Part 27

The same doctrine is taught more leniently in the 13th article of the Church of England, so that amongst the theologians, “the natural man,” as they call him, is in a sad condition, for act as he will he cannot but sin: if he does good works, he commits sin, and if he neglects them he is guilty of still greater sins. Quotations in the spirit of those already adduced might be swelled into volumes from the vast treasures of Calvinistic divinity. But I shall close these by an extract from the author I have before mentioned and quoted from, an author, as I have said, highly popular and largely circulated; and here is a passage of his on Christ and the last judgment.—“The judge will pronounce the sentence of damnation on the ungodly multitude. Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, ‘Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels:’ ... The Lamb of God shall roar as a lion against them; he shall excommunicate and cast them out of his presence for ever, by a sentence from the throne, saying, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed.’ He shall adjudge them to everlasting fire, and to the society of devils for evermore. And this sentence also we suppose, will be pronounced with an audible voice by the man Christ. And all the saints shall cry, ‘Hallelujah! true and righteous are his judgments!’ None were so compassionate as the saints when on earth, during the time of God’s patience: but now that time is at an end; their compassion for the ungodly is swallowed up in joy in the Mediator’s glory, and his executing of just judgment, by which his enemies are made his footstool. Though when on earth the righteous man wept in secret places for their pride, and because they would not hear, yet he shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked (Ps. lviii. 10). No pity shall then be shown them from their nearest relations. The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband: the godly husband shall say _Amen_ to the condemnation of _her_ who lay in his bosom; the godly parent shall say _Hallelujah_ at the passing of the sentence against their ungodly child; and the godly child shall, from the bottom of his heart, approve the condemnation of his wicked parents,—the father who begat him, and the mother who bore him. The sentence is just, they are judged according to their work.”—Rev. xx. 12.

It were surely preferable to labour under the blindest mistakes concerning the essence of God, or the person of Christ, than be guilty of believing such atrocious representations as these of their moral character. The zealous may scout us if they choose, as infidels; but if Calvinism and Christianity were identical, infidelity would be virtue, it would be but the righteous rebellion of human nature against creeds, in vindication of the truth of its own affections, and the rectitude of its God.

Footnotes for Lecture IV.

Footnote 151:

See Note on John xii.

Footnote 152:

John x. 34-36.

Footnote 153:

Acts xvii. 30, 31.

Footnote 154:

1 Cor. xv. 21, 47.

Footnote 155:

Acts. x.

Footnote 156:

Cuvier. See Note 1.

Footnote 157:

See Note 2.

Footnote 158:

Lect. pp. 219, 220.

Footnote 159:

Lect. p. 222.

Footnote 160:

Lecture, p. 233.

Footnote 161:

Lecture, p. 244.

Footnote 162:

Cuvier’s Eloge on Priestley.

Footnote 163:

No. 126, 1836.

THE PROPOSITION

“THAT CHRIST IS GOD,”

PROVED TO BE FALSE FROM THE JEWISH AND THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES.

PREFACE.

The length of the following Discourse rendered it necessary to omit large portions of it in the delivery; the remainder has undergone no alteration in preparing the Lecture for the press.

It is one of the duties of the controversialist to drop each subject of debate so soon as everything materially affecting it has been advanced; and to seize the time for silence, as promptly as the time for speech. This consideration would have led me to abstain from any further remarks respecting the Improved Version, did it not appear that it is considered disrespectful to pass without notice any argument adduced by our opponents. In briefly adverting to Mr. Byrth’s strictures on my former Lecture, contained in the preface to his own, I am more anxious to avert from myself the imputation of discourtesy to him than to disprove his charge of “PITIFUL EVASION;” which even the accuser himself, I imagine, cannot permanently esteem just.

Notwithstanding the criticisms of my respected opponent, I still maintain that a Subscriber to the British and Foreign Unitarian Association is no more responsible for the alleged delinquencies of the Improved Version, than is a Subscriber to the British and Foreign Bible Society for the known departures from the true standard of the text which its funds are employed to circulate. Mr. Byrth appears to enumerate three particulars, in which he thinks that the parallelism between these two cases fails:

First; “The Authorised Version does not profess to be a _systematic Interpretation_. It is not, in one word, a _Creed_ and an _Exposition_. It is only a literal _translation_, without note or comment.” So much the worse, must we not say? Whatever deception a false text can produce, is thus wholly concealed and undiscoverable; the counterfeit passes into circulation, undistinguished from the pure gold of the Divine Word, bearing on its front the very same image and superscription. Did this version “_profess_ to be a _systematic Interpretation_,” readers would be on their guard; but while professing to be “without note or comment,” it inserts “a note” or gloss (in the case of the Heavenly Witnesses) into the _text itself_. The doctrinal bearing of this and other readings, in which Griesbach’s differs from the Received Text, makes the Authorised Version, _quoad hoc_, a creed, while it disclaims this character.

