Laurel

You are my only love. 

You are closer than all others— 

All others whom I love, 

And those who love me. 

Whence came this love? 

It was born of you 

In your love for me. 

Yet beyond even you 

It came from Him 

Who is love Himself.

He, too, has a Bride. 

I meant to say 

I, too, have a Bride. 

For He has always had His Bride 

Before even the world began. 

Time was not with Him.
In His heart 

She was born to Him 

Who for her sake 

Became Man, and lived, 

And living, died. 

His full love for her 

Won her wondering heart 

On Calvary’s hill.

I am in Him 

And He in me. 

I, with all others, 

Am also His Bride, 

But this He did for me, 

He gave me His Bridegroom’s love 

To love you for ever. 

To love you where my mind, 

Lost in its loveless ego, 

Loved me more than others.

I, too, have been to Calvary,
First to curse and then to kiss. 

His love destroyed the ego, 

Bringing it to life again
As the new self, lost in Him. 

Else I had never loved you 

With ought but ego love, 

Seeking you for myself
And not for you.

Each day His Calvary love kills 

Old ego that would rise. 

Each day His pristine love 

Repristinates my own
Until I love afresh 

With Calvary love— 

God’s agape that grows 

Beyond romantic love
Which hides Man’s ego love: 

So does His love 

Love you, through me.

This love’s a mystery. 

Daily the Marriage Feast 

Draws nearer in our time, 

But in our time delights to be 

As it one day will be 

In time’s full time. 

Now in our love the Feast is here 

And you love me 

As I love you 

With Calvary Bridal love. 

And ever will.

From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 152-4

Atonement Creates A Renewed Moral Centre In Humanity

If Christianity do not make a revolution in human nature we make a revolution in Christianity. A religion centring wholly in the graciousness of Christ, or His submission, or His spiritual insight can be no foundation for a commanding ethic or a triumphant faith. It lacks the virile note. Christ did not come as a grand spiritual personality, but as the Redeemer. It was not to spiritualise us that He came but to save us. 

Moral verve is bound to relax if the religion of the cross become but a hallowed addition to life’s spiritual interests or touching moods, if it do not carry the stamp of moral crisis and personal decision for death or life. Ethic is bound to grow less strenuous, even while we bustle about ethical conduct, if the sublime ethical issue of the universe is not the marrow of our personal divinity and the principle of our personal religion. We can find a strong foundation only in that centre where the holy God both bears our load and performs His new creative act. If in the cross we have but the greatest of love’s renunciations instead of the one establishment of God’s holy will, if we have but the divine Kenosis and not also the divine Plerosis, then the sense of God’s presence in the cross, and in the Church, and in the world’s moral war, is bound to fade. 

The eternal ruling God cannot be a God in a passive or touching cross merely. A religion of simple service is no religion to rule a world like this. We shall come to feel that in such a cross, a cross that only stands for sacrifice, there is no God, but only a victory of God’s foes, another and a tremendous case of the world crushing the good and just, another case of the soul’s defeat by fate. Then, of course, Christianity must die. “The cross is either the life of our religion, or it is the death of all religion. Either it is the supreme atonement, and so the final guarantee of God’s Fatherhood and its victory; or else it is a mere martyr death, and so an eclipse of that fatherhood, its greatest historic eclipse, which would mean its extinction.” Christ would then have publicly trusted a God who did not publicly give Him the victory. 

Such a pathetic, mystic, and martyred Messiah could stir the sympathy of many, but He could not win the worship of the world. He could impress but not forgive; he could move men but not redeem them; he could criticise society but not judge the world. A king the world could just crucify is no king the world could fear; it needs a king who in his cross judged the world, and did not simply find his fate there. There is nothing central, nothing creative for life in such a fate. There may be much in it to appeal to our sympathetic and religious side, but nothing to establish faith, nothing to ethicise it for ever from a creative centre, nothing to fortify us against the unholy, nothing to set conscience and holiness on the throne of the world. If Christ died to saving and central purpose, then He died as the act of God. His death was God’s act in the sense that it was the moral activity of God. God was in Christ and His death, acting there, setting up an everlasting kingdom, and not simply inflicting a racial penalty, nor simply suffering a racial fate.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 66-69.

I Died: I Died

I dreamt I died that night, 

And all my grief 

Full coincided with His own. 

