Unspoken Sermons

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'But creation is not fatherhood.'

'Creation in the image of God, is. And if I am not in the image of God,
how can the word of God be of any meaning to me? "He called them gods
to whom the word of God came," says the Master himself. To be fit to
receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may
have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his
defaced image--an image yet that can hear his word. What makes me evil
and miserable is, that the thing spoiled in me is the image of the
Perfect. Nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good hypostasis. No,
no! nothing can make it that I am not the child of God. If one say,
"Look at the animals: God made them: you do not call them the children
of God!" I answer: "But I am to blame; they are not to blame! I cling
fast to my blame: it is the seal of my childhood." I have nothing to
argue from in the animals, for I do not understand them. Two things
only I am sure of: that God is to them "a faithful creator;" and that
the sooner I put in force my claim to be a child of God, the better for
them; for they too are fallen, though without blame.'

'But you are evil: how can you be a child of the Good?'

'Just as many an evil son is the child of a good parent.'

'But in him you call a good parent, there yet lay evil, and that
accounts for the child being evil.'

'I cannot explain. God let me be born through evil channels. But in
whatever manner I may have become an unworthy child, I cannot thereby
have ceased to be a child of God--his child in the way that a child
must ever be the child of the man of whom he comes. Is it not proof--
this complaint of my heart at the word _Adoption_? Is it not the spirit
of the child, crying out, "Abba, Father"?'

'Yes; but that is the spirit of adoption; the text says so.'

'Away with your adoption! I could not even be adopted if I were not
such as the adoption could reach--that is, of the nature of God. Much
as he may love him, can a man adopt a dog? I must be of a nature for
the word of God to come to--yea, so far, of the divine nature, of the
image of God! Heartily do I grant that, had I been left to myself, had
God dropped me, held no communication with me, I could never have thus
cried, never have cared when they told me I was not a child of God. But
he has never repudiated me, and does not now desire to adopt me. Pray,
why should it grieve me to be told I am not a child of God, if I be not
a child of God? If you say--Because you have learned to love him, I
answer--Adoption would satisfy the love of one who was not but would be
a child; for me, I cannot do without a father, nor can any adoption
give me one.'

'But what is the good of all you say, if the child is such that the
father cannot take him to his heart?'

'Ah, indeed, I grant you, nothing!--so long as the child does not
desire to be taken to the father's heart; but the moment he does, then
it is everything to the child's heart that he should be indeed the
child of him after whom his soul is thirsting. However bad I may be, I
am the child of God, and therein lies my blame. Ah, I would not lose my
blame! in my blame lies my hope. It is the pledge of what I am, and
what I am not; the pledge of what I am meant to be, what I shall one
day be, the child of God in spirit and in truth.'

'Then you dare to say the apostle is wrong in what he so plainly
teaches?'

'By no means; what I do say is, that our English presentation of his
teaching is in this point very misleading. It is not for me to judge
the learned and good men who have revised the translation of the New
Testament--with so much gain to every one whose love of truth is
greater than his loving prejudice for accustomed form;--I can only say,
I wonder what may have been their reasons for retaining this word
_adoption_. In the New Testament the word is used only by the apostle
Paul. Liddell and Scott give the meaning--"Adoption as a son," which is
a mere submission to popular theology: they give no reference except to
the New Testament. The relation of the word [Greek: _niothesia_] to the
form [Greek: _thetos_], which means "taken," or rather, "_placed_ as
one's child," is, I presume, the sole ground for the so translating of
it: usage plentiful and invariable could not justify that translation
here, in the face of what St. Paul elsewhere shows he means by the
word. The Greek word _might_ be variously meant--though I can find no
use of it earlier than St. Paul; the English can mean but one thing,
and that is not what St. Paul means. "The spirit of adoption" Luther
translates "the spirit of a child;" _adoption_ he translates
_kindschaft_, or _childship_'

Of two things I am sure--first, that by _niothesia_ St. Paul did not
intend _adoption_; and second, that if the Revisers had gone through
what I have gone through because of the word, if they had felt it come
between God and their hearts as I have felt it, they could not have
allowed it to remain in their version.

Once more I say, the word used by St Paul does not imply that God
adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he
fathers his own; that a second time they are born--this time from
above; that he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father:
he will have them back into the very bosom whence they issued, issued
that they might learn they could live nowhere else; he will have them
one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died
for them.

Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of the word. It is
in another of his epistles--that to the Galatians: iv. I-7.

'But I say that so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing
from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians
and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when
we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the
world: but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son,
born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which
were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And
because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant,
but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.'

