THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INTELLECTUALISM.

Another modern movement calls for attention because of the important bearing that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has upon it. It may perhaps be described as Intellectualism, and is represented by such names as Martineau and August Sabatier. In some respects the most vital question of modern days is as to the seat of authority. The view of Martineau and Sabatier is that it is found in the human reason and conscience. This is the general line taken in Martineau's Seat of Authority in Religion, and more recently in Sabatier's The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit. In this latter book it is said that there have been two religions of authority, the authority of the Church in Romanism and the authority of the Bible in Protestantism. Sabatier first subjects the claims of Rome to a close and thorough examination, and repudiates them in a series of arguments of remarkable force. Then he subjects the Authority of the Bible to an equally severe test and repudiates that with equal definiteness. Finally, he puts forth his own view of the supremacy of reason, which he calls the Religion of the Spirit. His main contention is that the mind is autonomous and finds the supreme rule of its standard and ideas within itself, that is, within its own constitution and not outside. To quote his words: ' The consent of the mind to itself is the prime condition and foundation of all certitude.' According to this view truth seems to be simply a matter of opinion, for as a man thinketh a thing is, so it is — to him. To the same effect, M. Reville, a colleague of Sabatier, says, ' An authority only exists for us in the measure in which we recognise it as such.'

Now while Sabatier's protest undoubtedly contains important elements of truth, it involves a false antithesis to speak of his own subjective view of religion as the Religion of the Spirit. In reality his position is that of an illuminated rationalism, with which the Spirit, as revealed in the New Testament, has very little to do. It is indeed the old, yet ever new question of the place of reason in religion, whether it is or is not the supreme authority. Let us be quite clear on this point. Reason is both valuable and necessary as one of the means of distinguishing the claims of authority, and also as a recipient of the truth of revelation. Long ago Butler taught us that reason is the only faculty for judging anything, even revelation. No authority can be legitimate which subverts or stultifies reason. The right of verification is the inalienable prerogative of every man, and no external compulsion can ever set aside the necessity and duty of proving all things as well as of holding fast that which is good. But while we thus insist on the right and duty of reason to judge and verify, it is quite another thing to claim for it the seat of authority itself. After all, reason is only one of several human faculties, and Divine revelation is intended to apply to them all. Then, too, reason has been affected by sin, has become biassed, darkened, and distorted, so that it cannot be regarded as reliable as the seat of authority in religion. Besides, there is such a thing as reality independent of our mind, and if there be no authority except that which our mind recognises, then such facts as, for instance, the existence of God must depend solely on our recognition of them, which is absurd. The consent of the mind cannot be the foundation of truth. Our certitude is only the result of our acceptance and experience of reality outside ourselves. It is our testimony to an already existing fact. Knowledge and certitude come through the apprehension and acceptance of objective truth based on adequate evidence. To regard reason as autonomous is to deny the existence of objective reality. Reason is not originative, but only receptive; not a source, but a channel; it is not creative, but only weighs and then appropriates the data offered to us. The true idea is of the authority which is not against reason but in accordance with it.

' It is not a test, so that we can act critically on Revelation. Nor is it a germ whose innate resources Revelation develops. But it is a recognising power, a receptivity.'1

Sabatier never seems to contemplate the possibility that the Holy Spirit may conceivably have been at work behind and even through the two forms of religion which he rejects. But what is still more important, he does not seem to be conscious of the fact that ' objective ' and ' external ' are not identical terms; and that ' authority ' and ' Spirit ' are not necessarily antithetical and contradictory. Divine revelation as expressed in the redemptive Person and Work of Christ can be at once objective and internal.

' All absolute authority must reveal itself in a way of miracle. It does not rise out of human nature by any development, but descends on it with an intervention, a revelation, a redemption. It does not evolve from human nature, it invades it. An authority, which has its source in ourselves, is no authority. In us authority can have but its sphere and its echo, never its charter.'2

' A large part of the reaction against authority is due to its externality being treated in this abstract and almost literal way, instead of being realised as within the nature of the spirit or will itself. Externality here means otherness, and not outwardness or foreignness.'3