The thought, of course, is madness. 

One drop of His would
More than destroy 

All that I have and am, 

And render me beyond the pale 

Of reconstruction.
 

Of course, I died, 

And that’s the whole 

Of all I knew. Full grief 

Took me to depths 

From which is no recall. 

In the annihilation 

That grief Divine brings 

To a human being 

Is irreversible decease. 

A man cannot enter the Divine 

And feel His grief. 

Holiness is His love 

And not a man’s.

True God feels grief 

From His own holiness, 

But from it man feels death.
 

And so I died. 

I died down to my depths, 

Disintegrating 

In the welter of the Love 

That, lone, knows grief; 

Not universal grief, 

Not grief en masse, 

But holy grief of love 

In intimacy with each 

Of whom it made, 

For that gone dark 

Within the essence of itself.
 

I cannot tell the death— 

It was a long and depthful sleep— 

And when I woke I lived. 

I had been dead before I died 

But dying in His grief 

Did not destroy. The grief 

Destroyed the pain 

In all my filaments and fibres, 

And every granule wholly purged 

Rose to a coruscation 

Of sheer upholiness. 

His multi-coloured joyfulness 

Surged through my resurrection— 

Such coruscation!
 

I did not long to sleep again, 

To die, to live again, 

To know fresh grief. 

I said my grief full coincided 

With all His own. I know not. 

I only knew the grief of love 

Purifies from death. I died, 

And now I live again
Who never lived in truth 

Before.



From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 154-5

Roland Allen's View of Paul's Apostolic Method

Apart from the early chapters of the Acts, we have little to go on as to the methods or modes used by the other apostles. Probably they were similar to those used by Paul. Modern missiologists seek to glean what they can from Paul’s methods, but suggest that his methods would not necessarily obtain now, the world having changed so much. Roland Allen—a famous missionary in China—wrote two books, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Christian Church and St. Paul’s Missionary Methods or Ours? These are two most stimulating works. Being written some 60 years ago they may appear to be dated, yet Allen asks questions which are still relevant.
 

 He first states that Paul in 10 years founded churches in Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. His methods were not distinctive, nor peculiarly his own. He had no printing press, no New Testament. He would immediately baptise his converts (or, have them baptised), seemingly without any instruction as we today would call it instruction. He had only one desire, and that was to present the Gospel without it being a system of morality. What Allen points out is that Paul trusted the Gospel and the Holy Spirit to both work their work of grace in the new churches, without the supportive roles that missionary bodies take up today, and the tendency to turn churches into moralistic units.

 Allen also asked some questions in order to focus on what we would call modern differences. He asked: 

1. Did Paul deliberately select certain strategic points at which to establish his churches? 
2. Was his success due to a certain social class or caste of people to which he made an appeal? 
3. Did special conditions obtain in Paul’s day, i.e. were the social, moral, economic or religious patterns such as to render any comparison to today’s world innocuous?
4. Was there any particular virtue in the way in which the Apostle presented his Gospel, eg. the use of miracles, his finance, the substance of his teaching? 
5. Was there any particular virtue in his way of dealing with 'organised churches', i.e. means by which discipline was exercised and unity maintained?

1. Allen says that Paul did not have a deliberate policy in regard to the selection of strategic points, as such. No journey seems to have been planned, as the Acts’ account would indicate. The Spirit’s guidance seemed linked with various circumstances. For example, he simply touched Ephesus on his return to Jerusalem on his second journey, and found a good reception there on his next journey. II Corinthians 1:5-18 shows Paul in a state of uncertainty, and his further journey into Achaia was because of his love for the church. This leads us to the conclusion that he was led by the Spirit rather than that he held some principle of expansion.

 

2. Allen discounts any value to the suggestion that class or caste has much significance either in receiving or opposing the Gospel. Paul made no attempt to speak to any class of his day, as, say, missionaries in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries addressed themselves to the Brahmins. Nor did Paul’s Gospel root itself in Jewish soil; to the contrary, Paul suffered much for preaching to Jews. Allen gives many examples of Paul’s universality in his contacts. He was ‘a man for all seasons’.
 

