Category Archives: James Denney

“He was numbered with the transgressors” James Denney

15 Friday Apr 2022

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The deepest word in that chapter, He was numbered with the transgressors, is expressly applied to our Lord by Himself at a later period (Luke 22:37); and however mysterious that word may be when we try to define it by relation to the providence and redemption of God—however appalling it may seem to render it as St. Paul does, Him who knew no sin, God made to be sin for us—here in the baptism we see not the word but the thing: Jesus numbering Himself with the transgressors, submitting to be baptized with their baptism, identifying Himself with them in their relation to God as sinners, making all their responsibilities His own. It was ‘a great act of loving communion with our misery,’ and in that hour, in the will and act of Jesus, the work of atonement was begun. It was no accident that now, and not at some other hour, the Father’s voice declared Him the beloved Son, the chosen One in whom His soul delighted. For in so identifying Himself with sinful men, in so making their last and most dreadful responsibilities His own, Jesus approved Himself the true Son of the Father, the true Servant and Representative of Him whose name from of old is Redeemer.1 It is impossible to have this in mind, and to remember the career which the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah sets before the Servant of the Lord, without feeling that from the moment He entered on His ministry our Lord’s thoughts of the future must have been more in keeping with the reality than those which are sometimes ascribed to Him as alone consistent with a truly human career. His career was truly His own as well as truly human, and the shadow of the world’s sin lay on it from the first

1 In The Expositor for May 1902, Mr. Garvie has a notable article on the baptism of Jesus—‘The Vocation Accepted’—in which he connects Matt. 3:15 (‘thus it becomes us to fulfil all righteousness’) with Isa. 53:11. ‘The righteous servant shall justify many because He shall bear their iniquities. It is in His vicarious consciousness and the sacrifice which this would ultimately involve that Jesus fulfilled all righteousness. There is a higher righteousness than being justified by one’s own works, a higher even than depending on God’s forgiveness; and that belongs to Him who undertakes by His own loving sacrifice for sinners to secure God’s forgiveness on their behalf.’ In combination with the argument in the text, this seems to me to make the essential meaning of our Lord’s baptism indubitable. To ascribe Matt. 3:14 f. to the productive activity of the Church, stimulated by dogmatic motives, is perfectly gratuitous. A dogmatic motive would have produced something more obviously and unequivocally dogmatic than a phrase (‘to fulfil all righteousness’) which has baffled most readers by its excessive vagueness.

 James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 20–22.

James Denney, The Death of Christ (The Temptation)

15 Friday Apr 2022

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Denney makes an interesting observation concerning the Temptation of Christ: it was not just an event which took place at the outset of his ministry, rather it framed his ministry:

 It does not matter that the temptations which are here described actually assailed Jesus at later stages in His life. Of course they did. They are the temptations of the Christ, and they not only assailed Him at particular moments, some of which we can still identify (Matt. 16:22 f.; John 6:15), they must in some way have haunted Him incessantly. But they were present to His mind from the outset of His career; that is the very meaning of the temptation story, standing where it stands. The Christ sees the two paths that lie before Him, and He chooses at the outset, in spiritual conflict, that which He knows will set Him in irreconcilable antagonism to the hopes and expectations of those to whom He is to appeal.

James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 17. What then does that do to him:

A soul which sees its vocation shadowed out in the Servant of the Lord, which is driven of the Spirit into the wilderness to face the dreadful alternatives raised by that vocation, and which takes the side which Jesus took in conflict with the enemy, does not enter on its life-work with any superficial illusions: it has looked Satan and all he can do in the face; it is prepared for conflict; it may shrink from death, when death confronts it in the path of its vocation, as hideous and unnatural, but it cannot be startled by it as by an unthought of, unfamiliar thing. The possibility, at least, of a tragic issue to His work—when we remember the Servant of the Lord, far more than the possibility—belongs to the consciousness of Jesus from the first

James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 17–18.

James Denney, The Death of Christ.1

13 Wednesday Apr 2022

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James Denney’s The Death of Christ is an examination of that theme in the New Testament. Responding to the contention that there is no “New Testament” which was written together and thus asserts a common plan, he writes:

The unity which belongs to the books of the New Testament, whatever be its value, is certainly not fortuitous. The books did not come together by chance. They are not held together simply by the art of the bookbinder. It would be truer to say that they gravitated toward each other in the course of the first century of the Church’s life, and imposed their unity on the Christian mind, than that the Church imposed on them by statute—for when ‘dogma’ is used in the abstract sense which contrasts it with fact or history, this is what it means—a unity to which they were inwardly strange.

James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 3. I like that phrase “gravitated toward each other.” It is a fascinating way to speak of the canon.  The books were recognized by the Church to belong together. The unity was not imposed by decree, but rather the unity was created by the books, admittedly written at different times and places by different men.

