What is cultural Christianity?

The above title would, no doubt, offend many an eye, to others it would appear quite out of place at the present time; the growing goodness of the age, the increase of religion among men is pleaded on every side as a reason for rejecting the hard thought of the world becoming more wicked every day and man in general on it more hardened and indifferent. It may appear harsh to some who read this paper to have it stated that Christ is left out of the religion, or so-called Christianity of the great bulk of professors. Christianity is a word used to signify that a man is neither a Jew, Turk, infidel, nor heretic, but without any sense of a soul really brought out of the world to God. In the popular use of the word, a man is said to be a good Christian though he has never believed on Jesus, has never known the forgiveness of his sins, has never known Christ. Then religion, too, is said to be the common portion of nearly all decent professors. They attend their place of worship on the Sabbath or Sunday, they receive the sacrament once a month, or twice a year; they give their money to spread the scriptures, or to convert the heathen, and they feel better for it all: yet are they unchanged, the very same in every respect; or, if differing from those whom they term profane persons, it is by no means to their own credit, being as "whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." (Matt. 23:27.)

Two ladies being in conversation, one said to the other, in reference to a gentleman who had recently died, "Was he a Christian?" "Was he - a what?" the other instantly replied, with a puzzled and indignant air. Again, the same lady asked a similar question of a clergyman, respecting a neighbour cut off in the prime of youth. "I don't understand you," he answered in an embarrassed way; but, recovering himself, added, "Oh, certainly; she regularly attended my church, and was most attentive in taking the sacrament!" The indignant answer of the lady was due to the question having implied, as she thought, that possibly the deceased was an infidel, a Mahommedan, or a Jew. The clergyman's answer disclosed his conviction that observance of ordinances and attendance on the so-called "means of grace," conclusively gave title to be termed a Christian. No doubt in each case, were it a question of outward profession and responsibility, distinguished from what does not own the name of Christ, the term could be rightly applied; but the enquiry referred to a state of soul before God, for each of the persons in question had passed out of the sphere of nominal Christianity into another in which the having a name to live while dead could only aggravate eternal guilt. But there is a third class - the great evangelical body - who, utterly rejecting mere nominal Christianity, and equally so a religion of ordinances, insist upon a doctrinal soundness, especially on justification by faith, as the alone ground of approach to God, escape from wrath to come, and making sure of heaven after this life. To be sound upon these doctrines with them constitutes the Christian.

"Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead," is the exact moral description, as it is the plain condemnation of nationalism. Of more this, no doubt, but still of this. It is not the idea of the Church of God at all, but a Christianized world, with Christians scattered through it: a place so defiling, that but few indeed can keep their garments undefiled. Connected with the truth, as popery is not, such a system betrays the truth which it professedly upholds. The character of the last days is developed by it: "Men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, proud, blas. phemers," the retaining all that is natural to them under the garb of Christianity; "having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof." The direct command is, "From such, turn away." This is the effect of popularized truth, - popularized as God never meant His truth to be. Of course this is to be distinguished from the preaching of His truth, than which nothing assuredly is more in accordance with His mind. His gospel is to go forth to every creature, and the blessings of an open Bible we could scarcely exaggerate. But by "popularized truth" is meant, what we have already been speaking of, truth made into a party badge, so as to be accepted by those with whom Christ is not; for He was never really popular, and still is not. Popularized truth means, truth that has lost its power. It may be that for which martyrs died, and which when first given of God, or when afresh given, was full of quickening power. Popularized, it is so far lifeless. No exercise of soul in receiving it; no cross in professing it; men have got from their fathers what their fathers got from God: to their fathers it was shame, to them it is honour. There is nothing to test conscience, nothing to make them ask, Dare I take this without human sanction to commend - nay, in the face of all human discountenance? Yet only thus have we got it truly from God. The martyrs they talk of took it thus and suffered for it: they take it from their fathers - a principle which would have condemned the martyrs; and they take it without the slightest thought of being martyrs. Truth is proclaimed as powerless by the unholy lives of its professors, while unholiness is recommended by the practice of those who are orthodox as to truth. And thus truth tends to die out of itself, as valueless, remaining all the while in the national creed, embalmed as a memorial of the past. "Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, which are ready to die; for I have not found thy works perfect before God." This has been long experienced with regard to all national systems too manifestly to need more than a bare allusion. It is a system designedly adapted to worldly minds, and to be worked by political machinery. The Word of God is no necessity to it, except, it may be, to furnish a table of lessons; for the authoritative standard is the creed. The Spirit of God is not necessary to it; for colleges can manufacture preachers, and ecclesiastics ordain and send them forth apart from this. Christians are not necessary to it; they are too uncertain as a constituent part of a nation or its government to be capable of being reckoned on; nor is there any means of certainly determining who they are. A sacrament, - baptism or the Lord's supper, - takes here the place of less manageable tests. And the grieved and insulted Spirit may be besought to breathe upon the lifeless mass, and fill the sails of the ship of state. But He must keep within the bounds prescribed by ritual, hierarchy, and parliament, or He will be treated as schismatical. And it must be remarked how often in this case a schism springs out of a large and manifest revival. Souls brought near to God, and made to feel the value of His Word, are not made thereby the more docile servants of a state-religion. The new wine will not be held in the old bottles. Statesmen are not thus favourable to such fresh enthusiasm, and no wonder: it divides the house which it is to their interest to keep as one. But is not here the history of the churches of the Reformation - of Protestantism, in fact, - during the three centuries of its existence? Is not this the true account of its divisions, for which it is reproached? The Spirit of God is not, indeed, the author of confusion, but of peace, - of unity, and not disunion. But when people talk of schism, they should remember to what that term applies. As found in Scripture, it is "schism in the body" that is reprobated, and the body of Christ is not a national church. When men have joined together the living and the dead, - when they have subjugated consciences to formularies instead of Scripture, - to hierarchies instead of God, or to hierarchies in the name of God, what have they forced the blessed Spirit to do but to draw afresh the line they have obliterated between the living and the dead, between man's word and God's, between human authority and divine?

