One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 2. John Williamson Nevin
should in this way be first made by the whole previous manifestation and work of the Redeemer.
The New Testament is full of this thought; so that it is truly wonderful there should ever be any doubt in regard to it, with those who pretend to take the Scriptures as their guide. The Gospel goes throughout upon the assumption that the power which Christ carried in himself for the salvation of the world could not make itself felt with free, full, constant action among men, till it had gone through a certain course of qualification previously in his own person. The Spirit dwelt in him, we know, without measure; but so long as he continued in our present mortal state, it was necessarily confined to his own individual life. Between it and the surrounding world of humanity, comprehended as this was in the order of mere nature, rose as a high wall of separation, the law of sin and death which reigns throughout this constitution, making it impossible for the law of spiritual life in Christ Jesus to reach it under its own form. Death and sin must first be conquered on their own territory by the Son of God himself; which however implied, of course, that he should with real victory transcend, at the same time, their domain, and so take possession of the world under the form of a new, higher existence, no longer natural, but supernatural, from the plain of which it might be possible for him to extend to men generally the power of his redemption in a corresponding real and truly supernatural way. The order of nature could never be the platform of any such work; and therefore it must be left behind for the sake of the work itself; and room must be found for the mystery of righteousness in another system altogether, in the order of grace, as this was to be constituted and made permanent in the world by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
This great idea underlies all our Saviour’s instructions, as it may be said also to be the actuating sense of his own entire life. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die,” we hear him saying (John 12:24), “it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” This refers to himself; but then he adds immediately, as the standing law and general conception of the Christian salvation: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal.”64 So after his resurrection (Luke 24:25–26), “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” Everywhere we may see, that in the mind of our Saviour, the whole purpose and force of his life were felt to be conditioned by his dying, and so entering upon a new mode of existence, in which he should no longer be subject to the limitations of his mortal state, but have his humanity itself exalted above nature, and clothed with dominion over it for the benefit of his Church. His removal from the world of sense in this way was to be no loss to his disciples, but on the contrary great gain. He would be put to death in the flesh, as St. Paul expresses it, only that he might be quickened in the Spirit.65 His presence with his people, under this form, would be not less real than it had been before, but in some sense, we might say, even more real, as being at the same time far more unrestrained, and intimately near, and powerfully efficacious for the ends of the Gospel, than it was ever possible for it to be previously to his glorification. For it is by the Spirit that he enters into living communication with the members of his mystical body; and the Spirit or Holy Ghost, we are told (John 7:39), could not be given, or was not, as the original text has it—that is, was not as the actual revelation of the Saviour’s higher presence in the world—till Jesus was glorified. “I will not leave you orphans,” he says (John 14:18–19), “I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me because I live, ye shall live also.” So again (John 16:7), “It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” The presence in the flesh must be withdrawn, to make room for a higher, better, and far more glorious presence in the Spirit.
The great burden indeed of our Saviour’s valedictory discourse may be said to turn upon this thought; and after his resurrection, accordingly, all is made to depend with him on what was to be now brought to pass by his formal ascension into heaven. “Behold I send the promise of my Father upon you,” it was said (Luke 14:49. Acts 1:4–5), “but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.” The mission of the Spirit is made thus to be the great object of his whole previous life. It formed the travail of his soul, from the commencement of his sufferings to their close. For this he wrestled with the powers of hell. This was emphatically the purchase of his death, the boon of salvation which he came into the world to obtain for our fallen race. He became the author and finisher of our faith (Heb 12:2), by enduring the cross, with all its shame, and so being set down at the right hand of the throne of God; ascending up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things; leading captivity captive, and taking possession of the world as its supernatural king and head, that he might bestow gifts upon men. And all these gifts were comprehended primarily in the Holy Ghost, as the form under which it was now made possible for the power of his glorified life to reveal itself with free effect in the world. The Holy Ghost, in this view, is not one among other gifts for which the world is indebted to Christ, but the sum and absolute unity at once of the whole; the Gift of gifts; that without which there could be no room to conceive of any other, and through which only all others have their significance and force. It is that which men need as the very complement of their life, that they may be redeemed from the power of the fall, and raised to a participation of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. For “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God;” and only what is thus born of God, as distinguished from all that is the birth of mere flesh (1 John 5:4), can ever have power to overcome the world. So wide and vast is the grace procured for man by the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and bestowed upon them after his ascension through the gift of the Holy Ghost.
This Gift now forms the origin and ground of the Christian Church; which by its very nature, therefore, is a supernatural constitution, a truly real and abiding fact in the world, and yet, at the same time, a fact not of the world in its natural view, but flowing from the resurrection of Christ and belonging to that new order of things which has been brought to pass by his glorification at the right hand of God; a fact not dependent, accordingly, on the laws and conditions that reign in “this present evil world,”66 and not at the mercy of its changes in any way—“against which the gates of hell shall not prevail,”67 and that is destined to outlast and conquer in the end all other institutions, interests and powers of the earth. As a supernatural presence among men in any such constant and really historical way as the Gift and Promise of Christ seem necessarily to imply, the Spirit must have his own supernatural sphere, in distinction from the order of nature, within which to carry forward his operations as the power of a new creation over against the vanity and misery of the old. This constitution or order of grace is what our faith is taught to receive in the article of the Holy Catholic Church; that great mystery which is denominated Christ’s Body, and within which is comprised, according to the Creed, the whole supernatural process of man’s salvation, from baptism for the remission of sins, onward to the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting. It is not of the first creation, like the art and science, and political institutions of mankind in every other view. It holds directly from Christ in his capacity of glorified superiority to the universal order of nature. He is “head over all things to the Church.”68 It is in virtue of his having conquered, and ascended up on high, leading captivity captive, far above all heavens—far above all principality (Eph 1:21), “and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come”—that he has by his Spirit created for himself this glorious constitution, and continues to reign over it through all ages as “the beginning (Col 1:18) and firstborn from the dead.” So when he commissioned his Apostles for their great work, all was made to depend on what had thus been accomplished in his own person. “All power,” he said (Matt 28:18–20), “is given unto me in heaven and in earth: Go ye therefore”—because it is so and I am able, as the conqueror of sin and death and hell, having all power in my hands, to become the author, the principle and ground of a new creation, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail; because it is so, go ye therefore—“and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe