Transcript
NEWBIGIN: In what I said yesterday, I tried to begin the study of the mission under the heading of "Towards a Theology of Mission" and, in particular, to try to draw out in five directions the implications of one sentence in the [billing and?] report. And I have to come now to the fifth of those elements implied in that statement.
Namely, the reminder that the Christian mission looks towards a consummation. What we have in Christ now, the new life in the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the substance of the mission. Wonderful as it is, incomparable with any other treasure on Earth is nevertheless not all. The
very nature of it is that it is a foretaste, that in its very essential nature it is, so to say, incomplete and points us forward. Of all the Old Testament texts which are taken up and used in the New Testament, the one which is quoted far and away beyond all the others, I think almost all the others put together, is the 110th
psalm, which is quoted or alluded to 22 times in the New Testament. "The Lord said unto my Lord, 'Sit Thou at My right hand until I put Thine enemies under Thy feet.'" That text evidently was felt by the apostolic church more than any other Old Testament text to express the situation in which they were living. That is to say, the situation in which the decisive victory has been
won, in which our Lord Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father but in which, because of that, we are looking forward. We are awaiting the day when every enemy is put under His feet. And the whole New Testament, unless I completely misunderstand it, is simply saturated with this forward-looking atmosphere with hope, with the sense that we are living in
an age in which, because the decisive victory has been won, therefore, we are in the end of the times and moving forward to the consummation. That phrase that St. Paul uses to the Romans, "Now is salvation nearer to us than when we first believed," expresses in the most absolutely uncompromising terms the sense that we are dealing with a real event to which we move forward and to which we are nearer every
year. St. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians in that long 15th chapter, speaks of Christ's resurrection as being the first fruits which must necessarily lead us to expect the full harvest, those who are Christs, at His coming. Among the later epistles, Philippians has that wonderful phrase, "Our citizenship is in heaven, from whence we wait
for a Savior." And Colossians has that promise: "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with Him in glory." I don't need to remind you of the addresses, the speeches in Acts, which all of them lead up to the assurance that Christ will come again. Nor to the teachings of the Synoptic Gospels in parable and in apocalyptic sayings which speak of the
end and bid us be ready with our loins girt and our laps lit to await it. And in the fourth Gospel, although there is a profound reinterpretation of the earlier eschatological teaching, the futurist element is still unmistakably present. And it will be sufficient to remind us of that mysterious verse with which the gospel almost closes: "If I will that he tarry till I
come, what is that to thee?" And finally, at the end of the whole Bible, we have that prayer written out of the midst of the furnace of affliction: "He which testifieth these things saith, Yea, I come quickly. Amen, come, Lord Jesus." I say that sense that we are moving towards a real consummation belongs to the very essence of the New Testament
faith. As we study the New Testament, understanding of that consummation to which the world is moved, it is clear that it is essentially something corporate and cosmic, something which is the consummation of human history as a whole and indeed of the whole creation. Of course, it has profound implications for individual persons. But it is not primarily, or it is not
something separate for each person. It is, in its essence, the appearing of the Lord Jesus, the manifesting of His glory to the whole Earth and the final destruction of all that opposes of God's will, and the coming of new heavens and a new earth. It is, in its essence, corporate and cosmic. And it is within that cosmic hope that the hope for the individual person is contained.
Necessarily, when we speak of these things and when the New Testament speaks of these things, we must use a large element of symbol. We are speaking of things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and it is obvious that the symbolism of the New Testament is symbolism. You cannot make a logically coherent conceptual structure out of it. But it is a very
different thing when we go on, or as some do, to attempt to treat the entire concept as though it were symbolic. In other words, to deny that there is a real future and to treat it as only the symbol of something which is eternally present, to deny that there is an actual consummation to which we are nearer this year than we were last year. To say, in other
words, that not merely the pictorial details of it but the actual futurity of it itself is symbolic. It seems to me that when we do that, we forget that time is related in a totally different way to the spiritual life from the way in which space is related. That if we deny real futurity, then
we at the same time destroy any present relevance. It is true that the doctrine of the second coming of our Lord is not something merely in the future but something which enters into the actual character of the Christian life as it is lived here every day. But it only does so because we believe that it is really future. The point that I want to make now is simply this, that the denial of a true
end to human history has the effect of placing men in the dilemma in which they can either find meaning for the life of the individual or they can find meaning for the life, for the history of the world as a whole but not both. We are very familiar with that dilemma in the history of Christian thought over past decades. We have seen on the one hand how the attempt
to have an eschatology simply of human progress -- in other words, the attempt to find the meaning of human life in terms of the progress of humanity as a whole towards some great future goal -- leads inevitably to those dehumanizing totalitarian systems in which finally all meaning is denied
to the life of the individual. Necessarily, I say, because if our eschatology is purely an eschatology of human progress, then there is, in the last analysis, no place in it for the individuals who live and labor and die before that end comes. And then, on the other hand, we have seen the mind of men swinging back again to the other half of the dilemma and trying to
find meaning in life in terms of the meaning and destiny of the individual man and woman. And we know how, over and over again, that has had the effect of creating a kind of piety in which the great drama of human history as a whole was written off as without essential significance. The great issues
of political and social and cultural life treated as being something fundamentally irrelevant to the ultimate issues of salvation and damnation and the whole meaning of life exhausted in a private and individual immortality. And the inevitable effect of it is a loss of interest, a loss of real belief,
in the lordship of Christ over the whole world. I have to confess that one had hoped that that kind of pietism had been killed forever. And yet, unless I completely misunderstand the situation, it does seem to me that the way is being reopened for it again in Bultmann's demythologizing program which seems to center everything once more in the private spiritual experiences
of the individual for whom, after his meeting with Christ, quote, "The decisive history is not the history of the world, of the people Israel, and of other peoples but the history which everyone experiences himself," close quote. If you abandon the New Testament eschatology, that is certainly the only possibility left for preserving some kind of valuation
for the human person. But what the New Testament offers is surely something quite different. It is an integral and total hope transcending but not negating world history and providing the true consummation both of every individual human history and of the drama of human history as a whole. Necessarily, such a hope must exceed
our powers of comprehension and description, and it therefore cannot be put in any other than symbolic terms as it is in the New Testament. But it is nevertheless a hope which rests not on mere wishful thinking but, and truly this is the position of St. Paul, "a hope solidly based upon the fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus." Something that we
look forward to which is necessarily beyond our comprehension and therefore must be expressed in symbol but something which has at its center that which is not symbol but known reality, namely Jesus Himself. He shall come again, and we shall see Him. His coming is the consummation both of world history
and of every individual history. And of course, we do not know anything of the time. We do not know the limits of human existence. We do not know what are the possibilities that are inherent in human history. We do not know, for instance, whether it is possible for man to colonize the moon. We do not know what are the limits that God has set or that are inherent in the nature of man and of his history.
We do know that there is a limit, namely death. The death of the individual and the death of the solar system of the cosmos. And the point is this, that apart from Christ, if we have discarded this New Testament eschatology, if we have lost the faith that it is Christ who is the ultimate limit of our human existence, then we do not know any other
limit, and our thinking is bound to be dominated by that limit, the death of the individual or the death of the world. Apart from Christ, we do not know any other boundary. But in Christ we know that He is, He and not death, is the true limit of human existence. In other words, to put it in another way, if we
ask, "What is coming to us, and what is coming to the world?" we have to answer, "Jesus is coming." And that provides the direction and the meaning of every single day's action. Now the essential point that I want to make, of course, in this is simply this, that the Christian mission according to the New Testament is integrally related to the end. One can explain that in a number of ways.