This is peculiarly solemn. It bears down with tremendous weight upon the vast mass of baptized profession which surrounds us, at the present moment, in which there is so much of outward semblance, but so little of inward reality. All profess to be Christians. The lamp of profession may be seen in every hand; but ah, how few have the oil in their vessels, the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, who have the Holy Ghost dwelling in their hearts. Without this, all is utterly worthless and vain. There may be the very highest profession; there may be a most orthodox creed; one may be baptized; he may receive the Lord's supper; be a regularly enrolled and duly recognized member of a Christian community, be a Sunday-school teacher; an ordained minister of religion; one may be all of this, and not have one spark of divine life, not one ray of heavenly light, not one link with the Christ of God.

From all this we learn the solemn truth that the most Satanic resistance to God's testimony, in the world, is offered by those who, though they imitate the effects of the truth, have but "the form of godliness," and "deny the power thereof." Persons of this class can do the same things, adopt the same habits and forms, use the same phraseology, profess the same opinions as others. If the true Christian, constrained by the love of Christ, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, visits the sick, circulates the scriptures, distributes tracts, supports the gospel, engages in prayer, sings praise, preaches the gospel, the formalist can do every one of these things; and this, be it observed, is the special character of the resistance offered to the truth "in the last days" — this is the spirit of "Jannes and Jambres." How needful to understand this! How important to remember that, "as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do" those self-loving, world-seeking, pleasure-hunting professors, "resist the truth!" They would not be without "a form of godliness;" but, while adopting "the form," because it is customary, they hate "the power," because it involves self-denial. "The power" of godliness involves the recognition of God's claims, the implanting of His kingdom in the heart, and the consequent exhibition thereof in the whole life and character; but the formalist knows nothing of this. "The power" of godliness could never comport with any one of those hideous features set forth in the foregoing quotation; but "the form," while it covers them over, leaves them wholly unsubdued; and this the formalist likes. He does not want his lusts subdued, his pleasures interfered with, his passions curbed, his affections governed, his heart purified. He wants just as much religion as will enable him "to make the best of both worlds." He knows nothing of giving up the world that is, because of having found "the world to come."

The Lord declares solemnly, "I know thy works, that thou has a name that thou livest, and art dead." How sad and solemn the indictment! One might well ask in amazement, How can such things be after the blessing and revival of Reformation days? But when we remember that the State-churches were, from the first, intended to include all the population of a given country, who were supposed to be made members of the church and kingdom of Christ by baptism in infancy, one can readily understand why such churches, though, possibly, strictly orthodox, may yet be largely composed of persons still dead in trespasses and in sins. Nothing can be much sadder than vast congregations of people, baptized, banded together as Christians, "taking the sacrament" of the Lord's Supper, zealous for church and Christianity, and yet largely devoid of personal, saving faith in Christ -- trusting rather in forms and ceremonies, and what some have called "birth-right membership," than in new birth through the Word and Spirit of God.