How could the Revisers choose this last reading, 'an heir through God,'
and keep the word _adoption_? From the passage it is as plain as St.
Paul could make it, that, by the word translated _adoption_, he means
the raising of a father's own child from the condition of tutelage and
subjection to others, a state which, he says, is no better than that of
a slave, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could
become a son; the idea is--a spiritual coming of age; _only when the
child is a man is he really and fully a son_. The thing holds in the
earthly relation. How many children of good parents--good children in
the main too--never know those parents, never feel towards them as
children might, until, grown up, they have left the house--until,
perhaps, they are parents themselves, or are parted from them by death!
To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. The childship
is the lower condition of the upward process towards the sonship, the
soil out of which the true sonship shall grow, the former without which
the latter were impossible. God can no more than an earthly parent be
content to have only children: he must have sons and daughters--
children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love--not merely in the
sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the sense
that they love like him, love as he loves. For this he does not adopt
them; he dies to give them himself, thereby to raise his own to his
heart; he gives them a birth from above; they are born again out of
himself and into himself--for he is the one and the all. His children
are not his real, true sons and daughters until they think like him,
feel with him, judge as he judges, are at home with him, and without
fear before him because he and they mean the same thing, love the same
things, seek the same ends. For this are we created; it is the one end
of our being, and includes all other ends whatever. It can come only of
unbelief and not faith, to make men believe that God has cast them off,
repudiated them, said they are not, yea never were, his children--and
he all the time spending himself to make us the children he designed,
foreordained--children who would take him for their Father! He is our
father all the time, for he is true; but until we respond with the
truth of children, he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no
place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. He is our father, but
we are not his children. Because we are his children, we must become
his sons and daughters. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but
that we be one with our father! What else could serve! How else should
life ever be a good! Because we are the sons of God, we must become the
sons of God.

There may be among my readers--alas for such!--to whom the word
_Father_ brings no cheer, no dawn, in whose heart it rouses no tremble
of even a vanished emotion. It is hardly likely to be their fault. For
though as children we seldom love up to the mark of reason; though we
often offend; and although the conduct of some children is inexplicable
to the parent who loves them; yet, if the parent has been but
ordinarily kind, even the son who has grown up a worthless man, will
now and then feel, in his better moments, some dim reflex of childship,
some faintly pleasant, some slightly sorrowful remembrance of the
father around whose neck his arms had sometimes clung. In my own
childhood and boyhood my father was the refuge from all the ills of
life, even sharp pain itself. Therefore I say to son or daughter who
has no pleasure in the name _Father_, 'You must interpret the word by
all that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to
you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land, that was a time when a father might have
been a father indeed. Happy you are yet, if you have found man or woman
such a refuge; so far have you known a shadow of the perfect, seen the
back of the only man, the perfect Son of the perfect Father. All that
human tenderness can give or desire in the nearness and readiness of
love, all and infinitely more must be true of the perfect Father--of
the maker of fatherhood, the Father of all the fathers of the earth,
specially the Father of those who have specially shown a father-heart.'

This Father would make to himself sons and daughters indeed--that is,
such sons and daughters as shall be his sons and daughters not merely
by having come from his heart, but by having returned thither--children
in virtue of being such as whence they came, such as choose to be what
he is. He will have them share in his being and nature--strong wherein
he cares for strength; tender and gracious as he is tender and
gracious; angry where and as he is angry. Even in the small matter of
power, he will have them able to do whatever his Son Jesus could on the
earth, whose was the life of the perfect man, whose works were those of
perfected humanity. Everything must at length be subject to man, as it
was to The Man. When God can do what he will with a man, the man may do
what he will with the world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord; the
deadliest thing will not he able to hurt him:--'He that believeth on
me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater than these shall
he do.'

God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were, an handbreath off, to give
Boom for the newly-made to live.

He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made _through_ the
Word, but that which was made _in_ the Word was life, and that life is
the light of men: they who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus
lived--by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own
making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way,
alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through him has
been born in them--by obedience they become one with the godhead: 'As
many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.'
He does not _make_ them the sons of God, but he gives them power to
become the sons of God: in choosing and obeying the truth, man becomes
the true son of the Father of lights.