One can say it in this way, that the Spirit who creates and sustains the mission is himself the earnest, the [arabon?] of the final glory. That the gift of the Spirit and the missionary preaching which is the fruit of that gift are both signs of the end, signs of the fact that we are living in the last days. The fundamental inner connection between the two may be expressed by saying that
because the salvation purposed by God and revealed in Jesus Christ is a corporate and cosmic salvation and not merely a private and individual salvation, it cannot be known in its fullness until all men have the opportunity of hearing the good news and making the decision of faith. The gospel must be preached to the whole world. The prosecution of the church's mission to the world is in fact,
to revert to language which we have used earlier, the clue to world history. It is the condition to which God has attached the completion of His total cosmic purpose. Incredible though it may seem, that is our faith, that He really does wait for our obedience. That, in a sense, He does depend upon us to be His witness. In speaking of this salvation as corporate and cosmic,
I do not mean to preach universalism. It is quite plainly the teaching of scripture that judgment is an integral part in the total consummation. The return of Christ is, according to a very important strand of New Testament teaching, immediately preceded by the revelation of Antichrist. The world mission, in other words, does not glide
smoothly home to a logically inevitable conclusion. Not only for the individual but also for the world, there is tribulation and conflict to the end. And the final revelation of mercy is at the same time the final revelation of judgment. We shall consider that further when we speak in the next section about the world. This fifth and final element in the mission ties in
with the first. Because the mission springs out of the revealed will of God the Creator, the Creator of heaven and Earth, it ultimately concerns nothing less than the completion and consummation of the whole work of God the Creator. Christ, in other words, in biblical language, is both Alpha and Omega. If He is the one, He is also the other.
If you abandon the biblical eschatology, you will in the end also have to abandon the biblical doctrine of creation. I think that becomes clear in much modern writing.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: What was that again?
NEWBIGIN: That if you abandon the biblical doctrine of eschatology, you will eventually have to abandon the biblical doctrine of creation. Let me try now to summarize what I've said under the heading of the revelation of God's saving purpose, just these five points. One, it has its origin in the Creator Himself. It is in fact the revelation of the true meaning and goal of the whole creation and of human history. Two, it is directed to a situation
of total rebellion. Rebellion of the whole human race against the source of its being. Therefore, it concerns the whole human race. Three, it is carried into effect through a chosen people and conclusively through a chosen one and through a people chosen in Him. It involves, therefore, an actual history with names and dates and places, concrete and individual, and it cannot be
detached from that history. Four, the relation of the Christian mission to the saving action of God in history is that it is both the reporting of this action in explicit verbal witness or evangelism and also, more inclusively, the continuance of that activity, through the work of the Holy Spirit, in creating a community which becomes the instrument
of God's saving action in the world. And fifthly, this saving action is directed to a real future consummation which is both the true end, in the sense of [telos?], of every individual life and also the true end of human history as a whole. This consummation involves judgment. God uses the Christian mission as the instrument
whereby human history is brought to its consummation. In very bald terms, that summarizes what I have tried to say under these five headings. Now, before I go on to speak of the other two main sections, namely, the world and the church, let me pause to interject a note. It will be seen that in dealing with the first of
my three topics, I have not spoken of the message, the kerygma, so much as of God's saving revelation and God's saving action. There is, of course, such a thing as the kerygma, the thing preached, the Christian message, the Word of the cross. It lies at the very heart of the Christian mission. And yet, if I may put it so, I want to emphasize this point,
that the Christian mission cannot be verbalized without remainder. The Christian mission is more than the transmission of something which can, in the last analysis, be reduced to verbal statement. The Word preached, the Word of the cross, is at the heart of the Christian mission. Without it, there is no mission. But if we ask what the mission is,
we have to insist again and again that it is, in its most fundamental sense, the continuing activity of God the Holy Spirit, creating a new kind of community, a regenerate humanity, and pouring out through this God's gift into the world. For this reason, I have sought throughout to emphasize the fact that the mission is embedded in human history and is part
of it and cannot be detached from it. But, and this is the other side of the same truth, the mission is itself the clue to human history, making it plain to eyes of faith that God is really leading the human race through the mission of the church to a consummation which is still in the future. The heart of the matter, in other words, is not a detached verbal message
to be appropriated privately by each individual. It is a concrete historical process, itself the clue to world history, which involves the entire life of the whole human race, secular and not merely what is called religious, and the entire life of every human being. Hence, what I tried to say in the first lecture of these four is not mere prologue but is integral to
what I want to say. And that leads to a second closely related point. In emphasizing this idea of a real series of historical events, a really chosen people, a real bodily resurrection, and a real second coming sometime in the future, nearer this year than it was last year if I understand St. Paul in Romans 13.