He later makes another comment which could help explain the nature of this unity. The New Testament gathers around Jesus. And Jesus’ self-consciousness, as described by Denney, is built around his understanding of the Old Testament Scripture:

Ideas, as Dr. Johnson says, must be given through something; and Jesus, we must believe, gave His disciples an idea of what His experience at baptism was in the narratives which we now read in the gospels. The sum of that experience is often put by saying that He came then to the consciousness of His Sonship. But the manner in which Jesus Himself puts it is much more revealing. ‘A voice came from heaven, Thou art My Son, the Beloved, in Thee I am well pleased.’ A voice from heaven does not mean a voice from the clouds, but a voice from God; and it is important to notice that the voice from God speaks in familiar Old Testament words. It does not come unmediated, but mediated through psalm and prophecy. It is through the absorption of Old Testament Scripture that Jesus comes to the consciousness of what He is; and the Scriptures which He uses to convey His experience to the disciples are the second Psalm, and the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. The first words of the heavenly voice are from the Psalm, the next from the prophet. Nothing could be more suggestive than this. The Messianic consciousness in Jesus from the very beginning was one with the consciousness of the Servant of the Lord. The King, to whom Jehovah says, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee (Psalm 2:7) 1 is at the same time (in the mind of Jesus) that mysterious Servant of Jehovah—‘my beloved, in whom I am well pleased’—whose tragic yet glorious destiny is adumbrated in the second Isaiah (42:1 ff.). It is not necessary to inquire how Jesus could combine beforehand two lines of anticipation which at the first glance seem so inconsistent with each other; the point is, that on the evidence before us, which seems to the writer as indisputable as anything in the gospels, He did combine them, and therefore cannot have started on His ministry with the cloudless hopes which are sometimes ascribed to Him. However ‘unhistorical’ it might seem on general grounds, on the ground of the evidence which is here available we must hold that from the very beginning of His public work the sense of something tragic in His destiny—something which in form might only become definite with time but in substance was sure—was present to the mind of Jesus.

James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 13–15. Since Jesus’ consciousness of himself was shaped in accordance with the Scripture which spoke of his death, the end he suffered was not a surprise or failure; it came as a necessity:

When it did emerge in definite form it brought necessities and appeals along with it which were not there from the beginning; it brought demands for definite action, for assuming a definite attitude, for giving more or less explicit instruction; but it did not bring a monstrous and unanticipated disappointment to which Jesus had to reconcile Himself as best He could. It was not a brutal démenti to all His hopes. It had a necessary relation to His consciousness from the beginning, just as surely as His consciousness, from the beginning had a necessary relation to the prophetic conception of the Servant of the Lord.

James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 15–16.

James Denney, The Deadliness of Slander

04 Monday Feb 2019

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From his collected sermons, The Way Everlasting

This sermon concerns the slander of Jesus recorded by Matthew:

31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. 32 And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

Matthew 12:31–32 (KJV 1900).  It discusses what it means to commit the “unpardonable sin.”

This text is striking: Jesus, who came to bring forgiveness of sins, is here stating a sin is not forgivable. To understand this text, we must first we must put aside our false stereotype of Jesus:

The tradition of Christian art has taught us to think of Jesus as living a life of untroubled calm; His countenance in pictures may be pensive or majestic or compassionate, but it is always in repose. Anything strained or overwrought would seem out of place. But here we see that alike upon friends and enemies He made a different impression. He was rapt, as He taught the multitudes, in a lofty excitement. When He encountered those who were regarded as possessed by evil spirits, the Spirit that was in Him reacted with intense vehemence against their delusions and degradation; the Gospels are full of the peremptory and commanding words that He spoke as He set them free. If we think of a scene like the cleansing of the temple, when zeal for His Father’s house consumed Him like a flame; or of His baptism, when He saw the heavens open and heard the Father’s voice; or of the hour when He turned on Peter with the terrible rebuke, “Get thee behind me, Satan”; we can feel how untrue is that conception of Jesus which represents Him as immovably placid. Perhaps it would be truer to think of Him as habitually rapt, exalted, intense. Certainly this is how we must think of Him on the occasion on which he is presented to us in the text. 

 James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 242–243. Jesus’ ministry was often a shock to those around. Even his own friends and family did not rightly understand him:

31 There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him. 32 And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. 33 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Mark 3:31–35 (KJV 1900). Denney explains this:

A life and work like that of Jesus must often have seemed baffling to those who were about Him and who had a natural affection for Him. We can understand how His mother and His brothers had a true though misplaced concern for His welfare. If there were a son or a brother in our house to whom the one thing real was the kingdom of God, who broke every earthly tie to give himself completely to it, who spent whole nights on the hillside in prayer to God over it, who was so absorbed in it that he could not find time for his necessary food and apparently did not care, should we not be tempted to think that he needed looking after? No doubt the friends of Jesus should have known Him better than they did. They ought to have had greater sympathy with Him, greater appreciation for His work. They ought not to have made it possible for Him to say, with the bitter accent of experience, “A man’s foes are they of his own household”. But though they sinned in these respects, it was not a hopeless or unpardonable sin. Their hearts were not really shut against Jesus; they were not deliberately and malignantly opposed to His work. I do not say this as though the sin of their speech could be explained away. If they were alarmed on Jesus’ account, they were irritated and annoyed on their own; they were provoked that One who ought to have been able to take care of Himself should persist in causing needless anxiety; and their petulant exclamation, pardonable though it was, was gravely wrong when we remember who was its object. Nevertheless, it was only petulant, not malignant. It was something they could and would be sorry for afterwards; they would repent and it would be forgiven.

