Tag Archives: The Way Everlasting

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, The Superlative Way

26 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by in 1 Corinthians, James Denney, Uncategorized

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From his collected sermons, The Way Everlasting. The sermon concerns 1 Corinthians 13, on the call for Christians to love:

For what the theologian defines and the Apostle depicts is illustrated and embodied in our Lord Himself, and what we have to do is to look at Him. “Herein is love.” We do not know what love is till we see it in Jesus, and when we see it there we see Him identifying Himself with God’s interest in us. The revelation is not only made before our eyes, it is made with special reference to ourselves. In Christ’s presence we are not the spectators of love only, we are its objects. Christ exhibits towards men, He exhibits towards us, that wonderful goodness which Paul describes. When we think what our life has been, and what has been His attitude to us from first to last, do we not say, “Our Lord suffers long, and is kind; He is not easily provoked; He does not impute to us our evil. Where we are concerned, where God’s interest in us is concerned, He bears all things, He believes all things, He hopes all things, He endures all things.” These are the thoughts, or rather these are the experiences, out of which love is born in our hearts. We love, because He first loved us All the time it is His love which must inspire ours. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.”

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 163.

James Denney, Degrees of Reality in Revelation and Religion

26 Tuesday Jun 2018

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(From The Way Everlasting).

This sermon is based upon 1 John 5:6:

6 This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. (ESV)

This sermon concerns the reality of Christ’s coming:

The reality of God’s redeeming love. It is easy to puzzle the mind with questions about reality, especially where God is concerned. Every one has heard of the astronomer who swept the heavens with his telescope and found no trace of God. That is not very disconcerting. We do not ascribe to God the same kind of reality as we do to the stars, and are not disappointed if the astronomer does not detect him as he might a hitherto unnoticed planet. M. Renan somewhere speaks of God as “the category of the ideal”; that is, he ascribes to God that kind of reality which belongs to the high thoughts, aspirations, and hopes of the mind. Certainly we should not disparage the ideal or its power, and still less should we speak lightly of those who devote themselves to ideals and cherish faith in them. But to redeem and elevate such creatures as we are, more is needed; and what the Apostle is so emphatic about is that God has come to save us not with the reality of ideals, but with the reality of all that is most real in the life we live on earth, in the battle we fight in the flesh, in the death that we die He has come with the reality of blood. The Christian religion is robbed of what is most vital in it if the historical Christ and the historical passion cease to be the very heart of it.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 143–144.

He then considers some ways that the reality of Christ’s coming are made bloodless, distance, mere abstractions. First consider the ethical, philosophical arguments which try to reduce Christ and his work to an ethics and example. But,

I had rather preach with a crucifix in my hand and the feeblest power of moral reflection, than have the finest insight into ethical principles and no Son of God who came by blood. It is the pierced side, the thorn-crowned brow, the rent hands and feet, that make us Christians—these, and not our profoundest thoughts about the ethical constitution of the universe.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 145. He also considers those who try to dehistoricize Christ’s coming; but that likewise will not do.

But here comes the bite of the sermon: if Christ came in such a real way, in the way of blood and water, then this lays upon the Christian the call to a life answering that reality:

It follows from this that no deliberate seeking of a sheltered life is truly Christian. The Son of God came in blood. He faced the world as it was, the hour and the power of darkness; He laid down life itself in pursuance of His calling; and there must be something answering to this in a life which is genuinely Christian. Yet we cannot help seeing that in different ways this conclusion is practically evaded. It is evaded by those who aim at cultivating the Christian life solely in coteries, cliques, and conventions of like-minded people; by those whose spiritual concern is all directed inward, and whose ideal is rather the sanctification of the soul than the consecration of life to Christ. There are so few people who make holiness in any sense whatever the chief end of life that one shrinks from saying anything which might reflect on those who do pursue it, even in a mistaken sense; but who has not known promising characters fade away and become characterless, through making this mistake? Who does not know how easy it is to miss the Gospel type, the type of Jesus, and actually to present to the world, as though with his stamp upon it, a character insipid, ineffective, bloodless? Nothing has a right to bear His name that is not proved amid the actualities of life to have a passion in it like His own.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 148–149.

