Acts 2:22-36 You men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs… 1. The present confusion of theological opinion is not wholly to be regretted. It is sad enough, no doubt, if you look at it on one side, that men should still be asking the question, "What is Christianity?" and giving to that question the most contrary answers. Grave and able men tell us that the virtue of Christianity lies in an order of men, is transmitted by one man putting his hand on another man's head, and reaches the rest of the world through water, wine, and bread. Other men as grave and able assure us there is in the system no supernatural virtue at all, only certain religious instincts which long ago attached themselves crudely to a few more or less mythical facts, the real value of which we can hardly now make out. Betwixt them an infinite variety of not less inconsistent opinions finds room, and for each of them intelligent and honest advocates may be heard to plead. 2. But sad as this bewilderment is in some aspects, it surely betrays at least a desire to get at the heart of Christianity, and to do so by disentangling its essentials from its accretions. No one can pretend that such disentangling is unnecessary. Christianity, in the course of her nineteen centuries, has had her own central and proper truths so sorely overlaid by external forms of Church life; has seen her simple doctrines pressed into shapes determined by changing fashions of thought, speculated on, debated over, worked up into systems, and deduced into syllogisms; has entered also into alliance with so many other influences, with art, with politics, with social systems; that in no land of Christendom does she offer to us to-day the features she wore when she began her mission, or speak in the voice with which she first spoke when she won the world. To get at the kernel of our faith, and know it as it is, there is need for some unwrapping. And if the critical tendency which has thrown the theology of educated men into such confusion has any raison d'etre at all, it is this, that it is bent on getting at the kernel of what we call Christianity. 3. It would be a blunder for the Church to suppose that criticism has only a hostile tendency. Men who hate our holy faith are to be found in this as in every age; and they take advantage of the prevailing uncertainty, as they would do of anything else, to create a prejudice against religion. But there are multitudes of inquirers who mean no ill to Christianity, and numbers more who revere and trust it as their only hope or guide in the perplexities of our present condition. 4. In these circumstances a timid distrustful clinging to traditional forms of truth, with a nervous desire to defend the farthest and most doubtful outposts of orthodoxy is an utterly mistaken policy. It is so, whether the criticisms we are called to face be hostile or friendly. (1) If it be hostile, it seems unwise tactics to spend our strength in defending outworks, which are either barely defensible or of inferior moment, when the enemy we fear is already thundering at the central citadel of the faith. The question which the Church must gird herself to answer is, whether there is any living Christ at all. For strategic reasons, therefore, the field to be defended needs to be contracted, that the strength of all gallant advocates of the faith may be concentrated on those main positions which are as a key to the whole situation. (2) Nor is a narrow dogmatism any better policy if our critics are friendly. It is better, surely, and hopefuller, to meet the new spirit with the frank admission that where human reason has manipulated things of God, and forms of words, beaten out in hot controversy, have been forged to set forth infinite truth, there something may need correction. 5. In what shape the religious faith of Christendom shall emerge after this time of doubt shall have worked itself out, no man can foretell. Yet the creed of the future is not likely to be very different in substance from the creeds of the past. There is, if any one care to look for it, a solid body of Christian verity which has been, with hardly any change, the possession and life of the Church at every period of her history, and the secret nutriment of her true life through her impurest periods — the "faith once delivered to the saints." 6. Whatever may be the issue within the Church of such revision of her ancient belief, in our contest with outside scepticism we find ourselves thrust back upon our centre, and driven to do battle there for the first principles of our faith, just as the apologists of the earliest age of Christianity had to do. Not against the same sort of doubters, nor altogether with the same arguments, yet the essentials of the Gospel we must make good as they did. In this first Christian apology, and in all other reported addresses of St. Peter in the Acts, I find the gospel defended in its germ. Back to this earliest kernel of gospel fact and truth the controversy of our day is again pressing us. We may borrow a lesson, therefore, from the apologist of Pentecost. How does he conduct his defence? In this and the other sermons of that first period, the Christian cause is made to rest on two pillars of supernatural historical fact bearing on its Founder's life. These are not two isolated facts, however, but two periods of supernatural history. The first is His earthly life of ministry and passion, the supernaturalness of which was sealed mainly by the fact of resurrection