Standing waiting in the breakfast queue at our annual ministers' fellowship I held the door open for a couple of our more senior ministers one of whom asked, with affectionate irony, 'Where did you find such graciousness, Jim?' To which I replied, 'I didn't - it found me.' One of those too quick ripostes that can often and easily seem flippant. But actually, I meant it - I always mean it when talking about the love of God made known in Christ. That's why my favourite NT books are Colossians and Ephesians.
And alongside his magnificent commentary on Romans, Colossians shared a special place in the spirituality of James Denney, along with P T Forsyth, Scotland's premier theologians of the cross. In Colossians Denney found a portrayal of Christ crucified, on a scale adequate to his conception of the grace of God, the one "in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell", and who was making peace through the blood of the cross".
Which took me back to some of Denney's lucid passionate statements on the cost and consequence of God's love, words that resonate in the deepest places of my own faith, and perhaps where that instinctive answer 'grace found me', drew its energy.
Sin is only forgiven as it is borne. He bore our
sins in His own body on the tree: that is the propitiation. It is the
satisfaction of divine necessities, and it has value not only for us, but for
God. In that sense, though Christ is God’s gift to us, the propitiation is
objective; it is the voice of God, no less than that of the sinner, which says,
‘Thou, O Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find.’ And this is our
hope towards God. It is not that the love of God has inspired us to repent,
but that Christ in the love of God has borne our sins.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, 162)
Grace is the attitude of God to man* which is
revealed and made sure in Christ, and the only way in which it becomes
effective in us for new life is when it wins for us the response of faith. And
just as grace is the whole attitude of God in Christ to sinful men, so faith is
the whole attitude of the sinful soul as it surrenders itself to that grace….
To maintain the original attitude of welcoming God’s love as it is revealed in
Christ bearing our sins – not only to trust it, but to go on trusting – not
merely to believe in it as a mode of transition from the old to the new, but to
keep on believing – to say with every breath we draw, ‘Thou, O Christ, art all
I want; more than all in Thee I find’ – is not a part of the Christian life,
but the whole of it.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation page 8)
But for His death we should have died in our
sins: we would have passed into the blackness of darkness with the condemnation
of God abiding on us. It is because he died for us, and for no other reason,
that the darkness has passed away, and a light shines in which we have peace
with God and rejoice in hope of His glory. On the basis of the New Testament,
of Christian experience, and of a theistic view of nature…, the writer has done
what he can to indicate the rationale of this; but imperfect as all such
attempts must be, their imperfection does not shake the conviction that they
are attempts to deal with a fact, and that fact the one which is vital to
Christianity.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, page 301)
* Denney was a writer of his time, and even if he were a writer of our day, in the light of his anti-suffragette stance, it's unlikely he would have used more inculsive discourse.
Comments