This then leads to a final question: I am willing to concede and even believe this fact of Christ coming so, but it still seems distant and abstract. Christ did come in blood and water, but my life and my experience does not seem truly touched by this fact. What of that? To which Denney answers:

The answer to such questions, I believe, is suggested by the next words of the Apostle: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth”. There is a point of mystery in all religion—not the point at which we know nothing, but the point at which we know everything and yet nothing happens—the point at which we are cast absolutely on God. But the mention of the Spirit reminds us that though the Christian experience depends absolutely upon God, it is not for that reason blankly mysterious. The Spirit is a witness; he takes the things of Christ and shows them to us, and under his showing they become present, real, and powerful. This is his work—to make the past present, the historical eternal, the inert vital.

When the Spirit comes, Christ is with us in all the reality of His life and Passion, and our hearts answer to His testimony. We read the Gospel, and we do not say, He spoke these words of grace and truth, but He speaks them. We do not say, He received sinners and ate with them; but, He receives sinners and spreads a table for them. We do not say, He prayed for His own; but, He ever liveth to make intercession for us. We do not even say, He came in blood; but, He is here, clothed in His crimson robe, in the power of His Passion, mighty to save. Have we not had this witness of the Spirit on days we can recall? Have we not had it in listening to the word of God this very day? We know what it is to grieve the Spirit; we know also what it is to open our hearts to Him.

Let us be ready always to open our hearts to His testimony to the Son of God—to Jesus Christ who came with the water and with the blood; and as the awful reality of the love of God in Christ is sealed upon them, let us make answer to it in a love which has all the reality of our own nature in it.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 150–151.

Loyalty to the Saints

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Ecclesiology, Faith, Faith, James Denney, Uncategorized

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This sermon (“Loyalty to the Saints”) by James Denney is based upon Psalm 78:15, ” If I had said, I will speak thus; Behold, I had dealt treacherously with the generation of thy children.”

This sermon concerns the “generation of God’s children”, the people of God and the individuals need of relationship to God’s children. Having established that God has a generation in every age, Denney explains the importance:

At this moment, there is such a thing in the world as the generation of God’s children, the spiritual successors of those to whom the Psalmist refers; they inherit the same hopes, and represent the same ideals and beliefs.

[1] It is a great matter to recognize this. For one thing, it is an important part of our moral security to have our place among God’s children.

[2 For another, it is a great test of the soundness of our judgment in spiritual things when we find ourselves in agreement with them.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 128.  Here is an important aspect of the stability in the Christian life: both as to how we live (“moral security”) and right thinking (“soundness of our judgment”).  Therefore, it is critical that we rightly understand the Church.

Denny singles out trust or faith in God as a distinguishing mark of the Church:

The one mark of the children of God which never varies is that they believe in Him. From generation to generation they perpetuate the sublime tradition of faith. In various modes, through all sorts of discouragement, they look unceasingly to Him, believing that He is, and that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him. (129)

While not a comprehensive theory of the “true Church”, Denney does focus on the distinguishing attribute of “faith”.  He does not attempt to distinguish true and false objects at faith. Rather he looks to three practical objections to faith. The rationale for such an examination is that faith must be challenged to be faith, “No doubt it belongs to the nature of faith that it should be tried; if there were not appearances against it, it would not be faith; it would be sight.” (129)

First, the political evil of the world may cause us to question God: “Faith in God implies faith in His government of the world.” (129) But when we look at the world — from the time of the psalmist until now — there is constantly more than enough to cause us to question God, “It is manifest that the Psalmist had had more than enough to try his faith in the Divine government. When he looked abroad upon the earth, it was as though God had abandoned it, or rather as though there were no God at all.” (129-130).

When we see the evil of this world, we wonder at the evil of the world and wonder why we should try. But in this skepticism, we should be checked, because the children of God have persevered through generations. To doubt would be to betray the perseverance of the Church:

What, it was suggested to him, does the indulgence of this sceptical temper mean? It means that I am betraying the cause for which the children of God have fought the good fight from generation to generation, that I am deserting the forlorn hope of the good to side with the enemies of God and man. God forbid! Be my soul with the saints, and shall my mind cherish thoughts, shall my lips speak words, that are disloyal to their faith, their hopes, their sacrifices? To choose your creed is to choose your company, and the feeling that such scepticism would range him in base opposition to the Israel of God is the first thing which rallies the Psalmist again to assert his faith. (131).

