Henry Churchill King ~ The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life

In an unrelated search, came upon the following little book (Acually more of a lecture contained within perhaps).From the main page:The NATHANIEL WILLIAM TAYLOR LECTURESFOR 1907GIVEN BEFORE THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF YALE UNIVERSITYBYHENRY CHURCHILL KINGPRESIDENT OF OBERLIN COLLEGE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Will admit to jumping to the last 4-5 chapters at the end to see where he might be going, especially in regards to the Lord. Something about these old writters...~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"Whatever may have happened at the grave [of Christ] and in the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain: This grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished, that there is a life eternal. It is useless to cite Plato; it is useless to point to the Persian religion, and the ideas and literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished and has perished; but the certainty of the resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph's garden has not perished, and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City which make our earthly life worth living and tolerable. 'He delivered them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage,' as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews confesses. That is the point. And although there be exceptions to its sway, wherever, despite all the weight of nature, there is a strong faith in the infinite value of the soul; wherever death has lost its terrors; wherever the sufferings of the present are measured against a future of glory, this feeling of life is bound up with the conviction that Jesus Christ has passed through death, that God has awakened him and raised him to life and glory."[1]If in fact, then, the great ground of our faith in immortality is the personality of Christ, let us ask further, Why is it Christ? Just how is it that our faith in immortality builds so directly upon him? Not because Christ has much to say about heavenly rewards; not because of much direct teaching; though giving, I think, straightforward assurance, he has, in fact, done little to satisfy our insatiate curiosity here. Not primarily, either, because of the resurrection evidence, however we may estimate that. For myself, for reasons into which I need not here go, I think there are more difficulties in setting aside the plain New Testament belief in the objective resurrection of Christ than most of our critics seem to realize. I have small faith in a gospel emptied of facts. And I share here Professor Mathews' expressed conviction of the genuine religious value of the historical fact of the resurrection.[2] But, at the same time, I cannot doubt that we cannot and do not build our faith in immortality primarily upon the historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, even where we are able fully to accept it. We do not believe in Christ's Lordship over life and death because we believe in the historical evidence for his resurrection. Rather this evidence has with us the weight it does, because we are already convinced of his Lordship in the moral and spiritual world.Our faith in immortality, that is, is built directly upon Christ, just because of the spirit of his life. He seems himself to live in the very atmosphere of the assurance of immortality, in the atmosphere of eternity. He expects it. He cannot be disappointed, we feel. But, more than that, eternity fits into that most perfect life of trust and love. It is harmonious with it. His life seems to us to have an eternal quality. We cannot think of it as of merely temporary significance. It must abide.http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/sus/index.htm

