Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 2

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 2

The most radical step which these spiritual Reformers took--the step which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the Reformation--was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superst.i.tions, and a shift of external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed as low an estimate on the saving value of orthodox systems of theological formulation as the Protestant Reformers did on the saving value of "works." To the former, salvation was an affair neither of "works" nor of what they called "notions," _i.e._ views, beliefs, or creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered "paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may "believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of G.o.d, a stranger and a foreigner to the spirit of Christ. They were determined, therefore, to go through to a deeper centre and to make only those things pivotal which are absolutely essential to life and salvation.

They began their reconstruction of the meaning of salvation with (1) a new and fresh interpretation of G.o.d, and (2) with a transformed eschatology. As I have already said, they re-discovered G.o.d through Christ, and in terms of His revelation; and coming to G.o.d _this way_, they saw at once that the prevailing interpretations of the atonement were inadequate and unworthy. G.o.d, they declared, is not a Suzerain, treating men as his va.s.sals, reckoning their sins up against them as infinite debts to be paid off at last in a vast commercial transaction only by the immeasurable price of a divine Life, given to pay the debt which had involved the entire race in hopeless bankruptcy. Nor, again, in their thought is He a mighty Sovereign, meting out to the world strict justice and holding all sin as flagrant disloyalty and appalling violation of law, never to be forgiven until the full requirements of sovereign justice are met and balanced and satisfied. All this seemed to them artificial and false. Salvation, as they understand it, cannot be conceived as escape from debt nor as the satisfaction of justice, since it is a personal life-relationship with a personal G.o.d who is and always was eternal Love. G.o.d's universe, both outer and inner, is loaded with moral significance, is meant for discipline, and therefore it has its stern aspects and drives its lessons home with the unswerving hammer of _consequences_. But in the personal Heart of the universe, Love and Tenderness and Sympathy and Forgiveness are supreme, and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.

G.o.d has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry "Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of G.o.d, and its bearing {xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they re-discovered the love of G.o.d, they also found again the gospel of love and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original gospel of divine Fatherhood.

Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered account of the character of G.o.d, but it was also partly due to their profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life and vital processes. Heaven and h.e.l.l were no longer thought of as terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the lost forever punished. Heaven and h.e.l.l were for them inward conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit toward its chosen centre. Heaven and h.e.l.l cease, therefore, to be eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of G.o.d; it is joy in the prevalence of His goodness; peace through harmonious correspondence with His purposes; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of an inward nature that loves what G.o.d loves and enjoys what He enjoys.

h.e.l.l, here or elsewhere, is a disordered life, out of adjustment with the universal will of G.o.d; it is concentration upon self and self-ends; the contraction of love; the shrinking of inward resources; the formation of a spirit of hate, the creation of an inward nature that hates what G.o.d loves. h.e.l.l is the inner condition inherently attaching to the kind of life that displays and exhibits the spirit and att.i.tude which must be overcome before G.o.d with His purposes of goodness can be {xlix} ultimately triumphant and all in all. Salvation, therefore, cannot be thought of in terms of escape from a place that is dreaded to a place that is desired as a haven. It is through and through a spiritual process--escape from a wrongly fashioned will to a will rightly fashioned. It is complete spiritual health and wholeness of life, brought into operation and function by the soul's recovery of G.o.d and by joyous correspondence with Him.

Here is the genuine beginning in modern times of what has come to be the deepest note of present-day Christianity, _the appreciation of personality as the highest thing in earth or heaven_, and the initiation of a movement to find the vital sources and resources for the inner kindling of the spirit, and for raising the whole personal life to higher functions and to higher powers.

Putting the emphasis, as they did, on personal religion, _i.e._ on experience, instead of on theology, they naturally became exponents of free-will, and that, too, in a period when fore-ordination was a central dogma of theology. This problem of freedom, which is as deep as personality itself, always has its answer "determined" by the point of approach. For those who _begin_ with an absolute and omnipotent G.o.d, and work down from above, the necessarian position is determined.

Their answer is: "All events are infallibly connected with G.o.d's disposal." For those who start, however, from actual experience and from the testimony of consciousness, freedom feels as certain as life itself. Their answer is: "Human will is a real factor in the direction of events and man shapes his own destiny toward good or evil."

Calvin's logic is irresistible if his a.s.sumptions are once granted.

These spiritual Reformers, however, were untouched by it, because they began from the interior life, with its dramatic movements, as their basal fact, and man as they knew him was free.

