room. She comes thinking about nothing in particular, looking at her mother, then looking at the guests or anything that objectively strikes her, not thinking of herself. That is pure, sweet and lovely. She grows older, and she comes to think of herself and what people think of her, and her manner has lost its unconsciousness. A great deal of what you call bashfulness is rottenness at the heart; it is self-consciousness. Nothing in the world so tends to defile the imagination, to pervert the affections and to corrupt the morals as self-consciousness. You know it is connected with every diseased and morbid action of the body.
A young woman told me that she wanted the witness of the Spirit, and she talked about it everlastingly; she wanted to tell her own experience and feelings always. I told her she must forget herself, not think of her own feelings. The man who is talking about his love unceasingly has no love; the man who is talking about his faith unceasingly has no faith; the two things cannot go together. When you love, what are you thinking about? Are you not thinking about the object of your love? And when you believe, what are you thinking about? Why, the object that you believe. Suppose you ask yourself, "Am I believing?" Why, of course you are not believing when you are thinking of believing. No human being believes except when he thinks about Christ. Am I loving? Of course I am not loving when I am thinking about loving; no human being loves except when he is thinking about Christ as the object of his love.
In Virginia I once saw one human being in whom there was the perfect work of grace, as far as I could see as her pastor, and I was intimate with her six years. Even on earth she was one of those who had made their garments white in the blood of the Lamb, and she seemed always to walk upon the verge of heaven. I never heard her speak of any one particular of her character or of her own graces. I have come out of the pulpit when the congregation had gone, and have found her upon her knees in her pew, absolutely unconscious of all external objects, so far was she absorbed in worship. When I roused her from her trance, she cried instantly, "Is he not holy? is he not glorious? is he not beautiful? is he not infinite?" She did not speak of her own love or of her feelings. A great deal of Perfectionism is rotten to the core. All self-consciousness is of the very essence and nature of sin. Then, again, true confidence leads necessarily to strong desires for more knowledge and more holiness, for unceasing advances of grace.
I was told once, in a congregation where I preached, that I need not tell a certain young man anything about religion; he had finished it—that is, that, having finished it, he found nothing else to do. That is what the word "perfect" means. Now, when a man has finished eternal life, when he has finished learning all the revelation of God, when he has experienced all the infinite benefits of Christ's redemption, when he has finished all the mysterious work of the Holy Ghost in his heart, he ought to be annihilated. There is no place in heaven or on earth for such a man. But a man who really has the love of God in his heart is always reaching forward to the things which are before. The more he loves, the more he wants to love; the more he is consecrated, the more consecration he longs for. He has grand ideas and grand aims, but they lie beyond him in heaven.
I want to speak now about Antinomianism. There are two forms of Antinomianism, but they are the same thing. One has been called Neo-nomianism and the other Antinomianism.
Antinomianism is the doctrine that Christ has so satisfied the law for us that it is abolished; that having gone to Christ we are washed and cleansed, and we may do as we please, because Christ has in every sense so fulfilled the law that it has no more dominion over us. That is called Antinomianism.
It has been very common for Arminians to charge upon Calvinism the doctrine of Antinomianism. We repudiate it. We say with Paul of the man who says, "Let us continue in sin that grace may abound," his damnation is sure.
Neo-nomianism is a substitution of a new and lower law for the infinite law of God. The law is the absolute perfection which God has put before us, and they lower the standard when they teach a lower doctrine with regard to sin.
The other view is that God has, for Christ's sake, not abolished the law, but he has substituted a new law, and that in place of the law of absolute perfection things are adjusted to the nature of man in his present state.
This is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and the doctrine also of many pretenders to perfection; it is the precise doctrine of the "higher life" under a different name.
Of course, there can be no controversy if you mean really higher life. We all believe in that; we all preach it. "Go on unto perfection;" "Leave the things which are behind;" strive after holiness in every direction. But if you say you have attained to it, and that higher life is just what I see embodied in the lives of A, B and C, I say that is the very opposite. It is not a higher life; it is a lower life.
It is wrong, because it substitutes a lower standard. It is wrong, because it gives you a false idea of sin, for sin means "any want of conformity" to the absolute standard of God. Every one is a sinner. John Wesley admits that; everybody admits that. If you use the word "sin" in the sense of a real, deliberate choice of evil, then perhaps some men may not be sinners in that sense.
