coincide with the circumstances in which man is found in the world. What the Gospel tells us is new but not strange. Had the atonement for instance been merely a pardon without a sacrifice it would have been but a weak, obscure appeal to the understanding, or the heart. It would not have demonstrated the evil of sin, nor the graciousness of God. In Christianity there is that which answers to the natural light of reason, and the counterpart of this is that no amount of external evidence can ever prove that what appears to us really absurd can ever proceed from God. This is further seen in Erskine's view of faith which is referred not to the mode of believing, but to the object believed.1 A man may understand what he does not believe, but he cannot believe what he does not understand. This is not setting reason above Revelation, for Revelation is addressed to reason and feeling. The Atonement has in it a moral meaning. The Trinity also is comprehensible, because 'when assumed it serves as a scaffolding or substratum for the doctrine of the atonement and of sanctification through the Spirit, and so it is connected with the plan of the moral manifestation of God and the regeneration of man."2 This is illustrated by the case of a man born blind. He has no impressions from light and therefore can have no faith with regard to such impressions. He has not the slightest conception of what colour in a body is and therefore cannot believe in a coloured body.' The truths of the gospel must be understood in order to be believed, and felt in order to be understood. 3 Some of the details in doctrine may be briefly summed up. There must be a new life before works acceptable to God can be done, and those who have this new life are conscious of it. Pardon is unconditional, just as the Jews looked to the brazen serpent so we must look to Christ. He died not as our substitute, but because He had taken our nature which was fallen and which suffered in Him. He took it into Himself to redeem it and make it divine. He did not suffer to dispense with our suffering, but to enable us to suffer to the glory of God, for the purification of our nature. Pardon does not remove penalties, but shows them to be full of love.' 4 The 1 Essay on Faith, p. 19. 3 Ibid. 39. 1 present life is not a state of trial, but a process of education devised by that eternal purpose of love which brought us into being. Some other points are that baptism declares our sonship; that all men will ultimately be restored; that we should look to Christ, not to Christianity, and that eternity is not constituted by duration but by God. They met opThe first heaving Coleridge and Erskine were laymen. position but they did not create a panic. of the storm that was to come was caused by the Bampton Lectures of 1832. Dr Hampden 2 chose for his subject' The Scholastic Philosophy,' and dealt with the origin of dogma. He started a real difficulty, touching the question of Revelation, and how it could be understood by the imperfect and fallible intellect of man. Something may be revealed, and yet we may but imperfectly understand the Revelation. On the assumption of an infallible Church, the definitions of Councils or other Ecclesiastical authorities are final, but not if the Church merely represents the judgment of fallible man. The latter is professedly the position of a Protestant Church. The revelation may therefore be divine, while the interpretation of it is human. As a fact of history, the dogmas of theology as we now have them, were shaped by philosophy or the fallible agency of man. They cannot therefore be the pure Revelation, but only an imperfect embodiment. The object of the Lectures is to give an account of the effect of opinions, as such, on the doctrines of Christianity; how the intellect of man has insinuated its own conclusions into the body of the Revelation in the course of its transmission.' 4 While the authorities of the Church have always opposed the successive efforts of Rationalism, they have in the end adopted the very systems which they opposed. Peter Lombard was condemned for the freedom of his speculations and the use he made of reason, but he became an authority in the Church. It was the same 1 'The Brazen Serpent,' vol. ii, 185. 2 B. 1792, d. 1868. 3 Dr Döllinger at the Munich Congress in 1863 said the same as Bishop Hampden had done concerning the Aristotelian Schoolmen. Their analytical processes could not construct a system corresponding to the harmony of revealed truth.' After their with Albertus, and still more with Aquinas. deaths, elaborate exercises of reason which the Church had denounced, became part of the common stock of ecclesiastical authority. The Church System changed the whole aspect of Revelation. It was made one contemporaneous production, instead of the record of God's dealings with the successive generations of man.1 In the theological creeds there are great variations on such subjects as the Trinity and predestination. These are fine metaphysical speculations. All that is really revealed is something extraordinary about the Divine Being and His agency in the world. The Lectures seem to mean that beyond this we can only attain an imperfect apprehension and expression of what is revealed. The Scriptures record facts. These are ever the same, but the opinions or doctrines which are inferences from them are the work of man, and continually change. The application of reason to the facts of Revelation has generally begun with heretics. They have proposed their explanation or modification, and it