It is enough to read with understanding the passage I have quoted from
his epistle to the Galatians, to see that the word _adoption_ does not
in the least fit St. Paul's idea, or suit the things he says. While we
but obey the law God has laid upon us, without knowing the heart of the
Father whence comes the law, we are but slaves--not necessarily ignoble
slaves, yet slaves; but when we come to think _with_ him, when the mind
of the son is as the mind of the Father, the action of the son the same
as that of the Father, then is the son _of_ the Father, then are we the
sons of God. And in both passages--this, and that which, from his
epistle to the Romans, I have placed at the head of this sermon--we
find the same phrase, _Abba, Father_, showing, if proof were needful,
that he uses the word [Greek: uiothesia] the same sense in both:
nothing can well be plainer, that needs consideration at all, than what
that sense is. Let us glance at the other passages in which he uses the
same word: as he alone of the writers of the New Testament does use it,
so, for aught I know, he may have made it for himsef. One of them is in
the same eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans; this I will keep
to the last. Another is in the following chapter, the fourth verse; in
it he speaks of the [Greek: viothesia], literally the _son-placing_
(that is, the placing of sons in the true place of sons), as belonging
to the Jews. On this I have but to remark that 'whose is the [Greek:
viothesia]' cannot mean either that they had already received it, or
that it belonged to the Jews more than to the Gentiles; it can only
mean that, as the elder-brother-nation, they had a foremost claim to
it, and would naturally first receive it; that, in their best men, they
had always been nearest to it. It must be wrought out first in such as
had received the preparation necessary; those were the Jews; of the
Jews was the Son, bringing the [Greek: viothesia], the sonship, to all.
Therefore theirs was the [Greek: viothesia], just as theirs was the
gospel. It was to the Jew first, then to the Gentile--though many a
Gentile would have it before many a Jew. Those and only those who out
of a true heart cry '_Abba, Father_,' be they of what paltry little
so-called church, other than the body of Christ, they may, or of no
otherat all, are the sons and daughters of God.

St. Paul uses the word also in his epistle to the Ephesians, the first
chapter, the fifth verse. 'Having predestinated us unto the adoption of
children by Jesus Christ to himself,' says the authorized version;
'Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto
himself,' says the revised--and I see little to choose between them:
neither gives the meaning of St. Paul. If there is anything gained by
the addition of the words 'of children' in the one case, and 'as sons'
in the other, to translate the word for which 'adoption' alone is made
to serve in the other passages, the advantage is only to the minus-
side, to that of the wrong interpretation.

Children we were; true sons we could never be, save through The Son. He
brothers us. He takes us to the knees of the Father, beholding whose
face we grow sons indeed. Never could we have known the heart of the
Father, never felt it possible to love him as sons, but for him who
cast himself into the gulf that yawned between us. In and through him
we were foreordained to the sonship: sonship, even had we never sinned,
never could we reach without him. We should have been little children
loving the Father indeed, but children far from the sonhood that
understands and adores. 'For as many as are led by the spirit of God,
these are sons of God;' 'If any man hath not the spirit of Christ, he
is none of his;' yea, if we have not each other's spirits, we do not
belong to each other. There is no unity but having the same spirit.
There is but one spirit, that of truth.

It remains to note yet another passage.

That never in anything he wrote was it St. Paul's intention to
contribute towards a system of theology, it were easy to show: one sign
of the fact is, that he does not hesitate to use this word he has
perhaps himself made, in different, and apparently opposing, though by
no means contradictory senses: his meanings always vivify each other.
His ideas are so large that they tax his utterance and make him strain
the use of words, but there is no danger to the honest heart, which
alone he regards, of misunderstanding them, though 'the ignorant and
unsteadfast wrest them' yet. At one time he speaks of the sonship as
being the possession of the Israelite, at another as his who has
learned to cry _Abba, Father_; and here, in the passage I have now last
to consider, that from the 18th to the 25th verse of this same eighth
chapter of his epistle to the Romans, he speaks of the _niothesia_ as
yet to come--and as if it had to do, not with our spiritual, but our
bodily condition. This use of the word, however, though not the same
use as we find anywhere else, is nevertheless entirely consistent with
his other uses of it.

The 23rd verse says, 'And not only so, but ourselves also, which have
the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within
ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body.'

It is nowise difficult to discern that the ideas in this and the main
use are necessarily associated and more than consistent. The putting of
a son in his true, his foreordained place, has outward relations as
well as inward reality; the outward depends on the inward, arises from
it, and reveals it. When the child whose condition under tutors had
passed away, took his position as a son, he would naturally change his
dress and modes of life: when God's children cease to be slaves doing
right from law and duty, and become his sons doing right from the
essential love of God and their neighbour, they too must change the
garments of their slavery for the robes of liberty, lay aside the body
of this death, and appear in bodies like that of Christ, with whom they
inherit of the Father. But many children who have learned to cry _Abba,
Father_, are yet far from the liberty of the sons of God. Sons they are
and no longer children, yet they groan as being still in bondage!--
Plainly the apostle has no thought of working out an idea; with burning
heart he is writing a letter: he gives, nevertheless, lines plentifully
sufficient for us to work out his idea, and this is how it takes clear
shape:--

We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be
sons--the moment we begin to cry _Father_. But as the world must be
redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few
of its thoughts and wants and ways, to begin with: it takes a long time
to finish the new creation of this redemption. Shall it have taken
millions of years to bring the world up to the point where a few of its
inhabitants shall desire God, and shall the creature of this new birth
be perfected in a day? The divine process may indeed now go on with
tenfold rapidity, for the new factor of man's fellow-working, for the
sake of which the whole previous array of means and forces existed, is
now developed; but its end is yet far below the horizon of man's
vision:--