Secondly; To constitute the Parallelism, the Bible Society ought to be, “The Trinitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,” avowedly publishing an “Improved Version of the Scriptures,” &c. So long, then, as Churchmen abstain from proposing “an Improved Version,” and designate their societies by neutral names, they may be acquitted, “in foro conscientiæ,” for retaining any corruptions which may happen to exist in the _un-improved_ Translation. It is easy to conjecture that, on this principle, it will be long before the Church incurs the needless guilt of an “Improved Version.” Surely the frank avowal, by the words “Trinitarian Society,” of a party purpose, would rather abate than augment the culpability of retaining a Trinitarian gloss; since the reader would have fair warning that the work was edited under Theological bias. And one of the most serious charges against “the Improved Version” was precisely this: that its first edition was without party badge (the word _Unitarian_ not appearing in the title); so that it might possibly deceive the unwary.

Thirdly; The parallelism is said to fail _in extent_; the peculiarities of the Improved Version being much more numerous, and sustained by less evidence, than the false readings of the Authorized Translation. I cannot concur in this remark, so far as it affects the evidence against 1 John v. 7. But I pass by this matter of opinion, to protest against the unjust exaggeration of a matter of fact, contained in Mr. Byrth’s supposition of a Trinitarian counterpart to the Improved Version. He speaks of “a text corrected on the principle of” “_Theological_ criticism and conjecture:”—he knows that _not one text_ is so corrected; that Griesbach’s second edition is followed without variation; that any proposed deviations from it are only typographically indicated, or suggested and defended in the notes. He speaks of the retention of “questionable passages,” without “notice that their authenticity had ever been doubted;” and the expunging of as many perplexing doctrinal texts as possible:—he knows that _not one word_ of the most approved text is expunged, or of any less perfect text retained; and that notice is given of every deviation on the part of the Editors, in questions either of authenticity or of translation, from their standards, Griesbach and Newcome, and from the Received Text. Mr. Byrth is aware that his opponents in this controversy do not altogether admire the Improved Version; but it is not fit that advantage should be taken of this to publish extravagant descriptions of it, in which the accuracy of the scholar, and even the justice of the Christian, are for the moment lost in the vehemence of the partisan.

It is desirable to add, that the Society which originally published the Improved Version, has long since been merged in the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. In this larger body three other societies (of which one, at least, surpassed in scale and influence the unfortunate object of our opponent’s hostility) are consolidated; and its subscription list contains the names of those who previously supported _any_ of the constituent elements of the Association. Hence it can, with no propriety, be called “The Society instituted for the circulation” of the Improved Version. It cannot be alleged that a subscriber is bound to anything more than a general and preponderant approbation of the complex objects of the Association; nor does he, by retaining his name on the list of its supporters, forego his right of dissenting from particular modes of action which its Directors may adopt.

May I assure Mr. Byrth, that I did not intend to insinuate, that his strictures were produced “second-hand:” except in the sense that many of them had, in fact, been anticipated. I expressly guarded myself against any construction reflecting on the originality and literary honour of our opponents.

The remaining animadversions of Mr Byrth, involving no public interest, and having merely personal reference to myself, I willingly pass by; knowing that they can have no power but in their truth; and in that case I should be sorry to weaken them.

LECTURE V.

THE PROPOSITION “THAT CHRIST IS GOD,” PROVED TO BE FALSE FROM THE JEWISH AND THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES.

BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.

“FOR THOUGH THERE BE THAT ARE CALLED GODS, WHETHER IN HEAVEN OR IN EARTH (AS THERE BE GODS MANY, AND LORDS MANY), BUT TO US THERE IS BUT ONE GOD, _THE FATHER_, OF WHOM ARE ALL THINGS, AND WE IN HIM; AND ONE LORD JESUS CHRIST, BY WHOM ARE ALL THINGS, AND WE BY HIM.”—1 _Cor._ viii. 5, 6.