3. The suggestion that certain conditions are more conducive to Gospel proclamation than another has no encouragement from Paul. On the one hand there was a revulsion by some against the immorality and evils of the day, and in this sense a preparation for a pure Gospel, and on the other a desire for the promiscuous. It is ironic that so many years after Allen’s writings, conditions are more like those of the promiscuous society of Paul’s day, than perhaps they have ever been, in which case the matter is a non sequiter.

 

4. Allen spends most time on this fourth section, showing convincingly that all the aids which Paul used are just as available for the church today. The Gospel has not altered, the use of signs and wonders is still operative, and the word and deeds can be just as dynamic. He takes up the whole matter of mission finances very clearly, showing that in the early church all monetary help was for personal needs, and not for ecclesiastical support Indeed no such things existed. There was no property, no political power, nothing irking to any national feeling such as domination and paternalism by ‘foreign boards’. He then goes on to show that Paul preached the simple kerugma as it is found throughout the Acts, and that he had five elements to his mode of preaching, namely (a) an appeal to the past to win sympathy by a statement of the truth common to him and the hearers; (b) a statement of facts, an assertion of things which can be understood, apprehended, accepted, disputed or proved regarding Jesus the Messiah, his crucifixion and resurrection; (c) the answer to the inevitable objection that the most thoughtful and judicial minds have made to his claims; (d) the appeal to the spiritual needs of men, the craving for pardon, and the assurance of comfort, and (e) the final grace warning against rejection which involves serious danger. In other words, Paul does nothing which we could not do today with profit.

 

5.  Allen’s point regarding discipline and unity relates to the training of converts. Allen says churches flourished because Paul established churches and not missions. He had no eye for paternalism, but taught as thoroughly as possible, and left the churches to work out their own matters. Baptism was virtually without instruction, and converts were not trained for a professional ministry. We have much valuable material in the Pastoral Epistles in regard to the life and unity of the church, but certainly the church is not organised or promoted. Professionalism was absent, and Allen points out that those who would be pastors and elders were not sent to some other situation for training. Training—if it can be called that—happened in the local church, and so the congregation understood God’s will for their pastors and elders, and in that sense would be subject to them.
 

 In regard to the moral life of the church, Allen sees Paul’s authority as proper and functional but suggests that the apostolic authority finished at the death of the Apostle, and normal local church ministry would prove sufficient. Teaching on proper living (cf. Eph. 4:20-32), would be given through the local ministry and would not be moralistic, especially in the light of the liberating and motivating power of the Gospel. Thus the life and unity of the church did not derive from an organisation but within the organism of the church. This, of course, accords with the New Testament. that the church is the Body of Christ, and he its Head. He gives it life, and through the Holy Spirit directs what we today would call ‘strategy of mission’. The local church as functional could not be directed from another country!

From Proclaiming Christ's Gospel In Today's World, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 31–34.

Lord, You Are My Love

Lord, You are my love,

You alone I love, and all my loves

Are in the loving of You. Yet You

Came first in your love; In Your

Mysterious predestining, fixing my life,

Planning my destiny before the world began.

 

You are my love and when I wake—

Time and again in the many nights—

There is sometimes the faint line of dread,

Sometimes the inner terror of the Holy One,

And I fear lest I have offended You.

Then Your love comes—reassuring—

And in Your word, and on my knees,

And in the secret places

Of my secret heart, there is a tryst—

A man and God affair

Of love inexpressible. I weep

And seem to hear You too,

Not weeping as I, but with me, for me,

And the pain becomes a precious pain,

A rich suffering in joy,

And I am one with You.

Oh Triune Lover, persistent One

Who never leaves me night and day

But moves within my dreams, and lives within

My daily awakenings, hear of my love.

More than faint intimations

Are the visitations and the ‘never-leavings’

That I have known these years of all my life.

Sometimes my thoughts of leaving You grow strong

And with the thought bewilderment fast grows,

And, like the Psalmist, in my heart I cry,

‘Whither, Lord, shall I go from Thy presence?

Thou art not only the Eternal One

Being the Everywhere I’d go, but of Thee

And from Thee, I am what Thou have made me.

Separation intolerable

My inner spirit dreads.

Such loneliness apart from Thee

Is more than Hell itself, yet Hell’s substance

That void the rebellious know’.

Why in this night—this early morn—

Do I speak to You, speak thus?

Why does this moan escape my lips?

