Ideas people

The effect of mass migration has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves -- because they are so defined by others -- by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature.
Salman RushdieImaginary Homelands

God-enterings

Psalm 119: 130. — The entrance [unfolding] of thy words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple.

A profane shop man crams into his pocket a leaf of a Bible, and reads the last words of Daniel: "Go thou thy way, till the end be, for thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days, "and begins to think what Iris own lot will be when days are ended. A Göttingen Professor opens a big printed Bible to see if he has eyesight enough to read it, and alights on the passage, "I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not, "and in reading the eyes of his understanding are enlightened. Cromwell's soldier opens his Bible to see how far the musket ball has pierced, and finds it stopped at the verse: "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; and walk in the ways of thine heart and the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." And in a frolic the Kentish soldier opens the Bible which his brokenhearted mother had sent him, and the first sentence that turns up is the text so familiar in boyish days: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden," and the weary profligate repairs for rest to Jesus Christ.

James Hamilton, 1814-1867*. (From the additional notes and comments to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David)

*The year of Hamilton's death is given as 1871 in the Wikipedia entry, and elsewhere. 

Living on Halsted St

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else.  I remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was "the strangest thing he had met in his experience," but who was finally convinced that it was "not strange but natural."  In time it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should be there.  If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel.  Whoever does it is rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation which which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.

Jane AddamsTwenty Years at Hull-House

Inexhaustible

I have completed reading the whole Bible through since January last. I began it on the first day of the present year, and finished it on the 26th of October. I have read it in that space four times, and not without real profit to myself. I always find in it something new; it being, like its Author, infinite and inexhaustible. — Samuel Eyles Pierce, 1814

This man's biography in Wikipedia makes interesting reading...frequently accused of antinomianism, he fell out with congregations and patrons a number of times. At one point his first wife even withdrew her financial support because of his beliefs. 

The Liberal Society

Liberal people have a vision of a society where everyone can freely choose without coercion. They find it difficult to grapple with opponents of that vision. Long ago, Voltaire declared his responsibility to defend the freedom of speech and action of his opponents. At the time of the 'Enough is Enough' march, some voices of the liberal leaders, including Labour parliamentarian, David Benson-Pope, showed little real vision of liberality. Accusing opponents of Nazism because of their black shirts was clever but not very ethical. Defenders of free speech rightly excoriated the way in which Destiny's antagonism provoked an outpouring of anti-gay sentiment.
When Christianity speaks stridently in the modern world, it attracts a wave of vitriol. We may be a liberal society, but we are not a particularly tolerant one. Perhaps a hate speech law would help. Unfortunately, such laws generally backfire. Islam might be protected, but Christianity is constantly targeted. In a very real sense, Destiny was fumbling for a strategy to respond to the inevitable risks when personal freedoms are prized. They have yet to find the solution. More than that, our society as a whole has failed to find the solution. We have all but abandoned the task of helping individuals develop a good sense of personal values and our society defends the freedom of the exploiters of sexuality and wonders why it faces such high levels of sexual abuse. There are no easy answers, and religious answers seem particularly suspect in the light of sexual abuse within the church.

Peter Lineham, in Destiny: the life and times of a self-made apostle, page 140

Moral and not official

The sixth of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (pages 151/2). There is a seventh, much longer, point, which I won't include here. 

Another thing may perhaps be taken as recognised in some form by the main line of judicious advance in our subject. The work of Christ was moral and not official.  It was the energy and victory of his own moral personality, and not simply the filling of a position, the discharge of an office he held. His victory was not due to his rank, but to his will and conscience. It lay in his faithfulness to the uttermost amid temptations morally real and psychologically relevant to what he was. It was a work that drew on his whole personality as a moral necessity of it. What he did he did not simply in the room and stead of others. He did it as a necessity of his own person also - though its effect for them was not what it was for him. He fulfilled an obligation under which his own personality lay; he did not simply pay the debts of other people. He fulfilled a personal vocation. 
And his faithfulness was not only to a vocation. It was to a special vocation, that of redeemer, not merely a saint. The immediate source of his suffering was not the sight of human sin, and it was not a general holiness in him. It was not the quivering of the saint's purity at the touch of evil. But it was the suffering of one who touched sin as the redeemer. He would not have suffered for sin as he did, had he not faced it as its destroyer. Not only was this his vocation as a moral hero, but his special vocation as Saviour. It was the work of a moral personality at the heart of the race, of one who concentrated on a special yet universal task - that of redemption. 
His perfection was not that of a paragon, one who could do better what every soul and genius of the race could do well. He was not all the powers and excellencies of mankind rolled into one superman. But his perfection was that of the race's redeemer. It was inferior to all other powers and achievements.It was central both for God and man. He made man's centre and God's coincide. He took mankind at its centre and laid it on the centre of God. His identification with man was not extensive but intensive, it was not discursive and parallel, so to say. It was morally central and creative. He was not humanity on its divine side; he was its new life from the inside. The problem he had to solve was the supreme and central moral problem of guilt; and the work could only be done by the native action of a personality moral in its nature and methods, moral to the pitch of the Holy.
It is an immense gain thus to construe Christs' work as that of a moral personality instead of a heavenly functionary. It brings it into line with the modern mind and into organic union with the moral problem of the race. It enables us to realise that every step of the moral victory in his life was a step also in the redemption of the whole human conscience. And we grasp with a new power the idea that his crowning victory of the Cross was the victory in principle of the whole race in him - that justification is really one with reconciliation, and what he did before God contained all he was to do on man. It makes possible for us what my last lecture will attempt to indicate - a unitary view of his whole work and person. 

Graphic courtesy of Jeanie Rhoades/Thought Collage.

