Hebrews 6:1-3 Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on to perfection… Here we may see the germ of what afterwards became at Alexandria and elsewhere the catechetical system of the primitive Church. Wherever converts to Christianity were the rule, it was necessary to protect the sacrament of baptism against unworthy reception by a graduated system of preparation and teaching, each stage of which represented an advance in moral and intellectual truth. Hence the several classes of catechumens or hearers, who were allowed to listen to the Scriptures and to sermons in church; kneelers who might stay and join in certain parts of the divine service; and the elected or enlightened who were taught the Lord's prayer, the language of the regenerate, and the creed, the sacred trust committed to the regenerate saints. They were now on the point of being admitted by baptism into the body of Christ. Then at last as the τελειοι or the Perfect they entered on the full privileges of believers, they learned in all their bearings the great doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Eucharist. They were thus placed in possession of the truths and motives which shaped must powerfully Christian thought and life. The Christians who are receiving elementary instruction are termed babes. They cannot understand, much less can they utter, the discourse of righteousness. The Christians who have received the higher instruction are perfect. They can digest the solid food of Christian doctrine. Their spiritual senses have been trained by habit to appreciate the distinction between the good and the evil, which in this connection are other names for the true and the false. Therefore leaving the principles or the first discourse about Christ, let us go or be borne on unto perfection. "Perfection." What does he mean by it? Certainly not here moral perfection, the attainment in general character and conduct of conformity to the will of God, for this would be no such contrast to the first principles of the doctrine of Christ as the sentence of itself implies. The perfection itself must be in some sense doctrinal perfection; in other words, the attainment of the complete or perfect truth about Christ, as distinct from its first principles: of these first or foundation principles six are enumerated, and they are selected it would seem for the practical reason that they were especially nee, led by candidates for baptism: the two sides of the great inward change implied in conversion to Christ, repentance from dead works — dead, because destitute of religious motive — and faith resting upon God as revealed in His Son; the two roads whereby the converted soul enters upon the privilege of full communion with Christ, the doctrine about baptism, which distinguish-s the Christian sacrament from the mere symbols of purification insisted upon for proselytes by the Baptist and by the law, and the laying on of hands which we now call confirmation; and finally the two tremendous motives which from the first cast their shadow across the light of the believer — the coming resurrection, and the judgment, whose issues are eternal. These three pairs of truths are precisely what the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews meant by the first principles of the doctrine of Christ, and therefore by perfection he must have meant something beyond these truths. He meant, no doubt, a great deal else, but specifically and in particular he meant the doctrine of Christ's Melchisedekian priesthood, in its majestic contrast to the temporal and relatively inefficient priesthood of Aaron, and with its vast issues in the mediatorial work, whether of atonement or of sanctification as carried out, the latter to the very end of time, by the great High Priest of Christendom. Now the point on which the text insists is the going forward from the first principles to the truths beyond. The apostolic writer does not say, "Let us go on unto perfection." He does say, "Let us be borne on" — θερώμεθα. He does not say, "Be courageous, be logical, push your premises well till you have reached their conclusions." He does say, "Let us all" — teachers and taught — "let us all yield ourselves to the impulse of such truth as we already hold" — θερώμεθα. It will carry us on, as we try to make it really our own, it wilt lead us to fresh truths which extend, which expand, which support it. We cannot select one bit of this organic whole, baptize it by some such names as "primary," or "fundamental," and then say, "This, and this only, shall be my creed." If the metaphor be permitted, the truck, all of whose limbs are cut off thus arbitrarily, will bleed to death. Where everything depends upon spiritual activity, non progredi est regredi. They who shrink from apostolic perfection will forfeit their hold sooner or later on apostolic first principles. Let us trace this somewhat more in detail. We have seen what were the first principles insisted upon among the first readers of the Epistle to the Hebrews. They belong to a disciplinary system of the Apostolical Church. They were selected on practical rather than on theological grounds. But what would probably be the first principles of an inquirer feeling his way upwards towards the light, under the circumstances of our own day? What would be the truths that would greet him on the threshold of faith, as the catechumen of our times, whom conscience and thought are training with hope for the full inheritance of the believer? They would be, in all probability, first, belief in a moral God. It is something, no doubt, to believe in a Cause who is the cause of all besides Himself it is more to believe in aa Intelligence who is the parent of all created intelligences. But religion, properly speaking, begins when man bows down in his secret heart before One who, being boundless in power and infinite in wisdom, is also justice, sanctity, love. And thus, perhaps, simultaneously, the modern catechumen would be arrested by the character of Jesus Christ as it lies on the surface of the Gospels. These, we will suppose, are the catechumen's two first principles. They are now beyond controversy, at least for him. They seem to be all that he needs, and he says to himself that a simple faith like this is also a working faith. He can at least limit, or try to limit, and leave the spheres of abstract and metaphysical discussion to those who will explore them. but alter all this, a time will come when he finds that he must go forward, if he is not to fall back. For he observes, first of all, that this world, the scene of so much wickedness and so much suffering, is hard indeed to reconcile with the idea of a God all-goodness and all-powerful, if, indeed, He has left, or is leaving, it to itself. If He is all-good, He surely will unveil Himself further to His reasonable creatures. Nay, He will do something more. His revelation will be, in some sort of sense, an efficacious cure. Exactly proportioned to the belief in the morality of God is the felt strength of this presumption in favour of a divine