Read through the entirety of this yesterday. Much of it is quite 'heady' but only in the sense of brain barbells that produce sweat, a good thing.Just found it like many things here, an uncanny and pondering thought that is recurring; At what point did Christianity finally slip over the edge into superficiality? When did the high gloss and shining allure of the gift wrap replace the gift?It seems just as odd that even in this modern day that is given to attempting to square a very old book with truths that are not in the least dated with 'new' concepts and meanings, packaged and sold with the glibbest sense of an almost Hallmark Greeting Card mentality, thumbtacked unto a wall, summarizing the whole of Christianity, a sweet sentimentality.Where and perhaps more so when did the slide begin, when did it stop thinking? If anything we ought to be the greatest thinkers of our time. It's in stumbling over items like this that reveals the disparity. How far removed with all that has been gained in 'knowledge', in technology, in infrastructure and by and large we have a Christianity that is unthinking and un-challenging, producing tons of product and little substance. It's smooth and slick and sweet and comfy, your best life in quick sound bite, how to's and fix your marriage, a whole cottage industry of crass commercialism, the whole thing made quick and instant and easy.What is striking is in just the comparisons to reading something such as this written 100 years ago to what is being produced now. It is what makes this mere website such an incredibly important function I believe in trying to throw up a large stop sign and shout, wait! There is so much more, so much that has been just passed over, so many treasures buried, but unearthed once again. So much history in the sense of those that have gone before us, our modern day running past on to something 'brand new' always replacing last weeks fix.It just seems there has been one giant leap frog over what once was to where we are now. Spurgeon touched on it The Down Grade (April, 1887) , many of the saints brought back to life here did, Tozer and Ravenhill and not that we are without any representative today, Wilkerson and a Keith Daniel, Zac Poonen and on a more brain straining thankfully level, Ravi Zacharias and others. But all these had their contemporaries and that is what is not only what is missing, more true dismissed as outdated or maybe even irrelevant.This is not necessarily a rant nor the result of some unextended nervous energy, maybe it's just a plea to think and to search and to dig deeper. It's to recognize and be ever grateful for what we have here and to pray over all this that goes on, I cannot escape the importance and the needfulness for such a time as this. The beauty is in sharing from what we have found and what even the authors have found, who influenced them? Who did they read? It's almost paradoxical, if you want something 'new' to read, turn around backwards and read the 'old' dead saints, the truths and insight they had will sound so foreign and therefore 'new' to the ways of modern Christendom it is amazing. Beyond that a great deal of it is free.Here's a bit more that seemed to address inadvertently the need and grasping of something that comes up periodically regarding the necessity of holding to scripture as it is in the bible. Maybe this approach might give a different and better slant on why. Just as a preface, much of this book address's areas of psychology, theology, the scientific method, diffusing arguments while showing the supremacy ultimately of Jesus Christ and therefore Christianity. It is peppered with many names that are unfamiliar (the writers own contemporaries).Not having enough gumption to do a 'review', have a hard enough time reviewing myself, threw it out here into the mix as just one more brain stretching addition to glean from and ponder on.THE NEEDED EMPHASES IN MODERN RELIGIOUS LIFEIf one asks, now, what is involved in these statements, and attempts to characterize the Christian way to communion with God, he will be obliged to say that, for the fully modern man, the way must be ethical, Christian, social, biblical, practical, and, in all these points alike, rational.It must be ethical, for no religious experience can justify itself to a man who has come to moral self-consciousness, which does not offer, in the sphere of the moral, a deepening of the moral life. Mere emotions, therefore, however entrancing, will not answer. Here lies the far reaching significance of the Reformers' insistence that God's presence is to be found in the daily calling, and the sense of his nearness to be won just there, in the doing of the daily duty.It must be Christian, in building, as we have seen, directly on the fact of Christ as the one fact sufficiently great and significant to open a certain way to God for the modern man.It must be social, because in the sphere of religion, as in all other spheres of value, we are almost inevitably introduced through the witness of those who already share in the value. And, doubtless, for some the religious experience remains to the end in much larger degree indirect, than for others. And for all of us some of our best visions of the spiritual come through others. The social trend of the Christian's communion with God is seen, too, in the indispensable fellowship with the Church and with the great prophetic seers of history, as well as in the inevitable way in which the kingdom of God must go forward by the witness, given from heart to heart, of what men have found Christ to be to them.It must be biblical, not as building on a book, but in just so far as the Bible is regarded not as a record of doctrines or history to be authoritatively accepted, but as a book of honest testimony to experience. Its supreme value lies just here. For the testimony of another is our chief road to enlargement of life. Most of all, it is through such simple, honest witness that the New Testament puts us face to face with the redeeming personality of Christ. Whatever our theories about the Bible, it is not as compelling authority, but as simple, honest witness that the New Testament brings us emancipating power.In another's words, "The inner life of Jesus is stamped, on the testimony of men who have been set free by him. In this way has it become a force in history, and in no other way was that possible. Hence we can lay hold on it and make it ours only when we let the witness of his disciples lay hold on us." And that witness the Christian "finds in Scripture as nowhere else."Treated as a book throbbing thus with personal life-as a book of honest testimony to experience broad and deep, in the moral and spiritual life-and approached through a true historical method, I have no doubt that the Bible will increasingly prove what the free critic, Edmond Scherer, claimed: "The Bible will ever be the book of power, the marvellous book, the book above all others. It will ever be the light of the mind and the bread of the soul. Neither the superstitions of some, nor the irreligious negations of others have been able to do it harm. If there is anything certain in the world, it is that the destinies of the Bible are linked with the destinies of holiness on earth."The modern emphasis, again, must be practical, as wrought out in experience, and submitting not only gladly, but of deliberate purpose, to the test of experiment in life. The experiment here is the endeavor to find whether the deepest laws and trends of our being do unmistakably point to God. And it is in this practical way that we must apply, each for himself, the psychological and sociological tests which have already been considered. Do the Christian conception of the spiritual life and the honest response to the inner life of Christ give opportunity for the highest and fullest personal self-expression and personal association, justifying themselves, thus, rationally and ethically? If the individual finds himself compelled, as I certainly do, to return an unhesitating affirmative to this question, then he will simply be saying that the deepest laws and trends of human nature reach their fullest justification and growth only upon the Christian assumption.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~That in itself is enough to warrant the label of inerrancy, it is true to itself, to honesty and to reality. That it interprets itself and where the failure is will always be on our end, irregardless of what perceived notions we might have, what we might observe as contradictory. To get the full gist of this summarization would have to take into account all that came before it in this little book and for those that would continue in their arguments otherwise.

(An old post (note the date) with a bit of rambling that I could but wish had been spared ...)

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[i]One may appeal here confidently to the life of Jesus. Is there the slightest suggestion in his spirit, that his clear sense of the reality of the spiritual world is in any way hysterical? On the contrary, is not the whole temper of his life that of a confident trust, as of one walking in the very presence of God, to whom it were absurd to suggest that the sense of the reality of God depended upon some strained attitude of attention or painfully maintained mood of feeling, and so might vanish at any moment when the tension became too great?