has prevailed according to the circumstances of the time, or the influence of the promoters. At one time nearly the whole of Christendom was Arian, and at another Pelagian. When it was so, the scriptural theologians could not refrain from mingling in the conflict, but they could only speak in the terms already used by the heretics, and so they obscured the truth as it stood in Scripture. The scholastic philosophy, which was long the ecclesiastical vesture of the Church's dogmas, was derived from Aristotle. The natural inference from Dr Hampden's Lectures was that he set aside the whole body of dogmatic theology held by orthodox Christians. This inference was not admitted. In his sermons he taught the common faith of Catholic Christianity, and in his inaugural Lecture as Professor of Divinity he declared his belief in all the doctrines of the Church of England as commonly understood, and as expressed in the phraseology, traceable to the Aristotelic theories of the Schoolmen. The sum of the matter is that man will reason, and that he will put his conceptions into dogmatic form, and will regard this form as absolute truth. 1 present life is not a state of trial, but a process of education devised by that eternal purpose of love which brought us into being. Some other points are that baptism declares our sonship; that all men will ultimately be restored; that we should look to Christ, not to Christianity, and that eternity is not constituted by duration but by God. Coleridge and Erskine were laymen. They met opposition but they did not create a panic. The first heaving of the storm that was to come was caused by the Bampton Lectures of 1832. Dr Hampden 2 chose for his subject' The Scholastic Philosophy,' and dealt with the origin of dogma. He started a real difficulty, touching the question of Revelation, and how it could be understood by the imperfect and fallible intellect of man. Something may be revealed, and yet we may but imperfectly understand the Revelation. On the assumption of an infallible Church, the definitions of Councils or other Ecclesiastical authorities are final, but not if the Church merely represents the judgment of fallible man. The latter is professedly the position of a Protestant Church. The revelation may therefore be divine, while the interpretation of it is human. As a fact of history, the dogmas of theology as we now have them, were shaped by philosophy or the fallible agency of man. They cannot therefore be the pure Revelation, but only an imperfect embodiment. The object of the Lectures is to give an account of the effect of opinions, as such, on the doctrines of Christianity; how the intellect of man has insinuated its own conclusions into the body of the Revelation in the course of its transmission.' 4 While the authorities of the Church have always opposed the successive efforts of Rationalism, they have in the end adopted the very systems which they opposed. Peter Lombard was condemned for the freedom of his speculations and the use he made of reason, but he became an authority in the Church. It was the same 1 The Brazen Serpent,' vol. ii, 185. 2 B. 1792, d. 1868. 8 Dr Döllinger at the Munich Congress in 1863 said the same as Bishop Hampden had done concerning the Aristotelian Schoolmen.—Their analytical processes could not construct a system corresponding to the harmony of revealed truth.' After their with Albertus, and still more with Aquinas. deaths, elaborate exercises of reason which the Church had denounced, became part of the common stock of ecclesiastical authority. The Church System changed the whole aspect of Revelation. It was made one contemporaneous production, instead of the record of God's dealings with the successive generations of man.1 In the theological creeds there are great variations on such subjects as the Trinity and predestination. These are fine metaphysical speculations. All that is really revealed is something extraordinary about the Divine Being and His agency in the world. The Lectures seem to mean that beyond this we can only attain an imperfect apprehension and expression of what is revealed. The Scriptures record facts. These are ever the same, but the opinions or doctrines which are inferences from them are the work of man, and continually change. The application of reason to the facts of Revelation has generally begun with heretics. They have proposed their explanation or modification, and it has prevailed according to the circumstances of the time, or the influence of the promoters. At one time nearly the whole of Christendom was Arian, and at another Pelagian. When it was so, the scriptural theologians could not refrain from mingling in the conflict, but they could only speak in the terms already used by the heretics, and so they obscured the truth as it stood in Scripture. The scholastic philosophy, which was long the ecclesiastical vesture of the Church's dogmas, was derived from Aristotle. The natural inference from Dr Hampden's Lectures was that he set aside the whole body of dogmatic theology held by orthodox Christians. This inference was not admitted. In his sermons he taught the common faith of Catholic Christianity, and in his inaugural Lecture as Professor of Divinity he declared his belief in all the doctrines of the Church of England as commonly understood, and as expressed in the phraseology, traceable to the Aristotelic theories of the Schoolmen. The sum of the matter is that man will reason, and that he will put his conceptions into dogmatic form, and will regard this form as absolute truth. |