Somewhere, somehow, some time, a man, or some men, it does
not matter which, took a choice that led them, and after them the whole human
race, away from God.
Whatever may have been the case in prehistoric times, and whether or not
the original impulse came from outside man himself, there is no doubt that,
by the time we come to people of whose lives and thoughts there is any record,
every human being is infected with a strong tendency to make choices which
are not in accordance with the will of God.
In the individual, as in the race, any such choice must set up an estrangement
between the chooser and God.
How is this estrangement to be broken down and
the lost relationship restored?
God may understand and sympathize with the reasons that led
to a wrong choice, but he cannot condone a wrong choice.
The fact that a
wrong choice causes an estrangement between him and us is not due to unkindness
on his part, but is a necessary consequence of his being both just and perfect.
In his infinite love God may be willing and anxious to come all the way to
meet us,
but he cannot (without being false to himself, which is absurd) restore the
lost relationship without some corresponding move on our part.
Just because he has given us free will,
we must first wish to restore the relationship;
and then, in order that it may be restored,
we must be sorry for our wrong choice and be willing to make reparation.
That, from our point of view, is the difficulty:
to make our sorrow or our reparation sufficient.
Sufficient, not to satisfy an outraged deity, but to satisfy our own realization
of what justice requires of us.
The more we learn about the perfection and love of God, the more dreadful
we must see to be any action of ours which estranges us from him.
The heart of the Christian faith is
that what man cannot do for himself,
God has done for him.
One human being?
Jesus Christ?
never made a wrong use of his freedom of choice.
Yet, just because of the evil in the human race, to which he had contributed
nothing, he was forced to suffer, as we have seen, as much as, and even more
than, any ordinary sinful man.
He experienced all the consequences of sin, even, and this is most important,
the consequence which consists in estrangement from God, though he himself
had deserved none of them.
What differentiates his case from every other is the fact that his sufferings
were entirely a result of his membership of the human race, and not in any
way the result of any evil in himself.
And so, once and for all, a representative of the race had made a full, perfect,
and sufficient reparation on behalf of the race, and the relationship between
God and the race could be restored.
What is more, it was AS MAN that Jesus returned
to God;
so that from that time the human race was no longer apart from God but was
actually joined to God.
We, as men, are linked to Jesus Christ the man, who is also God the Son;
and the link is unbreakable.
But what of the individuals who compose the race,
and who to our knowledge go on making wrong choices in spite of everything?
Their position has been fundamentally altered by the action of God in Christ.
They are still capable of going wrong;
they are still incapable of restoring their individual relationship with
God.
But, just as the first evil choice infected the whole race,
so the effect of one positively good life extends throughout the whole race.
Every individual member of the race can, if he will, associate himself with
Christ's act of reparation,
and so, through that act, enter into the companionship of God.
We shall come later on to consider the conditions upon which we can do this
and the way in which we can set about it.
At the moment we are only stating what Christians believe to be the effect
of the Crucifixion,
and seeing what sort of a case they have for claiming that their belief is
reasonable.
Even now we have not reached the end.
We must assume that if God sets out to do something he does it,
and what he has set out to do is nothing less than to win back the whole
human race.
Jesus said that if he were 'lifted up', he would draw all men to himself.
[Or 'all things' - it is doubtful which of the two translations
correctly represents the original.
But 'all things', that is 'the whole
creation', is even more comprehensive than' all men'.]
ALL MEN.
It is a staggering claim.
It means not only saints and parsons but you and me and the people next door
-
it means even the black-market racketeers and the white-slave traffickers,
even Judas Iscariot, even Hitler.
It means not only Christians,
but Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists, pagans, atheists.
How is it to be done?
We can only see dimly,
but it is certain that sooner or later,
here on earth or in some future state,
each of us human beings will find himself confronted with a love so attractive
that he cannot help responding.
There will be no compulsion but that of our own wills.
God has all eternity to work in,
and his purpose will be accomplished.
What, then, about hell fire?
Surely the Church believes officially in the existence of hell and eternal
punishment -
Certainly it does.
We are told explicitly that we shall be judged on our conduct in this life,
and that eternal suffering awaits those who shut themselves off from the
love of God.
It is this from which Christ came to save us,
and he could not save us from a non-existent possibility.
But we have not been told,
and the Church has never stated officially,
that in fact any particular human being has been or will be consigned to
eternal hell fire.
But again it may be said:
In that case what does it all matter?
If our salvation is certain, whatever we do, why should we bother about it?
Yet, of course, it is just this certainty which makes what we do matter far
more than would otherwise be the case.
The farther we go away from God, the
harder and longer must be the journey back.
It is only because there must be a journey back that it matters how far we
go.
The test, and the guarantee, of all this is the resurrection
of Jesus.
Christianity asserts that, after his dead body had been placed in the tomb,
God in some way acted it upon so that it was no longer there.
We cannot 'explain' this, and it would be surprising if we could,
for we have no experience of the effect upon a material body of its being
inhabited by God.
All material things of which we have consciousness must exist in four dimensions?
three which we call space,
and one which we call time.
An object is not perceptible to us unless it occupies a definite point in
time as well as in space.
If God should withdraw from the time-dimension a material object, that object
would be annihilated, so far as human perception is concerned.