244–245.

And then there was the response of the leaders, those whom Jesus rebuked so strongly in our text. They did not merely misunderstand Jesus with misplaced sympathy: they spoke against him. Denney turns to the modern “historical Jesus” research and readers: those who decide to judge Jesus and decide what he may and may not be, according to their own lights:

The friends of Jesus who said “He is beside Himself” had lost for the moment or had not yet attained any real sense of what He was; they spoke of Him as if He were just one of themselves, who in an excess of zeal was like to go off His head. Their attitude is reproduced by a great many people who, without thinking what they are doing, really take the measure of Jesus in their own minds, point out His limitations, assign Him His place, show where and how far He paid tribute to His time,—betray, in short, in their whole relation to Him, the twentieth century’s sense of its own superiority to the first. I am not going to deny that the twentieth century is in many ways superior to the first; nor even that it was part of the reality of our Lord’s manhood that He should be man of the particular age in which He was born, and not of another; but if we cease to feel through all such distinctions that Jesus is the Lord, we shall run great risk of falling into the sin in question. Do not let us consider it a sin of no consequence because it is pardonable. It is pardonable on the same condition as other sins—namely, that it is repented of, confessed, renounced. To

247.

What then was the sin of these leaders to Jesus  “who threatened everything the scribes counted dear.” (249):

It was not the exclamation of men who were irritated at the moment and forgot themselves, so to speak; that could have been repented of and forgiven; it was the deliberate and settled malice of men who would say anything and do anything rather than yield to the appeal of the good Spirit of God in Jesus. This is the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which in its very nature is unpardonable. Jesus calls it eternal sin. It is sin which, look at it as long as you may, is never turned by repentance into anything else; and therefore it has no forgiveness, neither in this world nor in that which is to come.

249–250. What then is necessary for this sin today:

The terrible solemnity of these words has oppressed many hearts. People of sensitive conscience have been tormented with the dread that they had committed the unpardonable sin—that without knowing it, or in some hasty but irretrievable word or act, they had placed themselves for ever beyond the reach of mercy. It would be wrong to say anything which encouraged sinful men to think lightly of their sins, but it is surely clear from what has been said already that this fatal sin cannot be committed inadvertently. It is the last degree of antipathy to Christ to which the soul can advance, the sin of those who will do anything rather than recognize in Him the presence of God.

 250. Now perhaps we do not break out in this sin in all its plain manifestation, but there hints and similarities in it when we disparage the good work of the Spirit in others.  “Perhaps we are naturally grasping and mean, and our selfish nature resent the reproof of another’s generosity.” (251). “It is the sin of refusing ot acknowledge God when he is manifestly there, and introducing something Satanic to explain and discredit what has unquestionably God behind it.”

Conversely, “It is a sign of spiritual health when we are quick to recognize and to welcome goodness, and our joy in the appreciation of it is one of the surest indications that we ourselves have a place in God’s kingdom.” 253.

 

 

 

James Denney: Moral Impossibilities

27 Sunday Jan 2019

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This sermon is based upon 1 Corinthians 10:21, Ye cannot drink the Cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils.

The sermon has two points of particular interest: (1) what is the nature of the elements in the Lord’s Supper: particularly what is work in a symbol. (2) What does it mean for a modern Christian to take the cup of the devils?

As for symbol, Denney makes an important corrective to the concept of symbol: a symbol is not meant to put something at a distance, but rather to bring that thing close:

Perhaps it was under a deep sense of what it signified, perhaps with a sort of perplexity in our minds that in a spiritual religion like ours such a place should have been claimed by a material rite. It is certain that many church members have no clear convictions about the sacraments, and are uncomfortable in the celebration of them. They may think in some indistinct fashion that they are symbolical, but they use even the idea of symbol in a wrong way.

A symbol in their thoughts is something to be distinguished from reality; just because it is a symbol, it keeps them, one might say, at arm’s length from the thing symbolized. But the true use of a symbol is to bring the reality near; it is to give us a grasp of it such as we could not otherwise obtain.