after death. The second is the later celestial life of Jesus, the supernatural relation of which to human experience is proved by a series of spiritual facts which began at Pentecost and have not yet ceased. Of course, when the Church asserts this double claim for a continuous Divine history from her Master's birth, she is met by a denial from those who hold any direct intercourse betwixt highest God and us earthly men to be, on philosophical grounds, a thing impossible. But she has no right to be so met by the inductive science of our day. It is the boast of modern science to have no prejudices, but to accept without misgiving whatever is established on its proper evidence. It therefore cannot bar Christianity in her attempt to prove her facts. For the Christian apologist in the Acts, and all wise Christian apologists since, profess to establish the two supernatural facts on the self-same sort of evidence on which the most ordinary facts of a like order are established. (1) The audience whom St. Peter addressed were familiar with the main outlines of Jesus' life as recent and notorious events. We assume them also. We owe it to the historical criticism of late years that no one now doubts the existence of Jesus and the leading features at least of that biography which we have in the holy Gospels. It is when we try to look behind the external events, and to explain their spiritual value, that the Church's faith and the unfaith of our age part company. That the Jewish teacher of Nazareth whom the Romans crucified was in very literal deed, God, a Divine Person, come among us to do a Divine work; that on His life and death rest the hopes of every man to be redeemed from sin and recovered to the favour and likeness of our heavenly Father: this is the Christian theory for the explanation of such historical facts as all admit. For the truth of this theory the Church offers one test-proof — the resurrection. Virtually, St. Peter does so in these early sermons of his. Expressly, St. Paul, the ablest of all her defenders, does so in his second letter to Corinth. If God did raise Jesus from the dead, as no other man ever was raised, then Jesus was the Son of God as He claimed to be, His life as Divine as it professed to he. But if God did not raise this Man, the Christian advocate throws up his case, our faith is false, our fancied Saviour an impostor, and we are in our sins like other men. So the case stood when Peter preached and Paul wrote. So it stands still. But the question, whether a given man was dead and became alive again, is one which nothing can help us to answer but the witness of such as saw what happened. It is a question of evidence, and it has pleased God that this crowning seal put to His Son's life should be sustained and guarded by an amount of proof such as no other fact in history can boast; so that no honest searcher for truth might be left in doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has been declared to be the Son of God with power, has risen the first fruits of an innumerable harvest of Christian sleepers, and by His resurrection has begotten us also unto a living hope. (2) Even a Christ who became alive is not enough, if He has so withdrawn Himself that in His absence He cannot help us. Our Christ is not out of reach. We believe with St. Peter that the re-ascended Son has been exalted by God's right hand to receive of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, and that by the special mission of this second Paraclete, He maintains a closer, mere equal, and more effective contact with human souls now than ever. Say that there is no Holy Ghost, or say that He is not otherwise present in Christian men than we know He is in all natural human life; and the Church is a delusion, and the word we preach as powerless for the spiritual cure of men as any socialistic or other earth-born scheme for the improvement of mankind. But how is it to be proved that through Christian agencies there does work a veritable Divine Agent? We have here the advantage over an apologist so early as St. Peter. In proof that his newly-departed Master had sent down the Holy Ghost, Peter had nothing to appeal to but one unique and startling phenomenon just happening in his hearers' presence. We have the gathered spiritual experience of eighteen centuries. Not an age has passed since without leaving somewhere tokens that to the gospel belongs a heavenly power. It is quite true that infinite discredit has been over and over again done to the Church's claims. But enough remains to us. Christianity is not now so new or so small a thing that it should be hard, for any man who tries, to track its working in detail on innumerable men and gather up even its secret fruits. Whoever honestly does this will satisfy himself, I think, of such facts as these: That where the gospel of Christ has been made known with tolerable correctness to numbers of men, it has been always followed, in the case of individuals, by spiritual and moral changes of a uniform type. Conclusion: To this ever-gathering evidence, each Christian must contribute. And you, who can bear no witness for Christ, because you have never let His Spirit in within your heart to change and cleanse you, be sure there is a risen living Christ who saves; be sure there is a present Holy Ghost who changes us; be sure the kingdom of God is come upon you. (J. O. Dykes, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: |
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