balance of truth (15 views) Subscribe   
   From:  Trent_Fuller (TrentFuller)    1/6/2003 1:28 pm  
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By: James M. Campbell 

The ground of salvation is in the historical Christ. His death for human sin is an accomplished fact, an objective reality, standing out on the canvas of history. In gospel preaching the objective side of things must be explained, for it is from the objective truth that the subjective experience comes.

If the outward revelation is discarded, inward experience withers and dies. Bushnell frankly admits that "any strictly subjective style of religion is vicious. It is moral self-culture, in fact, and not religion." Those who, like Origen, have tried to rise to a position in which they would become independent of the outward revelation, have in kicking away the ladder by which they have risen cut themselves off from connection with the solid facts upon which all experience must ultimately rest. The Christian grows in grace by growing in the knowledge of His Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He gathers strength by transmuting objective knowledge into subjective power.

Before the Atonement can attain its end, the objective gospel must produce certain subjective effects, and its historical facts become spiritual forces. The work which Christ has done for us must have as its counterpart a work that He does in us. His death for sin must become our death to sin. The life which He gave must be received; repose in what He has done must be connected with co-operation in what He is doing; the acceptance of His deliverance must be accompanied by the possession of His spirit. All that He did must be actualised in us.

Not the least service which the Protestant mystics have rendered to Christian truth, is the emphasis which they have put upon the subjective side of religion; although they have not always been careful to maintain the balance of truth by showing the relation which exists between objective fact and subjective experience.

"That man is no Christian," says Jacob Boehme, "who doth merely comfort himself with the suffering, death and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to himself as a gift or favour, remaining himself still a wild beast and unregenerate. If this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be wrought in me."

To the same effect are the words of William Law, "Christ given for us is neither more nor less than Christ given unto us. He is in no other sense our full, perfect, and sufficient Atonement than as His nature and spirit are born and formed in us."

The Reformers sometimes went to the opposite extreme from the mystics, and unduly emphasised the objective side of things. In their zeal for the doctrine of justification by faith they did not develop in its fulness the doctrine of sanctification. One of the tasks which they have left the Christian teachers of today is to round out the conception of salvation, by showing the necessary and intimate relation between the objective and subjective elements in the Atonement of Christ; so that to the declaration of faith "Christ died for me," shall be joined the declaration of experience, "Christ liveth in me."

From: The Heart of the Gospel: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of the Atonement. Fleming H. Revell Co. 1907. Pgs 165-168.

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