Rather than back down, the witness must become more certain (Thomas Watson, “The profaneness of the times should not slacken but heighten our zeal. The looser other are, the stricter we should be.”),

No: they are trumpet calls for witnesses for God; for soldiers, for martyrs, for men and women who will fight God’s battle against all odds, and though they die fighting die assured of victory at last. All the hope of the world lies in them, not in the cynical or sceptical who say, How doth God know?

The same principle applies to our private trials of faith, “by your own faith and patience set a new seal to its truth”. (132).

Second, we must not question God’s moral agency even when world proves to us that we should change our position: we must not be relativists. Our Faith in the authority of God’s law must remain unchanging.  While the first tests our patience and hope, this second tests our relationship to society, ”

While the first point shows itself in private defections, this second point has recently shown itself in claiming Christian Churches rejecting the law of God, particularly on matters of sexuality:

And how many novelists there are, exhibiting their criticism of life in all languages, who seem to have it as their one motive to show that there is nothing absolute in the seventh commandment. A man is to be true to his wife, naturally; but it is a poor kind of truth to sacrifice to his legal obligations to one woman the genuine love for another in which his true being would attain its full realization. (134)

What then should we do?

What should we say when we encounter ideas of this kind, in philosophy or in literature, in cruder or in subtler forms? Let them be met on their own ground, by all means; let bad philosophy be confuted by good; let the inadequacy of such theories to explain the actual moral contents of life be made clear; but before everything, let the soul purge itself from every shadow of complicity in them in the indignant words of the Psalm, “If I spoke thus, I should be false to the generation of God’s children.” I should desert those who have done more than all others to lift the life of man from the natural to the spiritual level.

It is also reject that which God has “set His seal” upon.

Finally, this faith is in the promises of God, particularly the promise of eternal life. (136)  Eternal life is at the crux of the Christian hope, “As the Scottish father whom I quoted at the beginning has said, ‘Eternity is wrapt up and implied in every truth of religion’.” (136).

How then do we respond to such necessary doubts? First, “that true as the disconcerting phenomena referred to may be, they are not the whole truth.” (138)

Second, why should I reject the the faith of the Church, why should “I separate myself from the generation of God’s children”? (139) He drives this argument further,

No one, I fancy, has ever argued more subtly against immortality than Hume: but what has Hume contributed to the spiritual life of the world that he should be counted an authority at all? Who would weigh his negative inferences, whatever the weight of logic behind them, against the insight and conviction of this Psalm, against the assurance of Jesus, against the struggling yet ever triumphant faith of the generation of God’s children? None who would be loyal to the best that man has been. (139)

Denny ends with an exhortation as to the life of the Church:

I will add one word of application to this interpretation of the text: Associate with God’s children, and let their convictions inspire yours; frequent the church, and let the immemorial faith of all saints beget itself in you anew. It is one great service of the Church that it perpetuates the tradition of faith—that sublime voices like those of this Psalm are for ever sounding in it, waking echoes and Amens in our hearts—that characters and convictions of the highest type are generated in it, not by logic but by loyalty, not by argument but by sympathy with the good—deep calling unto deep. We need the common faith to sustain our individual faith; we need the consciousness of the children of God in all ages to fortify our wavering belief in His government, His law and His promises. To be at home in the Church is to absorb this strength unconsciously. It is to be delivered from the shallows and miseries of a too narrow experience, and set afloat on the broad stream of Christian conviction which gathers impetus and volume with every generation the saints survive. (139-140).

 

 

 

 

 

 

More From James Denney on How to Profit From Slander

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, James Denney, Slander

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–What King so strong

Can tie the gall up in a slanderous tongue?

