Primitive Christianity. Is What They Had, Meant to Be Ours?
In our last chapter we had Christ’s words, in which all the power of God in heaven was promised to the Church to enable it to fulfil the great task that Christ set before it. In proportion to the measure of faith and prayer that power might be counted on. The questions come, How did the primitive Church avail itself of that promise? and, Have we a right to expect its fulfilment in the same measure?
In his Dawn on the Dark Continent, Dr. Stewart compares primitive with modern mission work. He writes: “The religious life of the early Christians seems to have possessed some vitality or concentrated spiritual power that helped Christianity, possibly because they believed intensely what they knew. Whatever it was, those Christians were successful as unofficial missionaries.” “In the Early Church its force and expansive power depended at first, as it still depends, on its internal condition, that is, on its spiritual life. The Church of our day needs reminding that spiritual enterprises require spiritual conditions of the very highest force. And while the latter are wanting, the success desired may also be wanting.”
I make no excuse for giving a whole chapter from Report, Vol. IV., “The Missionary Message,” on the difference between the amazing vitality of the Early Church, and the comparative impotence of the Church of our day.
“Christianity supposes an historical revelation. There could have been no Pentecost had it not been for the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. Union with an impersonal absolute has in it no regenerative power. It is distinctive of Christianity that the revelation of God as absolute love and purity in the Cross, and as absolute power in the Resurrection, had to be accomplished before the Spirit was given. But we may say further, that when that revelation had been made, and when it had been realised by the common faith of the Church, Pentecost became divinely inevitable. The dykes of human resistance were broken at last, and the encompassing, waiting, besieging sea of the Spirit rushed in. At last the living Father, through the Son, had found receptive men, and therefore the Spirit was given. Henceforward believing men and women knew that no union with such a God could be too close and too steadfast. Their true life was hidden with Christ in God, and all true progress therein was progress within the absolute revelation.
“Or is this too sweeping a statement so far as the Christian is concerned? Is it, or is it not, the view of the Christian revelation, that there is no limit to the efficacy of the Spirit of God in the life of man, save the measure of faith in those who receive it, that all limitation and delay arise from the imperfect receptiveness of the Christian Church?... What is implied in the promise of the Spirit of God to the Christian Church? How far can we count upon God to sustain and transform us? How near can we come to Him within the conditions of time? How far is it true that He is still literally creative in His world whenever and wherever He finds faith? Are there in Him undreamed of resources of life awaiting simply the rise of the faith, as the riches of nature throughout immemorial ages awaited the discovery and development of science?
“When we set ourselves to explain the difference between the amazing vitality of the Early Church and the comparative impotence of the Church of our day, three possible explanations suggest themselves.
“The first starts from existing facts, and endeavours to explain the early records in the light of present attainment.... The norm of judgment is the Church as we know it, from whom, in truth, the actual life of the heroic age could not have differed in any material degree.
“The second view is that these records of the first one hundred and fifty years of the Church’s life are in substance true history. The contrast between the spiritual exaltation and achievement of that age, and the comparative depression of our own, lies in the fact that for wise and good reasons God has straitened the early gift of the Spirit and put us under a more rigid and limited dispensation.
“The third view, like the second, holds to the truth of the records, but explains the difference between the early centuries and our own by saying that, while God remains unchanging in His grace, the Church has failed to comply with the primal conditions of its reception, that faith has gradually become depressed, and so has lost the expectancy which is the condition of all spiritual achievement. It faces the difficulty as to the failures of prayer to overcome the remaining sin and tragedy in the Christian life, by maintaining that the common faith and love of the Church is so far below the common faith and love of early days that the individual who shares in that common depression cannot attain as yet the ancient summit, and that the true remedy for such failure lies, not in abandoning the enterprises of faith as hopeless, and charging the failure upon God, but in flinging all his energies into the task of rousing the slumbering life of the Church, and awakening it to a new community of faith and love, and in pressing on from that new level to new personal attainment.
“It argues that the idea of God having straitened the spiritual environment of resource has no foundation in revelation, which everywhere assumes that believing men may count upon the Spirit of God with the same assurance as they repose upon the unchanging providence of God. And it pleads that whether it is recognised explicitly or not, the whole missionary movement of the past century rests upon a different foundation, that it began with Carey’s “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God,” and that its progress hitherto has been measured by the degree of expectancy, which again has depended upon the depth and strength and grandeur of its idea of God. It teaches that if the delay in the coming of the Divine Kingdom be due to a lowering of the common faith of the Church, — a lapse of ages of time, a lapse as wide as the Christendom of the modern world, — if around us to-day in the unseen be all the illimitable potencies of the Divine Spirit which lay around the first ages, awaiting only the rise of a generation stronger in faith and love than our own, then clearly the one true attitude for the Church is to confess its historic sin, and gird itself to the most resolute and strenuous endeavour and prayer, that the benumbing mists of our common unbelief may be dispelled, that the redeeming will of God in Christ may have free course in blessing the entire life of man.
“If this view be true, we are attributing to the inscrutable will of God innumerable temporal and spiritual ills which are in truth contingent on our cherishing thoughts of God which are unworthy of His goodness, wisdom, and power. In this case the whole thought of God is being lowered and darkened by a false theory of His ways with men.
“Is the spiritual environment of Divine resource to-day the same as it was in the early ages? By the very fact that the Church is once more facing its duty to the whole world, it has been led by the Providence and the Spirit of God into circumstances which are taxing her resources to the uttermost. Everywhere the question of our resources is coming to the front. But there is surely common agreement that behind all these things there is an incomparably deeper need. Behind all questions of quantity lies the incomparably momentous question of quality. Nor is it simply the spiritual quality of our missionaries that is the crucial point; it is the spiritual quality of the Church which is behind them; the spiritual temper of the great masses of the Christian commonalty, their faith, their love, their hopes, their enduement with the Spirit of God. The question arises and presses for an answer, whether at this moment the Church possesses the spiritual resources for the emergency which has so suddenly risen upon her, or whether, like Israel in the days of the prophets, her existing spiritual attainment is not sufficient for the great world emergency which has broken upon her” (p. 266).
With what force all the lessons that we need at this time are taught.
The supernatural power of the Holy Spirit sought and found is the one condition of success in the work of Christ’s Kingdom.
That power as it manifested itself in the Early Church is most assuredly available for the Church of our day.
All the feebleness from which the Church is suffering, in the decline of membership and impotence in the fulfilment of her calling, can have no other cause but the lack of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in her services.
How inconceivable that the Church does not know and act upon the blessed truth, that the Holy Spirit will work in her all that she needs of the Divine strength for winning the world.
The plea for more prayer opens the certain path to the power of the Spirit in every work the Church has to do.