A Christian spirit does not play off the reality in the sacrament, and the symbol, against each other; it grasps the reality through the symbol; it does not answer to its experience to say that in the communion it partakes of the symbols of Christ’s body and blood; it has Jesus Christ Himself in all the reality of his incarnation and passion as its meat and drink. It is nothing less than the cup of the Lord which we drink, nothing less than the table of the Lord of which we partake.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 230–231. The “symbols” of the supper are not to create a distance, but rather to bring about a relationship which could not obtain otherwise. The best of symbols make us understand better; help us relate better.

As for the second issue: what now is the cup of the devils? Denney says, Well, we don’t see idol worship or overt devilry nowadays. On this first point, things have changed greatly. There are a substantial number of people who self-identify as Wiccan, “In 2014 Pew Research Center estimated that 0.4 percent of Americans, about 1 to 1.5 million people, identify as Wiccan or Pagan.” There are any number of things quite common today which would have been unthinkable in such numbers in the late 19th century (although since the First World War, such things have certainly grown).

But even without overt paganism, Denney speaks of a certainly “liberty” which has one taking in ideas and culture which are contrary to Christ. The cup of devils is far more dangerous to us than we understand. Paul is warning them of a very real danger:

No matter how sure a man’s hold may be of the Christian principle that an idol is nothing in the world and therefore can do nothing to harm any enlightened person; if he takes part in such a transaction as I have described, then its atmosphere, its circumstances, its spirit, will prevail against him; he will be brought in spite of himself into the great communion of heathen life again. Let him say what he will, it is another world than that in which we live at the Lord’s table; it is spiritual influence of another quality which tells there upon the soul: and the two are irreconcilable. “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 235–236.

Here is how Denney describes the effect of such liberty:

Probably the cup of devils is drunk most frequently still under the sign of liberty. Even a Christian man says to himself that everything in human life ought to be of interest to him. It belongs to his intelligence to concern itself with all the experiences of his kind, and the most attractive way to look at these experiences is in literature. This is the mirror in which life is reflected, and it cannot be wrong to gaze into it. It is indeed the mark of a large and liberal intelligence to have the amplest toleration here; to allow the mind to familiarize itself with all that has been said and thought by human beings; to cultivate breadth, appreciation, geniality; to avoid a censorious and puritanic temper. The world that is good enough for God should be good enough for us, and we should not be too good to take it as it is.

It is by pleas like these, or in a mood like this, that men and women who have drunk the cup of the Lord allow themselves to drink the cup of devils. They deliberately breathe a poisoned spiritual air as if it could do them no harm. But it does do harm. I do not believe there is anything in which people are so ready to take liberties which does so much harm. There are bad books in the world, just as there are bad men, and a Christian cannot afford to take either the one or the other into his bosom. There are books, and books of genius too, which should not be read, because they should never have been written. The first imagination and conception of them was sin, and the sin is revived when they are conceived again in the mind even of a Christian reader. It is revived with all the deadly power that belongs to sin. We cannot give our minds over to it with impunity. It confuses, it stains, it debilitates, it kills. It is the cup of devils, and we cannot drink it and drink the cup of the Lord.

 James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 237–238.

And, “All things are not lawful for us if we wish to remain in the Lord’s company and to share in His life.”

James Denney: Walking in the Light

15 Tuesday Jan 2019

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WALKING IN THE LIGHT

“If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”—1 JOHN 1:7.

THIS is one of the passages in Scripture in which the language is so spiritual, and so remote from that which we use in daily life, that it is apt to leave no impression on our minds. We have no inclination to dispute it, but it does not arrest us.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 216.

Denney goes onto note elements of this passage: “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light” and “We have fellowship with one another”. These two elements combine for our sanctification:

This text brings before us two of the great experiences and privileges of Christians, and the condition on which they depend. These experiences are, first, mutual fellowship, and second, continuous sanctification.

What of this sanctification:

The mutual fellowship of Christians is a fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, and there is no justification known to Scripture which does not sanctify, nor any sanctification which does not rest on a fundamental annulling of the responsibility for sin.

And now to the first element: to walk in the light as he is in the light.

Denney observes that this language of light and darkness is never unpacked and explained by John, because, “Partly they do not need explanation and partly they do not admit of it.”

What then is to walk in the light?

To walk in the light means to live a life in which there is nothing hidden, nothing in which we are insincere with ourselves, nothing in which we seek to impose upon others. We may have, and no doubt we will have, both sin and the sense of sin upon us—“if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”—but we may walk in the light nevertheless, if we deal truly with our sin, and it is only as we do so that we enjoy Christian fellowship and are cleansed by the blood of Jesus.

Here, walking in the light we both enjoy true Christian fellowship and also have our sins cleansed. What then is involved in walking in the light?

It requires in the first place prompt confession of sin. The sin that lies upon the conscience unconfessed darkens the whole moral being. But to confess is not the first impulse when we have sinned. Pride, fear, shame, and other powerful feelings keep us back.