The apostle speaks at one time of the thing as to come, at another time
as done--when it is but commenced: our ways of thought are such. A
man's heart may leap for joy the moment when, amidst the sea-waves, a
strong hand has laid hold of the hair of his head; he may cry aloud, 'I
am saved;'--and he may be safe, but he is not saved; this is far from a
salvation to suffice. So are we sons when we begin to cry Father, but
we are far from perfected sons. So long as there is in us the least
taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not
received the sonship; we have not such life in us as raised the body of
Jesus; we have not attained to the resurrection of the dead--by which
word, in his epistle to the Philippians (iii. 2), St. Paul means, I
think, the same thing as here he means by the sonship which he puts in
apposition with the redemption of the body:--

Until our outward condition is that of sons royal, sons divine; so long
as the garments of our souls, these mortal bodies, are mean--torn and
dragged and stained; so long as we groan under sickness and weakness
and weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things; so long we
have not yet received the sonship in full--we are but getting ready one
day to creep from our chrysalids, and spread the great heaven-storming
wings of the psyches of God. We groan being burdened; we groan, waiting
for the sonship--to wit, the redemption of the body--the uplifting of
the body to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling spirit--
nay, like that of Christ, a fit temple and revelation of the deeper
indwelling God. For we shall always need bodies to manifest and reveal
us to each other--bodies, then, that fit the soul with absolute truth
of presentment and revelation. Hence the revealing of the sons of God,
spoken of in the 19th verse, is the same thing as the redemption of the
body; the body is redeemed when it is made fit for the sons of God;
then it is a revelation of them--the thing it was meant for, and
always, more or less imperfectly, was. Such it shall be, when truth is
strong enough in the sons of God to make it such--for it is the soul
that makes the body. When we are the sons of God in heart and soul,
then shall we be the sons of God in body too: 'we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.'

I care little to speculate on the kind of this body; two things only I
will say, as needful to be believed, concerning it: first, that it will
be a body to show the same self as before--but, second, a body to show
the being truly--without the defects, that is, and imperfections of the
former bodily revelation. Even through their corporeal presence shall
we then know our own infinitely better, and find in them endlessly more
delight, than before. These things we must believe, or distrust the
Father of our spirits. Till this redemption of the body arrives, the
[Greek: uiothesia] is not wrought out, is only upon the way. Nor can it
come but by our working out the salvation he is working in us.

This redemption of the body--its deliverance from all that is amiss,
awry, unfinished, weak, worn out, all that prevents the revelation of
the sons of God, is called by the apostle, not certainly the
_adoption_, but the [Greek: niothesia], the sonship in full
manifestation. It is the slave yet left in the sons and daughters of
God that has betrayed them into even permitting the word _adoption_ to
mislead them!

To see how the whole utterance hangs together, read from the 18th verse
to the 25th, especially noticing the 19th: 'For the earnest expectation
of the creation waiteth for the revealing' (_the outshining_) 'of the
sons of God.' When the sons of God show as they are, taking, with the
character, the appearance and the place that belong to their sonship;
when the sons of God sit with _the_ Son of God on the throne of their
Father; then shall they be in potency of fact the lords of the lower
creation, the bestowers of liberty and peace upon it; then shall the
creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in
their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to
serve them, will joy to come to them for help. Let the heartless scoff,
the unjust despise! the heart that cries _Abba, Father_, cries to the
God of the sparrow and the oxen; nor can hope go too far in hoping what
that God will do for the creation that now groaneth and travaileth in
pain because our higher birth is delayed. Shall not the judge of all
the earth do right? Shall my heart be more compassionate than his?

If to any reader my interpretation be unsatisfactory, I pray him not to
spend his strength in disputing my faith, but in making sure his own
progress on the way to freedom and sonship. Only to the child of God is
true judgment possible. Were it otherwise, what would it avail to prove
this one or that right or wrong? Right opinion on questions the most
momentous will deliver no man. Cure for any ill in me or about me there
is none, but to become the son of God I was born to be. Until such I
am, until Christ is born in me, until I am revealed a son of God, pain
and trouble will endure--and God grant they may! Call this presumption,
and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of
God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing. If I
presume for myself, I presume for you also. But I do not presume. Thus
have both Jesus Christ and his love-slave Paul represented God--as a
Father perfect in love, grand in self-forgetfulness, supreme in
righteousness, devoted to the lives he has uttered. I will not believe
less of the Father than I can conceive of glory after the lines he has
given me, after the radiation of his glory in the face of his Son. He
is the express image of the Father, by which we, his imperfect images,
are to read and understand him: imperfect, we have yet perfection
enough to spell towards the perfect.

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