This spiritual movement involved, as a natural development, an entire shift from the historical idea of the Church as an authoritative and supernatural instrument of salvation, to a Church whose authority was entirely vital, {l} ethical, spiritual, dynamic. The Church of these spiritual Reformers was a Fellowship, a Society, a Family, rather than a mysterious and supernatural ent.i.ty. They felt once again, as powerfully perhaps as it was possible in their centuries to feel it, the immense significance of the Pauline conception of the Church as the continued embodiment and revelation of Christ, the communion of saints past and present who live or have lived by the Spirit. Through this spiritual group, part of whom are visible and part invisible, they held that the divine revelation is continued and the eternal Word of G.o.d is being uttered to the race. "The true religion of Christ," as one of these spiritual teachers well puts it, "is written in the soul and spirit of man by the Spirit of G.o.d; and the believer is the only book in which G.o.d now writes His New Testament."[31] This Church of the Spirit is always being built. Its power is proportional to the spiritual vitality of the membership, to the measure of apprehension of divine resources, to the depth of insight and grasp of truth, to the prevalence of love and brotherhood, to the character of service, which the members exhibit. It possesses no other kind of power or authority than the power and authority of personal lives formed into a community by living correspondence with G.o.d, and acting as human channels and organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and conclusive word of G.o.d which automatically settles the issue. Its only weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified.

It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the Protestant Reformers this spiritual ideal presented "a Church" so shorn and emasculated as to be {li} absolutely worthless. It seemed to them a propaganda which threatened and endangered the mighty work of reformation to which they felt themselves called, and they used all the forces available to suppress and annihilate those of this other "way."

Nearly four hundred wonderful years have pa.s.sed since the issue was first drawn, since the first of these spiritual prophets uttered his modest challenge. There can be no question that the current of Christian thought has been strongly setting in the direction which these brave and sincere innovators took. I feel confident that many persons to-day will be interested in these lonely men and will follow with sympathy their valiant struggles to discover the road to a genuine spiritual religion, and their efforts to live by the eternal Word of G.o.d as it was freely revealed as the Day Star to their souls.

[1] 1 Cor. xv. 50.

[2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4.

[3] John iii. 6.

[4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4.

[5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the text which says: "The Lord G.o.d made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them."--Gen. iii. 21.

[6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_.

[7] Isaac Penington, "A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual Travails," _Works_ (edition of 1761), i. pp. x.x.xvii.-x.x.xviii.

[8] Isaac Penington's _Works_, i. pp. x.x.xvii.-x.x.xviii.

[9] The exact and sharply-defined "ladders" of mystic ascent which form a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious inst.i.tutions, they powerfully a.s.sist certain minds to find the way home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims.

[10] Wordsworth's "Prelude," Bk. ii.

[11] _Theologia Germanica_, chaps. xxii. and xliii.

[12] _Ibid._ chap. liii.

[13] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.

[14] Tauler's Sermons. See especially Sermons IV. and XXIII. in Hutton's _Inner Way_.

[15] _The Divine Names_ of Dionysius the Areopagite, chap. i. sec. i.

[16] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 25-30.

[17] Quoted in W. H. J. Gairdner's _The Reproach of Islam_, p. 151.

[19] Denck's _Was geredet sey, da.s.s die Schrift_, B. 2. Pascal's saying is: "Comfort thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou not already found Me."--Le Mystere de Jesus, sec. 2.

[19] _The Threefold Life of Man_, xiv. 72.

[20] Sterry's _Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of G.o.d in the Soul of Man_, p. 24.

[21] "The finite individual soul seems naturally to present a double aspect. It looks like, on the one hand, a climax or concentration of the nature beneath it and the community around it, and, on the other hand, a spark or fragment from what is above and beyond it. It is crystallized out of the collective soul of nature or society, or it falls down from the transcendental soul of heaven or what is above humanity. In both cases alike it has its share of divinity."--Bernard Bosanquet, _The Value and Destiny of the Individual_ (London, 1913), p.

1.

[22] The way to the world of Perfect Reality, Socrates says in the _Theaetetus_, consists in likeness to G.o.d, nor is there, he adds, anything more like G.o.d than is a good man.--_Theaetetus_ 176 A and B.

[23] Schleiermacher's _Glaubenslehre_.

[24] _Republic_ vii. 518 B.

[25] Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."

[26] _Realm of Ends_, p. 230.

[27] _Lectures and Addresses_, p. 193.

[28] Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x, _Poems of Life and Moments_.

[29] Jacob Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt, though a bungling attempt, to pa.s.s from an abstract G.o.d to a G.o.d of _character_, and it was a circuitous way of getting round the problem of evil.

[30] _Mystical Elements of Religion_, i. p. 26.

[31] William Dell's sermon on "The Trial of Spirits," _Works_, p. 438.

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CHAPTER I

THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION

I

One of the greatest tragedies in Christian history is the division of forces which occurred in the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century. Division of forces in the supreme spiritual undertakings of the race is of course confined to no one century and to no one movement; it is a very ancient tragedy. But the tragedy of division is often relieved by the fact that through the differentiation of opposing parties a vigorous emphasis is placed upon aspects of truth which might otherwise have been allowed to drop out of focus. This sixteenth-century division is peculiarly tragic, because through the split in the lines the very aspects of truth which were most needed to give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in the din and confusion of party warfare.