This confession is not bare just words:

Further, to walk in the light means that we confess our sins without reserve. Sometimes we do not really confess when we think we are doing so: we rather admit our sins than confess them, and we seek in all possible ways to explain, to extenuate and to excuse them. We may confess them in words, but in the secret of our hearts we do not take blame; we do not admit full responsibility for them.

Confession is to place the blame upon ourselves, period. There must be no lessening of the guilt – indeed there is no need for such, because Christ’s death was sufficient for all sin.

Moreover, confession means to not mere admit but also renounce:

Finally, to walk in the light means that when we confess our sins to God we do not keep a secret hold of them in our hearts. Many a man confesses the sin he has done, and knows that he is going to do it again. It is not only in his nature to do it; it is in his inmost desire. He has been found out, exposed, humiliated, punished; yet he is saying to himself, “When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.” It need not be said that there is no hope here: this is the man who is shut up at last in the iron cage of despair.

This mention of a man in an iron cage comes from Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian has come to the Interpreter’s House

So he took him by the hand again, and led him into a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage.
Now the man, to look on, seemed very sad; he sat with his eyes looking down to the ground, his hands folded together, and he sighed as if he would break his heart. Then said Christian, What means this? At which the Interpreter bid him talk with the man.
Then said Christian to the man, What art thou? The man answered, I am what I was not once.
CHR. What wast thou once?
MAN. The man said, I was once a fair and flourishing professor, Luke 8:13, both in mine own eyes, and also in the eyes of others: I once was, as I thought, fair for the celestial city, and had then even joy at the thoughts that I should get thither.
CHR. Well, but what art thou now?
MAN. I am now a man of despair, and am shut up in it, as in this iron cage. I cannot get out; Oh now I cannot!
CHR. But how camest thou into this condition?
MAN. I left off to watch and be sober: I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts; I sinned against the light of the word, and the goodness of God; I have grieved the Spirit, and he is gone; I tempted the devil, and he is come to me; I have provoked God to anger, and he has left me: I have so hardened my heart, that I cannot repent.
Then said Christian to the Interpreter, But is there no hope for such a man as this? Ask him, said the Interpreter.
CHR. Then said Christian, Is there no hope, but you must be kept in the iron cage of despair?
MAN. No, none at all.
CHR. Why, the Son of the Blessed is very pitiful.
MAN. I have crucified him to myself afresh, Heb. 6:6; I have despised his person, Luke 19:14; I have despised his righteousness; I have counted his blood an unholy thing; I have done despite to the spirit of grace, Heb. 10:29: therefore I have shut myself out of all the promises and there now remains to me nothing but threatenings, dreadful threatenings, faithful threatenings of certain judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour me as an adversary.
CHR. For what did you bring yourself into this condition?
MAN. For the lusts, pleasures, and profits of this world; in the enjoyment of which I did then promise myself much delight: but now every one of those things also bite me, and gnaw me like a burning worm.
CHR. But canst thou not now repent and turn?
MAN. God hath denied me repentance. His word gives me no encouragement to believe; yea, himself hath shut me up in this iron cage: nor can all the men in the world let me out. Oh eternity! eternity! how shall I grapple with the misery that I must meet with in eternity?
INTER. Then said the Interpreter to Christian, Let this man’s misery be remembered by thee, and be an everlasting caution to thee.

To confess, but not confess because we cling onto a sin is to not confess at all but rather to set ourselves up in an iron cage.

And now to the second point of the sermon:

2. (a) We have fellowship one with another.—The fellowship of Christians with each other has its basis in their common fellowship with the Father and the Son, but it is a separate and priceless good. The joy of the Christian religion is largely bound up with it, and without joy there can be little effectiveness, because little attraction or charm.

Denney then speaks of the poverty of Christian fellowship as follows:

It can hardly be doubted that the want of fellowship, in this primary Christian sense, is at this moment one of the greatest wants in the Church’s life—the one which is most to be deplored, which more almost than any other makes the Church helpless and exposes it to contempt. Is it not pitiable to see the substitutes that are found for it, and the importance which is assigned to them, only because the real thing is not there? We speak of having “a social meeting” of the Church, as if a meeting could not be social unless its Christian character were disguised or put into the background.

And this brings us to a question:

Why is it that the powerful and fundamental fellowship constituted simply by membership in the Church has fallen into the background?

Why is that so, because we have not met the first element of the passage:

According to the Apostle, it is because we do not walk in the light as God is in the light. We sit here side by side, but how far are we really present to each other? How many of us are there who have things to hide? How many who have done what no one knows, and what they have not told unreservedly even to God?

But this fact of true fellowship is not the only element of such walking in the light:

The restoration of Christian fellowship is not the only blessing which comes with walking in the light: there is also continuous and progressive sanctification. The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin. This is not spoken of simply as God’s will, as that which He intends shall take place; it is spoken of as actually going on.