The Duke

Measure for Measure

Act III, scene 2, 190-191

“It is bitter to be charged falsely with vices which may be quite alien to our character, but it is rarely that even a false charge does not bring something to our remembrance to humble us in the presence of God. It is of no profit to us to be angered by slander, and to retort upon those who utter it; very likely the one may be as easy as the other. The real profit is when it brings us into contact with something in our life to which in our self-complacency we have been blind—something of which the slanderer knows nothing, but which we feel before God more deeply than any wound He could inflict—and when we give ourselves in God’s presence with penitence and humility to set it right with Him. There are such things, such memories, in the lives of all men; and perhaps in surveying the unjust and malignant things said about the Church or about Christians in general we have all been secretly reminded of some of them. It is good to be reminded. It is good to take them to heart. It is good to put resentment away, and with a contrite heart seek forgiveness and amendment from God. It is thus he brings good out of evil and requites blessing for the curse.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting, “Learning From The Enemy”.

How Slander Works

07 Sunday May 2017

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From one direction, slander should not land a blow: it is not true. But slander merely means our enemies do not know us well enough to disclose our real sins. 

James Denney explains one pang of slander, it hits us on our bruise:

“And David said … let him curse, for the Lord hath bidden him.” 2 Samuel 16:11.

It would be hard to imagine a provocation more exasperating than that which David met in this chastened spirit. As the old King of Israel, once the darling of his people, was making his escape from Jerusalem, a man who had some family connexion with Saul came out to gloat over his downfall. “Come out, come out,” he cried, “thou man of blood, thou man of Belial; the Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul in whose stead thou hast reigned.” Nothing could have been more malignant and unjust. If David had exterminated the house of Saul when he came to the throne, he would only have done what was common in those times upon a change of dynasty; but in point of fact he had shown for his friend Jonathan’s sake a rare and distinguished generosity to the descendants of his predecessor. He was slandered in the very point on which he might well have prided himself, and we cannot wonder that the combined insolence and falsehood of Shimei provoked the soldiers in his escort. Abishai would have made short work of the malignant Benjamite if only David had allowed him. But David had other thoughts in his heart, and it was the words of Shimei that had roused them. He was not a man of blood, in general terms, but there was blood on his conscience for all that. He was not a man of Belial, in general terms, a worthless vicious character, but there was a hideous tragedy in which he was the villain. It was not the tragedy of the house of Saul, but of the house of Uriah the Hittite. The words of Shimei brought vividly to his remembrance things which touched him more deeply than any human malice could conceive—so deeply that in presence of them resentment could not live. David knew worse about himself than Shimei’s bitter tongue could ever tell. And it is the same with us. The most malignant taunts of our enemies wound us, not by what they are, but by what they remind us of. And in bringing our real sins to remembrance, they not only silence resentment on our part, but call us to reflection, to patience, to humility, to penitence”

James Denney, The Way Everlasting, “Learning From The Enemy”

There is no real difference between the work of missions and the work of the Church at home

17 Monday Oct 2016

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We have all heard a good deal lately of the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh. By far the strongest impression it made on my mind was that there is no real difference between the work of missions and the work of the Church at home, and that what we need is not a greater interest in missions but a greater interest in the Gospel—that is, in the truth that Christ has come into the world, the revelation of the Father, and that no deep or satisfying happiness can enter human hearts but that which enters with Him. Of course there are differences of men, racial, historical, cultural, but in the long run they do not count. It is not to the Briton or the German the Gospel is preached in Europe, or to the Chinaman or the Hindu in Asia; it is to the soul yearning for God, or perhaps hardened against God; it is with the same inspiration, the same hidden allies, the same antagonists, the same soul travail, the same hope, everywhere.

And with this word “hope” I will conclude, returning from the compassionate to the congratulatory side of our Saviour’s word. It is only a joyful religion which has a right to be missionary: only one which is conscious of having found the supreme good will be eager to impart it. But surely if we are conscious of having found the supreme good, or rather of being found by Him, it should make us glad and confident.

Some one said to me not long ago that he was struck with the number of hopeless ministers. There were so many men who had everything against them, who had an uphill fight, who despaired of making any more of it; they were pithless, apathetic, resigned; they entered beaten into the battle, or did not enter into it at all. I will say nothing unsympathetic of men whom it is not for their brethren to judge, but I will say this to every one who has accepted this vocation—that when we preach the Gospel it must be in the spirit of the Gospel. It must be with the sympathy of Jesus for all who are yearning after God, and with the certainty of Jesus that in Him there is the revelation of God which will bring happiness to all yearning souls. So preached, it cannot be in vain.