Readers of Saint John's Gospel cannot fail to be struck by the curious detail
-
so unlikely to have been invented -
that the grave clothes had collapsed in their places,
as if the body had been annihilated.
IT IS CERTAINLY REASONABLE TO SUPPOSE
THAT GOD,
having performed this great action for the human race upon the Cross,
WOULD TAKE STEPS TO GIVE THE DISCIPLES?
on whom he relied for making the results of his action available for humanity
at large?
AN ABSOLUTELY CONVINCING
AND SPECTACULAR DEMONSTRATION
OF WHAT HE HAD DONE.
Granted that he wished to do this,
how could he have done it more effectively than in the way described in the
Gospels?
The Gospels themselves admit that the disciples,
or at any rate some of them,
were not at all ready to be convinced;
but THEY WERE CONVINCED.
If they had not been convinced,
we could not possibly have known that God's plan had been carried through.
But, once they had been convinced,
they were in a position to be instructed by Jesus,
who was then able to explain the whole matter to them
and to tell them exactly what he wanted them to do.
Once they had taken in the essentials
it was no longer necessary or desirable that he,
who was now to be accessible equally to all men,
should remain in a special relationship to them:
and so they were given to understand,
in a final' acted parable',
that he had 'ascended' to the Father.
Shortly afterwards, they were given, at Pentecost, a further spectacular
sign that thenceforward his spiritual presence was available for them, and
for all Christians, as a source of power.
From that time on it is not the physical presence of Jesus,
but the Spirit of God,
working through the company of faithful people,
otherwise the Church,
which is entrusted with the carrying out of God's plan in the human world.
And thus we obtain some glimpse of the mysterious Christian doctrine of THE
TRINITY.
We cannot here attempt to plunge into theological deep waters,
but we should be clear as to what this doctrine affirms and what it does
not.
IT DOES AFFIRM THAT
GOD IS ONE.
It does not affirm that there are three Gods,
called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
IT DOES, however, AFFIRM THAT
WITHIN THE UNITY OF GOD
THERE ARE TO BE DISTINGUISHED THREE 'PERSONS'.
There is a distinction between 'the Father' and Jesus;
between Jesus and
'the Holy Spirit';
and between 'the Father' and 'the Holy Spirit'.
BUT ALL ARE ONE AND THE SAME GOD,
EXISTING TOGETHER ETERNALLY.
That is the doctrine;
and while it is not reasonable for us to expect that we can comprehend the
secrets of the being of God,
we can at any rate see,
that if the Christian assumptions are to be accepted at all,
the doctrine must be substantially true.
For the universe does not make sense unless there is one God.
The facts, as known to us on the basis of the evidence, do not make sense
unless Jesus is the Son of God.
Yet there is a difference between God the original creator, Jesus the man,
and the Spirit of God working in human souls.
We can express this crudely by the figure of three Persons in one God -
and
there, having regard to the limitations of our human minds, we have to leave
it.
Finally, the resurrection of Jesus is a guarantee to all
of us that death is not the end of personal life,
but that we shall live on, after physical death, as individual personalities.
It guarantees too that, inasmuch as those who have gone before us are still
alive
and either with God or on the way to him,
'the Church' must be understood as a fellowship comprising both these and
ourselves,
and also those who come after us?
that all men, past, present, and future,
have their equal share in the ultimate triumph.
To a Christian, this guarantee is all-sufficient, and does
not need to be supplemented by any evidence, whatever may be its value, derived
from spiritualist seances or other sources.
But it is worthwhile to observe that in fact the notion of personal immortality
fits in with the ideas of time and space that are being worked out by some
modern scientific thinkers.
If 'time' is rightly conceived (as is now generally supposed) as a dimension
similar to the three dimensions of' space', any one of us is, at any given
moment, simply a cross-section of a sort of four-dimensional worm, continually
extending in one dimension.
To an observer whose 'time' was a fifth dimension (which to us would be 'eternity'),
the whole worm would appear as an object in four-dimensional 'space'.
There is some reason for supposing that we ourselves are, in fact, capable
of observing ourselves in this way, though in normal conscious life we do
not as a rule make much use of this faculty.
However this may be, there is no inherent improbability in the idea that,
when I die, my four-dimensional self will not cease in any way to exist in
'eternity', but will merely cease to grow in the time dimension.
My fifth-dimensional 'observer' will then take over my consciousness and
continue along fifth-dimensional 'time', with the completed four-dimensional
'body' forming a permanent background.
Some process of the kind may be seen to be coming about in very old people
whose minds become more loosely attached to the 'present' and range over
the whole of the individual's life, remote events being as vivid as recent
experiences.
The idea that a drowning man sees the whole of his life pass before him may
point in the same direction.
Whether or not this is a true picture of what happens at
death,
I am at any rate justified in supposing that after death I shall still in
some way be myself,
and indeed more truly myself than at any point in my present existence,
for I shall be my whole self.
Everything that has happened to me,
from cradle to grave,
will be equally real to me,
equally part of my consciousness:
not just a memory but a reality.
Nothing that I have valued will be lost to me.
But, on the other hand, none of my sins and griefs and failures will be lost.
There, as Hamlet observed, is the rub.
I shall no longer be able to forget about them and conveniently pretend that
they are over and done with.
Can I, or any of us, assert that we are able to view such a prospect with
confidence unless we can put our trust in the redeeming love of Christ?
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