Indeed, “it is the will of God to cleanse us altogether from [sin] and He has the provided a power which is able to do so.”

This is all premised upon Christ’s atonement. It is atonement which both cleanses us from sin and which brings about fellowship – indeed it is the atonement which makes it possible to walk in the light.

Denney ends with the observation that this fellowship, cleansing and walking in the light are all of a piece:

There is power in the blood of Jesus to cleanse us from all sin, and there is no power to cleanse us anywhere else, but it needs the condition of openness and sincerity. We cannot be cleansed from the sin we do not confess. We cannot be cleansed from the sin we excuse. We cannot be cleansed from the sin to which we are secretly resolved to cling. And if not from these, then not from any. The Gospel is simple and whole; there is no such thing as negotiation, transaction, or compromise possible in the relations of God and man. Everything is absolute. We may take the Gospel or leave it, but we cannot bargain about it. We may be cleansed from all sin, or from none, but not from some on condition of retaining others. Walk in the light, and all this will be self-evident. Renounce with all your heart everything secret and insincere. Let there be nothing hidden in your life, no unavowed ends, no prevarications, no reserves. Simple truth is the one element in which we can be united to each other, and in which the redeeming love of God can work for our sanctification. Insincerity, the dark atmosphere in which so many souls live, is in its turn one of the forms of sin from which the blood of Christ cleanses; and as we confess it, and disown it, and bring it to the cleansing blood, it also loses its power. We can learn even to be sincere under the power of the death of Jesus—to hide nothing from God, to practise no delusions on ourselves, to refrain from imposing on others. This is the way in which all the wealth of the Gospel becomes ours; when we walk in it we realize that the Apostles wrote for us, and that the greatest and most wonderful things they say of Christ and His blood are the simple truth.

James Denney: Wrong Roads to the Kingdom.3

09 Sunday Dec 2018

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The last post on this sermon may be found here

The last of our Lord’s temptations is the one which has been most variously interpreted, which is another way of saying the one which has been least certainly understood. The tempter takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and says, “All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me”.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 198. This is a peculiar temptation: what could possibly work in this? Jesus had the right of rule over the world — he is now sitting as King of kings and Lord of lords:

The possibility of the temptation lies in the two facts that the sovereignty over the world belonged of right to Jesus, as the Son and representative of God, and that an immense and actual power in the world was unmistakably wielded by evil. Could Jesus make any use of that power? Could He, in order to obtain a footing in a world where evil was so strongly entrenched, give any kind of recognition to evil? Could He compromise with it, acknowledging that it had at least a relative or temporary right to exist, and making use of it till He could attain a position in which He would be able to dispense with its aid? This is the real question in the third temptation.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 199–200. Would Jesus be willing to make an “alliance of evil in establishing his kingdom?” (p. 200).

And so this temptation continues to exist for the church:

It hardly needs to be said that this temptation also remains with the Church. Evil is still a great power in the world, and as long as it is so the question will continue to arise whether it is not a power of which we can make some use for the kingdom of God. It is all the more sure to arise because evil is strong enough to cause great trouble and suffering to those who refuse to transact with it.

 James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 200.  There are a myriad of ways in which evil proposes a transaction.  Perhaps someone who is powerful and wealthy seeks influence in the church? Denney gives this example — and I have spoken with many pastors who have been offered financial security in exchange for a compromise in doctrine or winking at sin.

But there are other ways in which a pastor may be compromised — seeking political connections and power (and indeed, the state may be jealous when the church does not support the state; just today, I read of a nationally prominent politician who complained of voters listening to “the pulpit” rather than politicians on matters of morality and policy). There is the fact of being shunned, called names whether “ignorant” (God as creator, Jesus having risen from the dead) or hateful (Biblical sexual morality).  The world will make demands from every direction, and will cause great trouble for those who refuse to pay the world protection money.

James Denney, Wrong Roads to the Kingdom.2

07 Friday Dec 2018

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The first post on this sermon may be found here

The Second Temptation entailed an appeal to the spectacular:

Then the devil taketh Him unto the Holy City, and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If Thou art the Son of God, cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee; And in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest haply Thou dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God

Denney explains the heart of the temptation as follows:

The second temptation is of quite a different kind. As Jesus looked out upon the society around Him, He saw that one of the simplest ways of winning ascendency over men was to appeal to their love of the marvellous. If He only dazzled their senses sufficiently they would throng to His feet, and He would be able to do anything with them He pleased….The idea is that miraculous works, dazzling, overwhelming, dumb-foundering, are the basis on which the kingdom of God can be built. Overpower the senses of men with wonders, and you will win their souls for God. This was for Jesus radically false, and it contained a temptation which He steadily resisted. He never worked a miracle of ostentation or display: His miracles had all their motive in love, and it was the love in them which bore witness to God.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 195. There is an obvious and direct appeal to the function of the Church:

This temptation also has its lesson for all who are interested to-day in the coming of God’s kingdom. There is always a tendency in the Church to trust to methods which appeal rather to the senses than to the soul, or which are believed to be reaching the soul though they never get past the sense. They may be cruder or more refined, sensational or connected with the symbolic side of worship, but the common character of all is that they fall short of being rational and spiritual.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 196. He continues:

How little there is in the Gospels about methods and apparatus! Jesus had no church nor hall; He spoke in the synagogues when He had the opportunity, but as willingly and prevailingly in the fields or by the the seashore, in a boat or a private house. He had no choir, no vestments, no sacraments, and we may well believe He would look with more than amazement upon the importance which many of His diciples now attach to such things. “He spake the word unto them,” that was all. The trust of the Church in other things is really a distrust of the truth, an unwillingness to believe that its power lies in itself, a desire to have something more irresistible than truth to plead truth’s cause; and all these are modes of atheism. Sometimes our yielding to this temptation is shown in the apathy which falls upon us when we cannot have the apparatus we crave, sometimes in the complacency in which we clothe ourselves when we get it and it draws a crowd. This is precisely the kind of crowd which Jesus refused to draw. The kingdom of God is not there, nor is it to be brought by such appeals. It is not only a mistake, but a sin, to trust to attractions for the ear and the eye, and to draw people to the church by the same methods by which they are drawn to places of entertainment. What the evangelist calls “the word”—the spiritual truth, the message of the Father and of His kingdom—spoken in the spirit and enforced by the spirit, told by faith and heard by faith—is our only real resource, and we must not be ashamed of its simplicity.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 197–198.

Denney would be horrified were he to see the nonsense and spectacle which is used to draw attention to church. We can see by means of Denney’s sermon that this spectacle is succumbing to the Devil’s temptation.

Here is a video discussion which well addresses this issue:

James Denney, Wrong Roads to the Kingdom.1

29 Thursday Nov 2018

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James Denney in his sermon “Wrong Ways to the Kingdom” considers the three temptations of Jesus and applies them to the functioning of the Church. While his sermon was published in 1911, the applications he makes concerning the Church have more pertinence today than when he published them.

The basis upon which he applies the temptations of Christ to the entire Church are based upon the nature of Christ’s work:

They are not the temptations of a private person, but of the person whose calling it was to establish the kingdom of God in the world; and they have the interest for all of throwing light on the true nature of that kingdom by exposing alike false though seductive conceptions of it, and false though alluring paths which might be supposed to lead to it. It is a wrong way to put this if we say that the temptations are not personal, but official; there is no proper sense in which the term official can be connected with Jesus. They are the temptations of the person whose calling it was to bring in the kingdom of God, and they recur to every one who is interested in the same age-long task. They are the temptations of all churches, of all Christian workers, of all who have ideals in their life at all. It is necessary to be on our guard against false ideals, and even more against false methods of pursuing true ones.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 190–191.

Denney’s text is Matthew 4 which means he ends his sermon with the temptation to give homage to Satan (as opposed to Luke who ends with the temple).

The first temptation is to turn stones into bread.

From this Denney notes that the relationship with God must supersede physical and practical matters: However important temporal realties must be, they are temporary and not ultimate:

Must we take our life into our own hands as though God were a word without meaning? Jesus endured this temptation and overcame. Even under the pangs of hunger he held fast not simply His integrity like Job, but His Sonship. His relation to God remained deeper, more vital, more certain than anything that could befall Him; no privation or pain whatsoever would make Him renounce God, or live in any other relation to Him than that of a trustful and obedient child. And is not this power to assert the superior reality of the inward and spiritual against all that is outwardly disconcerting the very pith of true religion? We need not pretend to understand the purpose of all privations, or say that we can justify the ways of God with man to the last detail: but if there is not in man a power to assert his sonship through privations and in spite of them, our Lord has lived in vain.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 192. This does not mean that Jesus was unconcerned with the temporal and physical concerns of life:

Once, moved with compassion, He did feed five thousand men in a desert place.

But here is the issue as it applies to the Church? What was the effect of taking care of a physical need?

But what was the result? It was that this first temptation recurred: they wanted to take Him by force and make Him their king. This was the kingdom they wanted, a kingdom built on bread. But it was not the kingdom Jesus had come to set up. He withdrew Himself from that multitude, and retired to pray with God alone. He sent out the Twelve to face the rising storm on the lake, and in laborious toil and imminent danger of death forget this spurious hope.

Jesus rejected the “kingdom of bread” as the basis for his kingdom:

And soon after, in the synagogue at Capernaum, He spoke the searching words that drove the bread-seeking disciples from Him and showed the true basis of the kingdom. “Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the signs, but because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto eternal life.” Jesus was the friend of the poor, who went about doing good, but He felt it to be a temptation of the devil to base His kingdom on bread, and to count upon an allegiance evoked by loaves and fishes.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 193.