Scarcely had Christ retired from our world, before his influence began to be felt by mankind in two different ways. He transformed their _Worship_, and purified their interpretation of _Duty_. They have ever since adored a holier God, and obeyed a more exalted rule of right. Looking upward, they have discerned in heaven a Providence more true and tender than they had believed; looking around, they have seen on earth a service allotted to their conscience, nobler and more responsible than they had thought before. Watched from above by an object of infinite trust and veneration, they have found below a work of life most sacred, to be performed by obedient wills beneath his sight. Faith has flown to its rest _there_, and conscience has toiled in its task _here_, with a tranquil energy never seen in a world not yet evangelized.

To suppose that a set of moral precepts, however wise and authoritative, could ever have produced, in either of these respects, the effects which have flowed from Christianity, seems to me altogether unreasonable. Had Christ done no more than leave in the world a sound code of ethics, his work would probably have expired in a few centuries, and have been very imperfect while it endured. A few prudential and dispassionate minds would have profited by its excellence; but never would it have trained the affections of childhood, or overawed the energy of guilt, or refined the rugged heart of ignorance, or consecrated the vigils of grief.

The power of Christ’s religion is not in his precepts, but in his person; not in the memory of his maxims, but in the image of Himself. He is his own system; and, apart from him, his teachings do but take their place with the sublimest efforts of speculation, to be admired and forgotten with the colloquies of Socrates, and the meditations of Plato. Himself first, and his lessons afterwards, have the hearts of the people ever loved: his doctrines, indeed, have been obscured, his sayings perverted, his commands neglected, the distinctive features of his instructions obliterated, but he himself has been venerated still; his unmistakable spirit has corrected the ill-construed letter of the Gospel; and preserved some unity of life amid the various, and even opposing developments of Christian civilization.

The person of Christ may be contemplated as an object of religious reverence, or as an object of moral imitation. He may appear to our minds as the representative of Deity, or as the model of humanity; teaching us, in the one case, what we should believe, and trust, and adore in heaven; in the other, what we should do on earth:—the rule of faith in the one relation, the rule of life in the other.

Did his office extend only to the latter, were he simply an example to us, displaying to us merely what manhood ought to be, he might indeed constitute the centre of our morality; but he would not properly belong to our religion: he would be the object of affections equal and social, not devout; he would take a place among things human, not divine; would be the symbol of visible and definite duties, not of unseen and everlasting realities. A Christianity which should reduce him to this relation, would indeed be a step removed above the mere cold preceptive system, which depresses him into a law-giver; but it would no more be entitled to the name of a _religion_, than the Ethics of Aristotle, or the Offices of Cicero.

It is then as the type of God, the human image of the everlasting Mind, that Christ becomes an object of our _Faith_. Once did a dark and doubting world cry, like Philip on the evening of Gethsemane, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us:” but now has Christ “been so long with us” that we, “who have seen him, have seen the Father.” This I conceive to have been the peculiar office of Jesus; to _show us_, not to _tell us_, the spirit of that Being who spreads round us in Infinitude, and leads us through Eternity. The universe had prepared before us the _scale_ of Deity; Christ has filled it with his own _spirit_; and we worship now, not the cold intellectual deity of natural religion; not the distant majesty, the bleak immensity, the mechanical omnipotence, the immutable stillness, of the speculative Theist’s God: but One far nearer to our worn and wearied hearts; One whose likeness is seen in Jesus of Nazareth, and whose portraiture, suffused with the tints of that soul, is impressed upon creation; One, therefore, who concerns himself with our humblest humanities, and views our world with a domestic eye, whose sanctity pierces the guilty mind with repentance, and then shelters the penitent from rebuke; who hath mercy for the victims of infirmity, and a recall for the sleepers in the grave. Let Messiah’s mind pass forth to fill all time and space; and you behold the Father, to whom we render a loving worship.

In order to fulfil this office of revealing, in his own person, the character of the Father, Christ possessed and manifested all the _moral_ attributes of Deity. His absolute holiness; his ineffable perceptions of right; his majestic rebuke of sin; his profound insight into the corrupt core of worldly and hypocritical natures, and to the central point of life in the affectionate and genuine soul; his well-proportioned mercies and disinterested love, fill the whole meaning of the word Divine: God can have no other, and no more, perfection of character intelligible to us.

These moral attributes of God, we conceive to have been compressed, in Christ, within the physical and intellectual limits of humanity; to have been unfolded and displayed amid the infirmities of a suffering and tempted nature; and, during the brevity of a mortal life, swiftly hurried to its close. And this immersion of divine perfection in the darkness of weakness and sorrow, so far from forfeiting our appreciation of him, incalculably deepens it. The addition of infinite force, mechanical or mental, would contribute no new ingredient to our veneration, since force is not an object of reverence; and it would take away the wonder and grandeur of his soul, by rendering temptation impossible, and conflict a pretence. Since God cannot be pious, or submissive to his own providence, or cast down in doubt of his own future, or agonized by the insults of his own creatures, such a combination seems to confuse and destroy all the grounds of veneration, and to cause the perfection of Christ to pass in unreality away.