intervention of some kind, and the modern catechumen asks himself if the Epicurean deities themselves would not do almost as well as some moral God, who yet, in the plenitude of His power, should leave creatures trained by Himself to think and to struggle, without the light, without the aid, they so sorely need. This is the first observation, and the second is that the character of Jesus Christ, if attentively studied, implies that His life cannot be supposed to fall entirely within the limits, or under the laws, of what we call " Nature." Fur if anything is certain about Him, this is certain, that He invited men to love Him, to trust Him, to obey Him, even to death; and in terms which would be intolerable if, after all, He were merely human. Had He been crucified and then had rotted in an undistinguished or in a celebrated grave, the human conscience would have known what to say of Him. It would have traced over His sepulchre the legend, "Failure." It would have forthwith struck a significant balance between the attractive elements of His character, and the utterly unwarranted exaggeration of His pretensions. But, our modern catechumen's reflections should not end here, for the character of God, and of Jesus Christ, in the Gospels is, in one respect, like the old Mosaic Law, which provokes a sense of guilt in man by its revelation of what righteousness really is. The more we really know about God and His Son, the less can we be satisfied with ourselves. It is not possible for a man whose moral sense is not dead, to admire Jesus Christ, as if He were some exquisite creation of human art — a painting in a gallery, or a statue in a museum of antiquities — and without the thought. "What do His perfections say to me?" For Jesus Christ shows us what human nature has been, what it might be, and in showing us this, He reveals us as none other, He reveals us individually to ourselves. Of His character, we may say what St. Paul says of the law, that "it is the schoolmaster to bring us to Himself," for it makes us profoundly dissatisfied with self — if anything can possibly do so — it forces us to recognise the worthlessness and the poverty of our natural resources, it throws a true, though it may be an unwelcome, light upon the history of our past existence, and thus it disposes us to listen anxiously and attentively for any fresh disclosures of the Divine mind that may be still in store for us, or already within our reach. And thus it is that the first principles which we have been attributing to our catechumen prepare him for the truths beyond these, that Divine goodness, those perfections of the character of Christ, which bear the soul onwards and upwards, towards acceptance of Christ's true Divinity, and, as a consequence, of the atoning virtue of His death upon the Cross. These momentous realities rest, indeed, on other bases, but they bring satisfaction, repose, and relief to souls who have attentively considered what is involved in the truths which were at first accepted. They proclaim that God has not left man to Himself, that God does not despise the work of His own hands, they unfold His heart of tenderness for man, they justify by the language which Jesus Christ used about Himself and about His claims, the faith and the obedience of mankind, and they enable us to bear the revelation of personal sin in which His character makes within each separate conscience that understands it, because we now know that " He was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." But does the advance towards perfection stop at this point? Surely not. Where so much has been done, there is a presumption in favour of something more, if more be needed. The Divine Christ has died upon the Cross, the victim for the sins of men. What is He doing now? The past has been forgiven, but has no provision been made for the future may not recovery itself be almost a dubious boon if it be followed by an almost inevitable relapse? And thus it is that the soul makes a further stage in its advance to perfection. The work of the Holy Spirit in conveying to men the gift of the now humanity exhibited by the perfect Christ, and this, mainly through the Christian sacraments, opens at this point before the believer's eye. It is by a sequence as natural as that from Christ's character to His divinity and atonement, that we pass on from His atonement to the sacramental aspect of His mediatorial work. The new life which He gives in baptism, "As many as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ" — the new life which He strengthens in the Eucharist, "He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me" — these great gifts are but an expansion of what is already latent in the recognised perfection of His human character; awed the apostolic ministry, the channel and the guarantee of their reality, is not less a part of that perfection of truth to which intelligent faith conducts the soul. And the Christian creed has not said its last word to the soul of man until, besides assuring his reconciliation and peace with God, it has satisfied his desire for union with the Source of life. Who — let me say it once more — who does not see that our Lord's human character can only be described as perfect, if His right to draw the attention of men in terms which befit only a superhuman person, be frankly conceded? Who does not know that the existence of a moral God, the Maker and Ruler of this universe, is more clearly and forcibly contested by a large class of influential writers than any subordinate or derived truths what. ever — that whatever may have been the case in the last century, atheism is even more earnest in rejecting, in our own day, the specific doctrines and the creed which comes from Jesus Christ? Surely, then, it is our wisdom, as Christian believers, while the day of life lasts, to make the most, and not the least, of such religious truths as we know. What must not He, who is their object, think — and surely He is thinking on the subject now — what must He not think of those many magnificent intellects which He has endowed so richly, unto which He has granted such opportunities of exercise and development, who yet know almost as little about Him as the children in our national schools, and who make no effort to know more; but have studied, with eager enthusiasm, all forms of created life, all the resources of nature, all the intricacies of the laws of human thought, while He, the Author of all, He, who is the Infinite and the Everlasting, is, as it would seem, forgotten. It is not much to ask of a serious Christian to endeavour to make his own, each day, some little portion -f that knowledge which will one day seem incomparably more precious than any other. Half an hour a day costs something in a busy life; but it will not be held to have involved a very great sacrifice when hereafter we are face to face with the unchanging realities, and know in very deed what is meant by perfection. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, |
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