Denney then turned the issue to the matter of the present day. First, the Church is always tempted to turn itself into a social agency, a kingdom of bread. In response to this temptation, the world turns it into an accusation: Why aren’t you (only) a kingdom of bread? Why aren’t you solving this social problem? To which Denney retorts, What would be left of such good work if the church removed itself?

We are seeing the results now as Christian organizations which do not adhere to contemporary moral positions (such as on sexuality) are forbidden to operate? How much foster and adoption work will be left when Christians who adhere to a biblical morality are forbidden to foster and adopt and run agencies which help with such things?

Denney ends with a discussion of what could be called “social justice”. At the time of his writing, there was no “social justice” concerns which would go beyond or would have been contrary to biblical concerns (for instance, concern for the poor is unquestionably a biblical issue). Denney provides some guidance for us here which we should consider:

There are times when these are very unpopular things to say, and when there is therefore a strong temptation not to say them, but they were all said by Jesus. What comes first is sonship to God, faith in the Father, the love, trust, and obedience of a child; to this, everything else is to be postponed, in the possession of this every trial is to be overcome. The Church dare not enlist under the banner of those who think that a programme of what are called social reforms—the kind of reforms which can be carried in Parliament—will bring in the kingdom of God. It cannot do this any more than Jesus could enlist under the banner of those who would have made Him a king by force. It may quite well be its duty to sympathize with such reforms and to promote them; but it is its specific function to make plain that in the kingdom of God a perpetual primacy belongs to the spiritual, and that it may be the trial of any child of God, in humble faith in the Father, to maintain his sonship through hunger, pain, and death.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 194–195.

If I Die, Shall I Live Again?

17 Saturday Nov 2018

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Sebastiano Ricci, The Resurrection 1714

Here is the question of death in a way that differs from Dylan Thomas’ hopeless view of the matter.

James Denney begins his sermon, Immortality, as follows:

WHO has not asked this question, in suspense, in hope, or in fear? We know that we must all die: we know that those who are dearest to us must die: can our eyes penetrate beyond the veil which death lets fall? Is there any answer in the nature or heart of humanity to the question of Job, “If a man die shall he live again?”

If we look at the history of nations and religions, we see that the whole tendency of man has been to answer the question in one way. “Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole,” says Dr. Tylor in his Primitive Culture, “we shall at least not be ill advised in taking as one of its general and principal elements the doctrine of the soul’s future life.” The idea of the extinction or annihilation of man in death is indeed not so much a natural as a philosophic or doctrinaire one; an untaught mind is incapable of it, and it only appears as a fruit of reflection or speculation. The natural inclination of man everywhere is to believe not in his extinction, but in his survival. The ideas attached to the word may be vague, but they are real, and they exercise a real influence upon the life.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 177.

As he looks upon the range of human beliefs on this matter he makes this observation:

What strikes one most in looking at this widespread, one may truly say this universal, faith in man’s survival of death, is its moral neutrality. All men survive, and they survive in practically the same condition, whether they are good or bad. The world into which they pass is conceived as a shadowy unsubstantial place, and the life of those who tenant it corresponds.

I have seen this to be true. I once spoke with people visiting the place a young man was murdered in a gang drive by (one rival gang against another). The friends of the slain man were quite certain that their comrade who died in connection with his criminality was alive in the same place as everyone else.

Having reviewed both beliefs of many cultures and having traced the issue through the Scripture, he comes to the Christian hope in full:

Christians believe in their own resurrection to eternal life, because they believe in the Resurrection of Christ. But faith does not depend upon—it does not originate in nor is it maintained by—the Resurrection of Christ, simply as a historical fact. The Resurrection of Jesus is not simply a fact outside of us, guaranteeing in some mysterious way our resurrection in some remote future. It is a present power in the believer. He can say with St. Paul—Christ liveth in me—the risen Christ—the Conqueror of Death—and a part, therefore, is ensured to me in His life and immortality. This is the great idea of the New Testament whenever the future life is in view.

Having shown the ground of our hope, he returns to Job’s question from his introduction, but this he rephrases it:

“If a man die,” asked Job, “shall he live again?” Let us put it directly, If I die, shall I live again? It is not worth while putting it as a speculative question: the speculators have not been unanimous nor hearty in their answer. Faith in immortality has in point of fact entered the world and affected human life along the line of faith in God and in Jesus Christ His Son. Only one life has ever won the victory over death: only one kind of life ever can win it—that kind which was in Him, which is in Him, which He shares with all whom faith makes one with Him. That is our hope, to be really members of Christ, living with a life which comes from God and has already vanquished death. God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Can death touch that life? Never. The confidence of Christ Himself ought to be ours. If we live by Him we have nothing to fear. “He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” “Verily, verily I say unto you, if a man keep My word, he shall never see death.” “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die.” Believest thou this?