We therefore believe that the seat of authority is the Divine revelation in Christ, as embodied for us in the Bible. We hold this because the New Testament preserves for us the revelation of Christ in its purest available form. Christianity has a historic basis in the Person of Christ, and what we need is the clearest and completest form of that revelation. The books of the New Testament being the product of the apostolic age give and guarantee this. All that we require is that the vehicle of transmission be certain and assuring, whether it be a Book, or an Institution, or a Man. But just as we have seen that it would be impossible to guard the purity of Christ's revelation against corruption by embodiment in an institution, so we are equally certain that human reason is no preservative against impurity and corruption. Reason is human, Scripture though human in form has Divine elements which no criticism can touch. As such. Scripture is the light of reason, the informant of the mind, and the guide of all religious thought. To speak, therefore, of reason or conscience as our supreme authority is to incur grave danger of misconception, since, as we well know, neither reason nor conscience is creative but only receptive, not a source of truth but only a medium. And although modern thought with its doctrine of evolution has rightly abandoned the deistical idea of natural religion, many writers still argue as if conscience and reason were independent and sufficient authorities; as if they were not only the receptive but even the originative organs of religious principles. Reason is not the origin but the organ of truth. Revelation does not dishonour reason, but honours it by appealing to it with evidence. To the spiritual, enlightened moral reason the Scriptures make constant appeal. Indeed, the human reason has a vital duty to perform. It must judge of man's need of Divine revelation. It must examine the credentials of revelation, and it must understand and interpret the meaning of revelation. The place of reason has been well illustrated by a simple fact of life. The warden of a prison receives from the proper judicial officers the warrant for the execution of a murderer. It is his duty to examine the document so as to satisfy himself as to its genuineness, authenticity, etc. He carefully scrutinises the seal, signature, and other marks of identification. But he has no right to tamper with the contents of the death-warrant. He dare not change the form of execution nor alter the date. His duty is to obey its order. It is similar with the reason. Men may examine the credentials of revelation; nay, they must do so. But having done this, reason necessarily yields to the superior authority of Divine revelation accepted by faith. The mind of man may not add or omit one jot or tittle of Divine revelation.

The tendency to-day to fix the seat of authority within ourselves is doubtless due to the reaction from the pure externalism of an authoritative Church, or of an authoritative Book, considered apart from internal reception and experience. We have rightly come to realise that the authoritative religion is inward and spiritual, and that nothing can become genuinely authoritative for us without exercising moral and spiritual control over heart and conscience. But we must beware of going to the other extreme and precipitating ourselves into the error of pure subjectivity. That authority must be inward does not in the least mean that our ideas and prejudices are the measure of truth. There is an element of objectivity in all our knowledge, and so there is an objective authority in religion. The idea that ' objective ' and ' external ' are identical, and that this means a purely mechanical authority leads to untold mischief. Since the ultimate authority in the Christian religion is Christ Himself we see at once that even when Christ is within us He is not identical with us. Although He speaks in the innermost sanctuary of our being yet He speaks as One Who is not a Christ of our own invention. He is the Divine revelation given to us, mediated to us through Holy Scripture, so that if Christ is to be an authority at all He must be primarily objective.

' Many earnest and forward people to-day are concerned with the repudiation of an external authority. Some are as passionate about it as only those can be who do not gauge, or even grasp, the situation. Often they are more concerned to repudiate the externality than to own the authority. They are not always quite clear what externality means. An authority must be external, in some real sense, or it is none. It must be external to us. It must be something not ourselves, descending on us in a grand paradox. We might well for a little relax our recalcitrant animus against the externality of the authority and bestow more anxious pains upon the reality of it.'4

It is the revelation of the Person of our Lord which is our supreme authority, and this revelation is at the outset entirely external to man though subsequently coming within him. It is the historical fact of His Divine Person, prior and external to us and primarily independent of us, that forms our final authority in religion. To regard reason as the supreme authority is really to transfer to it the infallibility which we have denied to the Church and the Bible, and at the same time to ignore utterly its variableness and the entire absence of any confirmatory proof of its decisions. If it should be said that reason is superior to all because it testifies to and approves of revelation, it must never be forgotten that reason itself needs to be purified and developed before it can give a proper answer to and verification of religion. This itself shows that reason cannot be primary and superior. This need of cleansing and enlightenment is a reminder that man's deepest need is not illumination but redemption.5 Christ ' restores the sight to which He presents the light,' and while reason and conscience, as they are at present, may apprehend just sufficient to warrant faith in Christ, the full vindication of His claims is only made possible to a conscience and reason transformed by Divine grace. And w^hen revelation is thus apprehended, it is at once accepted and submitted to, thereby proving the supremacy of revelation over reason.

It is worth while saying again that the Lord Jesus Christ is our authority and that we accept the Bible because it enshrines the Divine revelation in the purest, clearest, and most available form. All that we desire is the highest and best knowledge of Christ. The seat of authority cannot be the consciousness of Christ, to which we have no access, but only the record of that consciousness which we find in the New Testament. And we hold Scripture, as we have already seen, to be not merely the record of the spiritual experience of the first Christian generation, but the Divinely provided and Divinely inspired record of the consciousness of Christ as the Redeemer of men. As such it is the touchstone of experience, which is genuine only as it corresponds with Christ's revelation in Scripture. Then by this correspondence experience becomes a witness to Scripture. As a French writer well puts it:

' Christianity is the Person of Jesus Christ. Still we must enter into relations with this Person. In order that two moral subjects should communicate with one another there must needs be manifestations between them. A person manifests himself clearly to us only by his acts and his words; and he has value for us only as we form for ourselves a certain idea of him. Christianity is, therefore, essentially, above all, a person: but on pain of reducing it to a magic, which would no longer possess any ethical and, consequently, no longer possess any religious quality, we must needs grant that Christianity, precisely because it is essentially a Person, is also a body of facts and of ideas.'