The whole meaning of his life seems rather to say, "God can be counted upon. The life in relation to him is no mere imaginary one, which you are forced to make; it is a real life in which he is constantly at work. I am come to give you the most positive assurance upon that point."[/i]

[i]And so in countless problems, the mere imaging power is made to take the place of thinking; and it does it so effectively, that often the really serious difficulties are not even raised. Almost all the force of much anti-theistic argument lies in this shallow appeal to the power of sense-imagery.[/i]

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[i]Professor Bowne's very clear and suggestive statement upon this point: "The sum is this: The mind is not a disinterested logic machine, but a living organism, with manifold interests and tendencies. These outline its development, and furnish the driving power.[/i]

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[i]Once more, in considering the psychological conditions of the sense of reality in the spiritual life, we may not forget the natural results that come from a long ignoring of facts. Here, too, the religious life is not at all peculiar. The law is one common to all the spheres of our living. Our entire consciousness is characterized, the Psychologists tell us, by a constant selective activity. To certain elements in our environment we attend; certain others we persistently ignore. These ignored elements practically drop out of our life; they have for us no real existence. For all practical purposes, they have ceased to be. So too, no doubt, the seeming unreality of the spiritual world in the case of many is due, in no small degree, to the long ignoring of the facts of the spiritual world in their previous lives and habits of thought. "We hear much," writes Professor Peabody, "of the reasons which lead men to abandon prayer, but in most such instances the loss of the prayer habit does not happen because of profound philosophizing or serious conviction, but through sheer inertia. There are so many other things to do, that, as a young man once said, 'One does not get around to his prayers!' "[13] The fact of the existence of God, as he is revealed to us in Christ, is no barren truth. The rational inferences to be drawn from it will bear on every detail of life. But here is a man, perhaps, (I am very far from believing that this is a universal explanation) into whose life for years no conscious recognition of God and the spiritual life has come; who has acted precisely as if they were not; who has thus virtually denied their existence in every act; whose thoughts, plans, purposes, have been all apart from God; who has settled habits of thought and life, that are logically consistent only with denial of the existence of God and a spiritual life. Will those habits have no influence on his spiritual insight? Is he to come now, at one bound, into the clear and simple vision of God and divine truth, which may have belonged to his childhood? And shall he refuse to have patience to take the toilsome way back to those early convictions from which his lack of earnestness, his carelessness, his indifference, his neglect, his worldliness, and his sin have separated him? Verily, I sometimes think, it were a strange thing, if the spiritual life were not obscure to many of us. If the voice within us were not indeed divine, long since would it have been smothered under the heaped up rubbish of the years.[/i]

[i]... it was Clerk Maxwell, who wrote in a private letter, after various intellectual excursions of this kind: Old Chap! I have read up many queer religions; there is nothing like the old thing after all. I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen that none will work without a God."[/i]

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"Sometimes the demand for "overwhelming evidence" in the spiritual life means that one wishes the conviction that comes from personal experience, before fulfilling the conditions upon which alone that experience can come. It seems to be true that we come into all the higher experiences of life in one of two ways:[8] either the necessary course of our lives thrusts the experience upon us, and though we did not choose it and would not have chosen it, we find the actual experience meaning to us what we could not have guessed beforehand, and then choose it for its own sake; or, we have to make the venture with a kind of desperate faith that the experience will be to us what others have found it, for the highest things everywhere require the complete commitment,—they give themselves only where all is risked. No temporizing, half-hearted experiment here will give results. The meaning of a genuinely unselfish love, for example, does not yield itself to any calculating experiment. Either one is surprised into it, or he must voluntarily venture all in complete self-abandonment, burning all his bridges behind him. It should be no surprise to us, therefore, that in the highest sphere of value, that of religion, with its preeminently ethical and personal emphasis, there should be no way of getting the conviction of individual experience before experience. There are, then, two temperaments, and two ways of coming into the great values of life; but there is no way of avoiding the need of experience.

A closely related suggestion needs also to be heeded if we are really to recognize how impossible a merely theoretical solution is in religion; though here, too, religion makes no peculiar demand. Throughout life we are continually encountering experiences of which we instinctively realize that it is useless to speak, except to those who have had a like experience. It is useless to talk of color to a man born blind, or of beauty to a man who never had the living emotion of the beautiful. Our words in all such cases are only the names for experiences; they cannot disclose the experiences themselves. The very meaning of the words here is not chiefly a thought product at all. We have lived the meaning, and know it only so far as we have lived it. After all, the one great teacher is life, and our best words to another of even the deepest in us must fall resultless, until life has brought to the other the experience out of which the words can be interpreted. We can only bear witness. How impossible, then, is it by any logical means to bring home the full reality of the spiritual world, where the conditions of the possible experience are not fulfilled! In Whitman's putting:

"No one can acquire for another—not one,
No one can grow for another—not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back
most to him.
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back
most to him.
And no man understands any greatness or
goodness but his own, or the indication
of his own."

We cannot inherit the sense of reality in the spiritual world. There is no reality in religion without a living experience of our own."