To this view, however, of the person of Christ, Trinitarians object as defective; and proceed to add one other ingredient to the conception, viz., that he possessed the physical and intellectual attributes of Deity;—that he is to be esteemed no less eternal, omnipotent and omnipresent, than the Infinite Father; the actual creator of the visible universe, of the very world into which he was born and of the mother who bare him, of the disciples who followed and of the enemies who destroyed him. These essential properties of Deity by no means, we are assured, interfered with the completeness of his humanity; so that he had the body, the soul, the consciousness, of a man; and, in union with these, the infinite mind of God. But in a question of mere words, in which the guidance of ideas is altogether lost, I dare not trust myself to my own language. To disturb the juxtaposition of charmed sounds, is to endanger orthodoxy; and, in describing the true doctrine, I therefore present you with a portion of that unexampled congeries of luminous phrases, commonly called the Athanasian Creed. “The Catholic faith is this: that we worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost: ... the Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal; and yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.... So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; and yet they are not three Gods, but one God.... So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And, in this Trinity, none is afore or after other; none is greater or less than another; but the whole three persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.”

Of the second of these three persons, the second article of the Church of England gives the following account:—

“The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance; so that two whole and perfect natures,—that is to say, the Godhead and the Manhood,—were joined together in one Person, never to be divided; whereof is One Christ, very God and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us.”

In opposition to this theory, we maintain the Personal Unity of God, and the simplicity of nature in Christ. It is my duty at present to submit these contrasted schemes to the test of Scripture. In order to effect this, I advance these three positions:

(1.) That if the Athanasian doctrine be found in Scripture, then, on our opponents’ own principles, Scripture does not contain a revelation from God.

(2.) That if it be really in the Bible, certain definable traces of it there may justly be demanded; and, before opening the record, we should settle what these traces must be.

(3.) That such traces cannot be found in Scripture.

I. “If,” says Bishop Butler, “a supposed revelation contain clear immoralities or contradictions, either of these would prove it false.”[164] This principle, generally recognized by competent reasoners, has been distinctly admitted in the present discussion; and Dr. Tattershall, in particular, has employed much ingenuity to prove that the doctrine of the Trinity, containing no absurdity or contradiction, involves in no danger the authority of the writings supposed to teach it. But no subtlety can avail to remove the inherent incredibility of this tenet, which even its believers cannot, without uneasiness, distinctly and steadily contemplate. Long usage and Church authority alone prevent men from perceiving that the propositions, announcing it, are either simple contradictions, or statements empty of all meaning. The same remark is applicable to the notion of the two natures in Christ.

Before proceeding to justify this assertion, let me guard myself from the imputation of rejecting this doctrine _because it is mysterious_; or of supporting a system which insists on banishing all mysteries from religion. On any such system I should look with unqualified aversion, as excluding from faith one of its primary elements; as obliterating the distinction between logic and devotion, and tending only to produce an irreverent and narrow-minded dogmatism. “Religion without mystery” is a combination of terms, than which the Athanasian Creed contains nothing more contradictory; and the sentiment of which it is the motto, I take to be a fatal caricature of rationalism, tending to bring all piety into contempt. Until we touch upon the mysterious, we are not in contact with religion; nor are any objects reverently regarded by us, except such as, from their nature or their vastness, are felt to transcend our comprehension. God, of whose inscrutable immensity creation is but the superficial film; Christ, the love of whom surpasseth knowledge; futurity, veiled in awful shadows, yet illumined by a point or two of light; these, which are slightly known, and greatly unknown, with something definite, representing a vast indefinite, are the peculiar objects of trust and veneration. And the station which the soul occupies, when its devout affections are awakened, is always this: on the twilight, between immeasurable darkness and refreshing light; on the confines, between the seen and the unseen; where a little is discerned, and an infinitude concealed; where a few distinct conceptions stand, in confessed inadequacy, as symbols of ineffable realities: and we say, “Lo! these are part of his ways; but the thunder of his power, who can understand?” And if this be true, the sense of what we do not know is as essential to our religion as the impression of what we do know: the thought of the boundless, the incomprehensible, must blend in our mind with the perception of the clear and true; the little knowledge we have must be clung to, as the margin of an invisible immensity; and all our positive ideas be regarded as the mere float to show the surface of the infinite deep.