' For the contemporaries of Jesus Christ, who could see and hear Him, the teaching that fell from His lips and the deeds performed by Him, constituted this necessary middle term between Jesus Christ and them. For us, with no wish, certainly, to deny the personal, present, and living relations of Jesus Christ with the soul of the redeemed, we cannot, without opening the door to the most dangerous mysticism, reduce Christianity to these relations, in derogation of the acts and revelations of the historical Christ, which we have neither seen nor heard, but which have been transmitted to us by tradition, by the Bible: this would be equivalent to cutting down the tree at its roots under pretext of being thus better able to gather its fruit.'6

There is always grave danger in rationalistic subjectivity,7 and Sabatier's position, which is so often and so widely accepted to-day, tends to make Christianity little or nothing more than a set of intellectual conceptions of truth which vary with each holder, quot homines tot sententiae. Dr. Sanday, in a lecture delivered a few years ago, on ' The Place of Dogma in Religion,' made a very apt and acute criticism of Sabatier's position, when he protested against the assumption that small minorities must be right.

' It almost appears as though (in M. Sabatier's view) the larger aggregations of men might be assumed to be always in the wrong, while the self-confident dogmatism of an individual might be trusted to be in the right. One looks in vain for any safeguard against mere religious subjectivity.'

But this view is not the Christianity of the New Testament, mediated by the Holy Spirit, and applied to every part of man's nature. Let it be said again that reason is important and essential, but is one of several faculties, all affected by sin. It needs cleansing and illumination if it is to do proper service. In its province of testing the credentials of revelation it is a vital part of our being, but it is equally vital to its duty to bow to those credentials when it has tested them satisfactorily. While, therefore, we value every opportunity we can obtain of examination, enquiry, and consideration, we must never forget that

' in the last resort the only religious authority must be some action of God's creative self-revelation, and not simply an outside witness to it.' 8

And while, of course, we must necessarily experience this Divine authority, we must also remember that it is not the experience but the authority which is supreme.9 No real Christianity is possible which is not derived from the New Testament as the purest source of our knowledge of Christ, Who is God's authority for life revealed by the Holy Spirit.

' In religious knowledge the object is God; it is not the world, it is not man. And that object differs from every other in being for us far more than an object of knowledge. He is the absolute subject of it. He is not something that we approach, with the initiative on our side. He takes the initiative and approaches us. Our knowledge is the result of His revelation. We find Him because He first finds us. That is to say, the main thing, the unique thing, in religion is not a God Whom we know but a God Who knows us.'10

In the movements that we have been considering one feature emerges as common to them all; the tendency to ignore the primitive revelation and to forget that the Source of that revelation is still its Safeguard and Illuminator. All error, intellectual and fanatical, comes in this way. Contrariwise, the only guarantee of preserving Christianity in its purity and fulness will be the insistence on the supremacy of Divine revelation in Scripture, and the necessity of the Holy Spirit as its guard and guide. Any movement which severs the Word from the Spirit tends inevitably to deny both; whether it be Development in Roman Catholicism, Evolution in Modernism, Mysticism in Quakerism, or Intellectualism in Rationalism. Primitive, full, pure Christianity will only be assured as we rest everything upon the supreme authority of the Divine revelation in Holy Scripture, illuminated, guarded, and developed by the Holy Spirit. When these two are thus united and made our supreme standard, we know the truth and the truth makes us free; we love the truth, and the truth makes us safe; we follow the truth, and the truth makes us strong, sure, satisfied, for then we become united to Him Who is the Truth; we are His disciples indeed, and are led by the Spirit of truth.11

Literature. — Sabatier, The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit; Orr, The Christian View of God and the World; Garvie, The Christian Certainty amid the Modern Perplexity, ch. vii.; Oman, The Problem of Faith and Freedom; Vision and Authority; Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind; The Principle of Authority; Grubb, Authority and the Light Within; Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion; Stanton, The Place of Authority in Religious Belief.

1 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, p. 176. See also pp. 187, 189, 193, 196.

2 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 339.

3 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 371.

4 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 306. See also, p. 356.

5 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 424.

6 Bois, Le Dogme Grec, p. 107.

7 Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion, pp. 59, 182, 323.

8 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 23.

9 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 55.

10 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 167; see also pp. 356, 373, 377; Mullins, op. cit. pp. 43, 45.

11 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, ch. i.