Why does my heart complain

When all You’ve ever shown

Is holy love to me? Ah, yes,

The rub lies there, the hurt, the pain,

That You are holy, You are pure,

And I am not. Strange truth and fact

That though You holy be and I am not

Your love enwraps my soul and spirit

Like a protecting mantle, a healing cloak

That cleanses as it loves, loves as it purifies

And makes me one with You,

Your inner heart to mine and mine to You.

This is the mystery—the pained alternation

Of love and fear, of fear and love—

The mystery that’s my life

From when conceived until this now

And ‘til the death that’s life

Releases me from pain and joy

Of the present mingling.

The present mingling is the grace

And love that I and God are one.

This is the dread that comes to me—the commingling

Of human flesh and Your dread Deity

Catching me up to all eternity

In a resistless love. Why then

Do I moan in the deep night

At the painful delight of present union,

Future joy and ecstasy—not Dionysian but pure

As love makes serene for ever?

Why should my heart complain

Except its shame should make me long

For the Then to be Now—the Then I dread

As now I dread, and yet adore?

Ah Lord! I love You deep,

Deeper than all my secret heart,

Deeper than Heaven and Hell themselves.

Your love once captured me

Even before I saw the Tree:

But all the time the Tree was there

With You, in You, for me, for them.

One word from You is spoken not

But in the Cross, and by the Cross,

And through the Cross, and from its self

Till Christ in all his love—

And Spirit-love along—

Ushers my trembling heart to You

Till all Your Fatherhood Embraces me for ever.

Dear Lord there’s no complaint,

Only the plaint gentle, the tender plea

That I may tell with power You give,

The everlasting love—the mercy full—

That lifts to love’s most holy height

And there retains for ever

The transformed spirit.

Lord, I plead,

Never release me from the noble call,

That dignity most high—that ministry

That makes the heart of me melt to be

One with Your love forever;

One as I tell Your love, in quivering tones

From depths that measure cannot know,

Your depthless, breadthless, heightless love

That captures me for ever,

And in its capture captures all

Its utter holiness had planned

For time and all eternity.

From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, p.97-99.

Grace Is Much More Than Sympathy And Pity

The tendency to dwell upon the passive obedience of Christ is but the theological way of expressing the tendency to dwell on God’s sympathy and to ignore His salvation. There is little doubt that the sympathetic tendency is the more popular to-day, and to press salvation in a real sense is to be accused of a reactionary bias to theology. But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of an infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace.  
 

We are often warned of the dangers of anthropomorphism, especially by those who are preoccupied with the super-personal element in God. But what we need much more to-day is a caution against anthropopathism, or a conception of God which thinks of Him chiefly as the divine consummation of all our human pity and tenderness to man’s mischance, bewilderment, sorrow and sin. A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God. And a religion of far more sympathy than we have yet felt would not be the Christian religion.
 

It is needless to dwell on the preciousness of sympathy. The man who needs none is something less than human; and the man who receives none remains so. But a sympathy which has no help in it mocks us with an enlargement of our own sensitive impotence, which means so much better than it can. And yet a sympathy which could only help would not secure us against the fear that all its help might be at last in vain. It might not reach me, or not my worst need; or it might be arrested in some future by a power more mighty to foil than to help.
 

We must have a sympathy that can not only help but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem. Nay, far more, we must have, for the entire confidence of faith, a sympathy that has redeemed, and already triumphs in a conclusive salvation. If God, indeed, could not sympathise, He would be less than God. There would be a region, large or small, into which He could not pass. There would be an insuperable obstacle set to Almighty God by a something which by so far reduced His power and resisted His access. He would be a limited being, tied up, as impersonal things are, by their own nature, and incapable of passing beyond it.
 

But all the same, if God were all sympathy, if His divine power lay chiefly in His ability to infuse Himself with super-human intimacy of feeling into the most unspeakable tangles and crises of human life, then also He would be less than God, and we should have no more than what might be called a monism of heart. Even a loving God is really God not because He loves, but because He has power to subdue all things to the holiness of His love, and even sin itself to His love as redeeming grace. A sympathetic God is really God because He is a holy, saving, redeeming God; because in Him already the great world-transaction is done, and the kingdom of His holy love already set up on His foregone conquest of all evil.
 