The spiritual world's effects on the material

Another writer in full flight on Psalm 119:126 - it is time for the Lord to act. 

It is time for thee, Lord, to work. Was ever vessel more hopelessly becalmed in mid ocean? or did crew ever cry with more frenzy for some favouring breeze than those should cry who man the Church of the living God? If God work not, it is certain there is nothing before the Church but the prospect of utter discomfiture and overthrow. Greater is the world than the Church if God be not in her. But if God be in her, she shall not be moved. May he help her, and that right early!

When he arises to work we know not what may be the form and fashion of his operations. He works according to the counsel of his own will; and who knows but that when once he awakes, and puts on his strength, it may not be confined in its results to the immediate and exclusive quickening of the spiritual life of the Church; but may be associated with providential upheavals and convulsions which will fill the heart of the world with astonishment and dismay. 

 His spiritual kingdom does not stand in isolation. It has relations which closely involve it with the material universe, and with human society and national life. There have been times when God has worked, and the signs of his presence have been seen, in terrible shaking of the nations, in the ploughing up from their foundations of hoary injustice, in the smiting of grinding tyrannies, and in the emancipation of peoples whose life had been a long and hopeless moan. There have been times, too, and many, when he has worked through the elements of nature— through blasting and mildew, through floods and famine, through locust, caterpillar and palmer worm; through flagging commerce, with its machinery rusting in the mill and its ships rotting in the harbour. All these things are his servants. 

Sometimes the sleep of the world, and the Church too, is so profound that it can be broken only by agencies like the wind, or fire, or earthquake, which made the prophet shiver at the mouth of the cave, and without which the voice that followed, so still, so small and tender, would have lost much of its melting and subduing power. When society has become drugged with the Circean cup of worldliness, and the voices that come from eternity are unheeded, if not unheard, even terror has its merciful mission. The frivolous and superficial hearts of men have to be made serious, their idols have to be broken, their nests have to be stoned, or tossed from the trees where they had been made with so much care, and they have to be taught that if this life be all, it is but a phantom and a mockery. 

When the day of the Lord shall come, in which he shall begin to work, let us not marvel if it "shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low; and upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, and upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures. And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day." [Isaiah 2] 

But this working of God will also take other shapes. Will it not be seen in the inspiration of the Church with faith in its own creed, so far as that creed has the warrant of the Divine word? Does the Church believe its creed? It writes it, sets it forth, sings it, defends it; but does it believe it, at least with a faith which begets either enthusiasm in itself, or respect from the world? Have not the truths which form the methodized symbols of the Church become propositions instead of living powers? Do they not lie embalmed with superstitious reverence in the ark of tradition, tenderly cherished for what they have been and done. But is it not forgotten that if they be truths they are not dead and cannot die? They are true now, or they were never true; living now, or they never lived. Time cannot touch them, nor human opinion, nor the Church's sluggishness or unbelief, for they are emanations from the Divine essence, instinct with his own undecaying life. They are not machinery which may become antiquated and obsolete and displaced by better inventions; they are not methods of policy framed for conditions which are transient, and vanishing with them; they are not scaffolding within which other and higher truth is to be reared from age to age. They are like him who is the end of our conversation, "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever." There is not one of them which, if the faith it awakens were but commensurate with its intrinsic worth, would not clothe the Church with a new and wondrous power. But what would be that power if that faith were to grasp them all? It would be life from the dead.

 Enoch Mellor (1823-1881), in "The Hem of Christ's Garment, and other Sermons."

Dr Enoch Mellor's books are still available secondhand, but biographical information about him mostly exists on Google Books. There is a delightful story from a newspaper about him from the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin.

A brief summary of his life appears in Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion. 

There is no difference between what Mellor is crying for in his day, and what is cried and prayed for in our day. If anything we see more calamity in the world, and though people turn to God for a time, they slide away as soon as the pain has eased.  On the other hand see this brief post from Steve Bell on the way in which God is at work in the Arab countries in the midst of their turmoil.

 

Times of extremity

Psalm 119: 126. It is time for thee, Lord, to work: For they have made void thy law. 

David was a servant, and therefore it was always his time to work: but being oppressed by a sight of man's ungodly behaviour, he feels that his Master's hand is wanted, and therefore he appeals to him to work against the working of evil. Men make void the law of God by denying it to be his law, by promulgating commands and doctrines in opposition to it, by setting up tradition in its place, or by utterly disregarding and scorning the authority of the lawgiver. Then sin becomes fashionable, and a holy walk is regarded as a contemptible puritanism; vice is styled pleasure, and vanity bears the bell. Then the saints sigh for the presence and power of their God: Oh for an hour of the King upon the throne and the rod of iron! Oh for another Pentecost with all its wonders, to reveal the energy of God to gainsayers, and make them see that there is a God in Israel! Man's extremity, whether of need or sin, is God's opportunity. When the earth was without form and void, the Spirit came and moved upon the face of the waters; should he not come when society is returning to a like chaos? When Israel in Egypt were reduced to the lowest point, and it seemed that the covenant would be void, then Moses appeared and wrought mighty miracles; so, too, when the church of God is trampled down, and her message is derided, we may expect to see the hand of the Lord stretched out for the revival of religion, the defence of the truth, and the glorifying of the divine name. The Lord can work either by judgments which hurl down the ramparts of the foe; or by revivals which build up the walls of his own Jerusalem. How heartily may we pray the Lord to raise up new evangelists, to quicken those we all early have, to set his whole church on fire, and to bring the world to his feet. God's work is ever honourable and glorious; as for our work, it is as nothing apart from him.

Charles Spurgeon in The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119.