In Bengal and in Scotland, in our own race, and in the races most remote from our own, there are souls desiring to see the things that we see, and destined to be blessed with the vision. The evangelist’s is no calling for a joyless and dispirited man. “Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of Thy countenance.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 59–61.

If the sermon in church is what it ought to be

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in James Denney, Preaching

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There are plenty of people, of course, outside the Church who have a sincere contempt for sermons. There are plenty of people inside who would like, as they put it, to enlarge the field of interest, and to hear the minister of the Church on all sorts of literary, economical, or political questions. There are even people who disparage preaching on the plea of devotion: we do not go to church to hear sermons, they say, but to worship God. The mouths of all these people would be shut in a church waiting assiduously on the teaching of the Apostles, always eager to hear more about Jesus. Preaching is much more likely to fail, even in interest, from want of concentration than from want of range. There are plenty of people to talk politics and literature, and not too many to bear witness to Jesus who will yet extend His sceptre over every field.

If the sermon in church is what it ought to be—if it is not an exhibition of the preacher but of Jesus—there should be nothing in it even conceivably in contrast with worship, but the very reverse. What can be more truly described as worship than hearing the word of God as it ought to be heard, hearing it with penitence, with contrition, with faith, with self-consecration, with vows of new obedience? If this is not worship in spirit and in truth, what is? We may sorrowfully confess that in all our churches there is too little worship, that adoration is rare, that while singing is enjoyed the sacrifice of praise is hardly conceived, and the ardour and concentration of prayer strangely unfamiliar, but we will not mend these deficiencies by thrusting into the background the testimony to Jesus. Such a testimony is the only inspiration to worship in the Christian sense of the term, and it is the primary mark of the true Church that it gathers round this testimony and is unreservedly loyal to it.

 

“The Ideal Church” in James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 104–105.

 

 

Elemental Religion.3 James Denney (Known by God)

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Apologetics, James Denney, Preaching

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I suppose most of us have wrestled with arguments intended to prove the existence or personality of God. Well, I am not going to raise any philosophical questions about the powers are in capacities of human reasoning in this matter. No religion ever took its origin in such reasoning, however it may have succeeded or been baffled and trying to justify itself at reason’s bar. The being and the personality of God, so far as there is any religious interest in them, are not to be proved by arguments; they are to be experienced in a kind of experienced here described. The man who can say, O  Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me, does not need any arguments to prove that God is, and that he is a person, and that he has an intimate and importunate interest in his life. If that is a real experience — and who will deny that it is? — And if it is not a morbid phenomenon, but one which is sane and normal, then the thou  in it is just as real as the me. The psalmist is as certain of God as he is of his own existence; and indeed it is not too much to say that it is only as he is conscious of being searched and known by God — only as he is overwhelmed by contact with the spirit which knows him better than he knows himself — that he rises to any adequate sense of what his own being and personality mean. He is revealed to himself by God’s search; he knows himself through God. Speaking practically — and in religion everything is practical — God alone can overcome atheism, and this is how he overcomes it. He does not put arguments within our reach which point to theistic conclusion; he gives us the experience which makes this song intelligible, and forces us to cry, oh Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. “After that he have known God,” says St. Paul to the Galatians, “or rather” — correcting himself — “have been known by God.” Yes, it is the overpowering sense that we are known through and through by another which seals upon our hearts that knowledge of God on which religion rests.

Here is the cure for atheism: it is the answer to the question of whether one should use presuppositional or evidential apologetics. There are evidences and arguments in favor of Chrsitianity. Arguments from reason, from experience, from history exist and are good and valid. But in the end, one does not believe in the existence of their wife or husband, child or friend, on the basis of argument, but on the basis of knowing. This is the reason why the atheist will not be converted by argument: an argument of the existence of a person whom one has never met cannot convince. But one who has known God – or better, has been known by God – doubts not God

Elemental Religion.2 James Denney (“The experience that God knows me”)

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1 Corinthians, Hebrews, James Denney, Preaching, Psalms