The great and crucial thing is done in God and not before Him, in His will and not in His presence, by Him and not/or Him by any servants, not even by a son. It is an act of His own being, a victory in His own immutable and invincible being. And to be saved, in any non- egoistical sense of the word, means that God gains His own victory over again in me, and that I have lost in life’s great issue unless He do. God’s participation in man’s affairs is much more than that of a fellow-sufferer on a divine scale, whose love can rise to a painless sympathy with pain. He not only perfectly understands our case and our problem, but He has morally, actively, finally solved it. The solution is for ever present with Him. Already He sees, and for ever sees, the travail of His soul and is satisfied. All the jars, collisions, contradictions, crises, pities, tragedies and terrors of life are in Him for ever adjusted in a peace which is not resigned and quietist, but triumphant and exultant; and nothing can pluck us from His hands.
 

All history, through His great act at its moral centre, is, in God; resolved into the harmonies of a foregone and final conquest. And our faith is not merely that God is with us, nor that one day He will clear all things up and triumph; but that for Him all things are already triumphant, clear, and sure. All things are working together for good, as good is in the cross of Christ and its saving effect. Our faith is not that one day we shall solve the riddles of providence, and see all things put under us, but that now we see Jesus; and that we commit ourselves to one who has both the solution of every tragic thing and the glory of every dark thing clear and sure in a kingdom that cannot be moved, and, therefore alone, moves for ever on.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 58-62.

The Cross of Christ Has Moral Reality Not Simply Impressive Effect

It is sometimes said, “There are several theories of the Atonement, but we have to do with the fact, and not with our understanding of it.” This frame of mind is the root of all that is most feeble and ominous in our Churches today. The one thing we need is to understand the Atonement, with a life’s understanding, with a vital conscience. There it is that Christ comes to Himself for good. There, as it were, He finally finds His tongue, and takes command of the deep eloquence of moral things. Christ, I repeat, is to us just what His cross is. You do not understand Christ till you understand His cross. Nor have you measured the moral world. Such a fact as Christ or His Atonement only exists as it is intelligible, as it comes home to us with a moral meaning and a moral nature. It is only by understanding it that it becomes anything else than a martyrdom, that it becomes the saving act of God. It is only by understanding it that we escape from religion with no mind, and from religion which is all mind, from pietism with its lack of critical judgment, and from rationalism with its lack of everything else.... 

...The feeble gospel preaches “God is ready to forgive”; the mighty gospel preaches “God has redeemed.” It works not with forgiveness alone, which would be mere futile amnesty, but with forgiveness in a moral way, with holy forgiveness, a forgiveness which not only restores the soul, but restores it in the only final and eternal way, by restoring in the same act the infinite moral order, and reconstructing mankind from the foundation of a moral revolution. God reconciles by making Christ to be sin, and not imputing it (2 Cor. 5:21). The Christian act of forgiveness at once regards the whole wide moral order of things, and goes deep to the springs of the human will for entire repentance and a new order of obedience. This it does by the consummation of God’s judgment in the central act of mercy. 

Do not think of God’s judgment as an arbitrary infliction, but as the necessary reaction to sin in a holy God. There alone do you have the divine necessity of the cross in a sinful world—the moral necessity of judgment. A judgment upon man alone would have destroyed him. And a judgment borne by God alone would be manqué, it would be wide of the mark, as being irrelevant to man’s experience and regeneration. But borne by God in man, in such a racial, nay cosmic, experience as the cross of Christ, it is the creation of a new conscience, and of the new ethic of the race. When Christ died, all died. Dying with Christ is not a mere ethical idea, complete only as we succeed in doing it. It is a religious or mystic idea, which is ethical as taking effect in a holy act, where, however, it is already complete in principle. It is not applying the principle of salvation to life; the foregone salvation becomes our life; and practical Christianity is freely living it out, and not merely squaring life to it laboriously. The judgment involved is one that fell on Christ once for all. It is not a judgment in individual men, but in man in Christ. It is not the sum total of our self-judgments under Christ’s light; rather say, all our self-judgment is but inspired by the complete judgment on Christ once for all. It is on us according as we are in Him, yet not as a judgment, but as a grace; not as a punishment, but as salvation; not as a scourge, but as a cross.

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, pp. 45-46; 52-54.