But even Dr. George Peck, whose book is a standard with regard to the doctrine of Perfectionism among Arminians, says: "In the life of the most perfect Christian there is every day renewed occasion for self-abhorrence, for repentance, for renewed application to the blood of Christ, for application of the rekindling of the Holy Spirit." What is the use of calling that perfection? We do go on unto perfection, and we grow better and better every day; but every day we come so far short that there is renewed occasion for having recourse to the standard of perfection. We require the renewed application of the blood of Christ and the grace of the Spirit. We do not call this perfection. But you say, Why make a point of telling people they cannot be perfect? I say we do not make a point of telling people they cannot be perfect. I open the Bible and it says, Move on; "forgetting the things which are behind," go forward. When a man can show that he is doing this, he is going on to perfection. I would not preach that you cannot be perfect, but I would preach to you, Have no standard of perfection but Almighty God and Jesus Christ his Son. That is the doctrine. Perfectionism is pernicious and evil, because it is false. It is not true, and every lie does harm. A lie that touches the very quick and centre of religious experience is of the very nature of death itself.
A man recently died in London who held this doctrine. He was once my guest in America. I loved him. I was his guest in London. But I thought he knew no more of theology than a babe; yet he was trying to teach others when he ought to have been taught himself. He said that we all receive Christ twice. We receive him for our justification, and afterward we receive him for our sanctification; and he tried to illustrate it in a great many instances. He spoke of D'Aubigné, Thomas Chalmers and Mrs. Jonathan Edwards.
Now, it is very remarkable that nearly all the most perfect saints never themselves knew their own perfection. Mrs. Edwards was all the time aspiring for perfection which was beyond her, and never thought for an instant that she was perfect. D'Aubigné never heard of the grace of justification without sanctification. And if you could have talked to Dr. Chalmers, with his great heart and glowing tongue, on such a theme as this, he would have struck it down into the dust. It is not true. You cannot take Christ for justification unless you take him for sanctification. Think of the sinner coming to Christ and saying, "I do not want to be holy;" "I do not want to be saved from sin;" "I would like to be saved in my sins;" "Do not sanctify me now;" "But justify me now." What would be the answer? Could he be accepted by God? You can no more separate justification from sanctification than you can separate the circulation of the blood from the inhalation of the air. Breathing and circulation are two different things, but you cannot have one without the other; they go together and they constitute one life. So you have justification and sanctification; they go together and they constitute one life. If there was ever one who attempted to receive Christ with justification and not with sanctification, he missed it, thank God! He was no more justified than he was sanctified.
The whole process is the reverse of sanctification in its very essence; for the more a man grows in sanctification, the more delicate is his sensibility, the more exquisite his sense of sin. A man who has been in a swoon, utterly dead to sensation, recovers his sensations gradually. As he becomes more and more conscious, he gradually perceives everything that is wrong with him. So the more a man is sanctified, the more is there a change in his judgment; it becomes more discriminating, and the more humble will be his estimate of himself. Things which did not appear to be sin at first will be realized as sin afterward more and more.
Those who say, "We have already attained and are already perfect," lower the standard; instead of sanctification, it is pollution; instead of a higher life, it is a lower life. Again, it necessarily generates increasing self-consciousness and spiritual pride; these things run together, and will go out at last in utter darkness.
You can all understand the ripening of the pear. There is a ripening which goes on in the autumn of the year which is perfect, and perfectly ripe fruit is one of the most perfect and beautiful things in nature. It is a gradual process from the blossom through all the different stages. You could not hasten it. It is growing on in the sunshine and when the dews of heaven descend upon it. The ripening is perfect; and when you take it from the limb you say, "Thank God, this is perfect; it has run through all the stages; it has omitted none, it has come to the end, it is finished." But you go sometimes and you find pears early ripe, and they have a sweet and luscious self-consciousness of it, and they fell down flat on the earth and are soft, because there is a worm at the core. My good grandmother used to say, and I think now it is worth repeating, "I do hate the early-ripes."
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From Popular Lectures on Theological Themes (eBook)