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We are apt to speak in this connexion of omniscience, but there is nothing about omniscience in the Psalm.  Omniscience is an abstract noun, and abstract nouns are unequal to the intense feeling of the passage. The important thing in religion is not the belief that God is omniscience, but the experience that God knows me, and it is on this the Psalmist dwells. It is almost implied in the connexion of his words that in the heart of the writer there was a kind of passive resistance to this experience, a resistance which God’s overcame, piercing and discovering all his inner life. We are slow to know ourselves, and sometimes do not wish to; purposes form in the background of our minds, of which we are hardly conscious; latent motives actuate us; perhaps own words or deeds, in which they suddenly issue, startle us; we are amazed that we should have said or done such a thing. But it is no surprise to Him. “Oh thou understandest my thought of far off.”  Such knowledge of man by God is quite different from omniscience. Omniscience is a divine attribute, but what here is experienced is a divine action — it is God through His searching knowledge of us entering with power into our lives. It is God the besetting us behind and before, and laying His hand upon us. The Psalmist does not dwell particularly on the divine motive, so to speak, and the searching of man. It might be felt as the shadowing of the soul by an enemy, or is the over-shadowing presence of a friend. The one thing on which he does dwell is its reality and its completeness. It is too wonderful for him; it baffles him when he tries to understand it; but incomprehensible as it is, it is real. He only knows himself as he is conscious of being searched and known by God.

Preaching: Denney first works out his argument by overturning the assumption of the words: This is not about omniscience (although God is omniscient, and God’s omniscience stands behind God’s conduct here), but rather it is about the personal knowledge of God.

He explains the error of misusing this text by means of doing what should be done with the text. He shows how the wrong reading misses the intensely personal knowledge which the text conveys.

He describes the Psalmist’s experience so that it is well understood.

He ends the paragraph with a statement that the proposition ultimately baffles and with the proposition, “He only knows himself as he is conscious of being searched and known by God.”

Good preaching should open up one’s ways of thinking and transform one’s categories of understanding. There is a great deal of argument that we must make the Bible relevant to people in their current circumstance. While it is necessary to understand one’s culture, the important thing is that Christian thinking is conformed to biblical categories and methods – not that Christians have the Bible translated and defanged; domesticated to the culture.

This last sentence explodes our normal manner of thought: How does God prove himself to me? Here, Denney explains, it is only as God knows me that I can even know myself. God is the ground, the subject – I am the observed, the object.

Doctrine: Here is a strange thing: Another person, wise, eternal, knows me inside and out: There is God at hand with my thoughts, knowing my inclination before I admit to myself what I know of myself. The Greek aphorism γνῶθι σεαυτόν Know Thyself hangs dependent upon God’s knowledge: “He only knows himself as he is conscious of being searched and known by God.”

Such knowledge, whether we seek to avoid it or long for it, stands at the heart of human and Divine life: Adam sinned and sought to hide himself from God. God’s question, “Where are you?” Does not reflect ignorance by God, but rather the penetrating search of God – Adam cannot and does not hide.[1]

Am I what I think myself to be, or am I what God knows me to be? This is one element of the basic tension between God and humanity. We seek to define ourselves, but the believing heart knows that it is only God’s opinion which matters. Indeed, what is “confession” but saying the same thing of my sin as God?

Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Psalm 51:4 (ESV)

Now consider this as a true proposition: not as an abstract doctrine but as an actual knowledge/experience. He does not say that God speaks to him in any propositional manner. But rather that he knows that God knows him.

The propositional content will be in our reading of the Scripture: It is in the reading of this Psalm that I become aware of this knowledge. Hebrews 4 explains that it is in the operation of the Word of God that we are known by God:

11 Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. 12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Hebrews 4:11–13 (ESV)

Thus, my conscience, my joy and sorrow, my affections and thoughts as they are informed by the Word of God become my valuation of who I am – it is not my judgment of myself, but God’s judgment of me which matters:

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. 1 Corinthians 4:3 (ESV)

But there is something even more profound in this observation.

[1] In fact, God at times makes fun of human hubris on this point. In Genesis 11, the people seek to build a tower to heaven; a fortress so great that God cannot overcome it. But verse 5 reads, “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower”: the tower was so tiny, God could not see it from heaven!