All national churches in the same way mix them up by the very fact that they are national churches. You cannot by the force of will, or act of Parliament, make a nation Christian. You can give them a name to live, while they are dead. You can make them formalists and hypocrites, but nothing more. You can do your best to hide from them their true condition, and leave them under an awful delusion from which eternity alone may wake them up.

Such is the well-known principle of nationalistic bodies wherever found, whether in England or in Scotland, in Germany or in Holland. They profess to receive all decent people in the districts or parishes. It is avowedly a religion for every body and in no way the intention or the desire to incorporate none that are not living members of Christ. Birth or local connections are allowed unless there be open scandal. There is no demand of life or faith, still less of the gift of the Holy Ghost, as of old (Acts 11:16-17). It is rather such a pattern as Israel affords, not the church wherein is neither Jew nor Greek but all are one in Christ Jesus. It is a question of family life and of geographical limits, and people are not Israelites or heathen but own the Christian religion, being in what is commonly called a national church: yet is it not clear that in a national church the unity of the Spirit cannot possibly be kept? One may be a true Christian or child of God, but there is neither the thought nor the possibility for a member of a national church to keep therein "the unity of the Spirit." Hence they speak of the Church of England, not of the church of God in England: still less do they contemplate all that are Christ's on the earth.

The fact is that, in escaping from Babylon, they have come to acknowledge a unity wholly different from, and opposed to, that of the Spirit. They have set up a unity which, if carried out with complete success, would comprehend the whole nation, saving perhaps those who eschew all show of religion. For I do not forget that the Rubric provides against heinous or manifest scandal. Notoriously, however, in every quarter, and almost in every family, there may be persons of more or less respectability, moral and amiable men, who know they are not born of God, and would shrink from pretending to be members of Christ, if they were not misled to claim the place on ritual ground. Most of these would shrink from being called "saints", and hesitate not to apply the word as a cant term of reproach to God's children who are not ashamed to call themselves what they are.

This then is divinely given knowledge, in a world where all is out of course, and where there is no light but what streams from Him Who came by water and blood. No other key unlocks the enigma of this groaning creation, the "burden of this otherwise unintelligible world." What else claims to be light, when it is not spurious, or mere will-of-the-wisp, is but a reflection of the rays of Christianity. It is forgotten often by those who point t the sometimes upright lives of doubters, that they have been nurtured in the Christian tradition. Truly no high standard of morality in society at large could survive the dethronement of the Bible. The reflected radiance seen in philanthrophy, crusade of peace, etc., etc., would soon vanish in the eclipse of doctrinal faith.

Children of Christians often offer this spectacle. Their parents' faith guides their first steps, a thing which is legitimate and approved of God. They later manifest a genuine faith, but not stripped of its first habits, looking to men rather than to God Himself. Their conscience has never been deeply exercised about man's sinful state and his natural distance from God. They believe that which they have always believed; however one cannot doubt that they have life. Their conduct leaves nothing to be desired, and they have a real interest in the things of God. The Word is not unknown to them, and one sees a Joash reminding even the high priest of the "tribute of Moses the servant of Jehovah laid upon the congregation of Israel, for the tent of testimony" (2 Chr. 24:6). But the hour of their spiritual emancipation has not yet sounded, when it should have taken place long ago. Knowledge and real piety do not make up for the lack of a direct relationship of the soul with the Lord. The Christian must seek this before all else. Thousands of godly souls remain in a condition of childhood, depending first of all upon their parents, and later upon their spiritual leaders, instead of depending upon God and the Word. Let the leader disappear, and their godliness disappears with him; let him turn aside, and their soul turns aside after him. However amiable certain traits of this piety may be, let us be kept from it, especially during the difficult times that we are passing through. Let us meditate often on this word of the apostle, addressed to the "little children": "And ye have the unction from the holy one, and ye know all things" (1 John 2:20, 26-27). Not that obedience to leaders should be wanting Christians are to obey their leaders and submit to them because "they watch over your souls"; the apostle also charges them to "Remember your leaders who have spoken to you the word of God" (Heb. 13:7, 17). In no wise, however, does this imply that they must submit to all these without discernment, nor, if they would be kept, that they should refrain from seeking direct and immediate communion with the Lord. Joash obeyed leaders indiscriminately, whether Jehoiada or the princes — and that was his ruin.