In other words, in trying to follow the biblical picture of human history, I know that I am laying myself open to the charge of being too naive. I know that the proponents of the program of demythologizing are warning us not only that the biblical time and space King cannot be used to convey the gospel to modern man but also that the whole idea of a real, concrete historic event is not so simple
and obvious as it seems and may in fact mislead us. I have to confess, hoping to be subject to conviction that I am, as at this date, unrepentant. It may be possibly be that I have been prejudiced by living in India for 21 years, but I would like to ask you to visualize what it feels like to try to preach the gospel in a country for whose
deepest philosophical tradition the difference between a thing which happened and a thing which did not happen is a nonexistent difference. In which, for instance, to ask, "Did the events recorded in the Gita happen or did they not happen?" is a meaningless jumble of sounds. It is a question to which no meaning can be attached. The Gita,
in the form of a historical narrative, sets forth certain ultimate truths about human existence. That is sufficient. There is no truth beyond that. And to ask the question whether these events really happened or not is simply to show that you are living in a world in which truth cannot be apprehended. It seems to me that in that situation, it is perhaps inevitable that the evangelist should be compelled to fall back
more and more heavily on the conviction that there is a difference between something which happened and something which did not happen and that, in the last analysis, our salvation rests upon something which happened, upon something which God did. I know that there is a vast amount that might be said about this, but I want only to ask three questions which seem to me to go to the
root of the matter. And I do so with fear and trembling and also with hope that I may be convicted if I am wrong. Is not Bultmann's fundamental theological error here that, in terms of faith, he treats the cross and the resurrection as the essentially unitary experience which constitutes faith while, in terms of history, he separates the
one from the other and ascribes to the cross a historical actuality which he denies to the resurrection? It does not seem to me ultimately logically possible in the sphere of history to create an absolute dichotomy between two things which, in the sphere of faith, are held to be one. In other words, I have to confess that I am more and more convinced that perhaps the central
question is this: Was that tomb actually empty or not on Sunday morning? I am more and more convinced that the following out to their ultimate issues of the two possible answers to that question, namely yes and no, will, in the last analysis, lead us either to the Christian faith or to some kind of Gnosticism. Secondly,
do not the implications of this become still more clear in Gogarten's defense of Bultmann in the book Demythologizing and History, in which it seems to me that the doctrine of creation is deftly removed from all effective participation in the argument. That book begins by making an absolute dichotomy between metaphysics and history.
A dichotomy which, if the issue with which we are concerned is the possibility of a revelation of ultimate reality on the sphere of history, begs the whole question with which we are concerned. And therefore, it is not surprising that the answer is already contained in the starting point. Hence, as it seems to me in that book, history runs from the fall to the crucifixion.
The possibility of a real resurrection and a real consummation are necessarily excluded because the creation itself has been excluded at the beginning. And thirdly, and here I am conscious of the fact that I may be bringing down vials of wroth upon my head. Is this whole development not a kind of reductio ad absurdum of that strain in Lutheran
theology which tends to take the Word, define the part from the incarnation, and to absolutize it? And is this not a further indication of the fact that we have reached a point in human history where we must try to go on from the Reformation, where we must recognize that the answers given by the Reformers to the issues with which they had to deal, when necessarily distorted
by the distortions against which they had to fight? That in resisting the unbiblical absolutizing of a historical institution, they were in danger of absolutizing a disembodied word and that we are called upon in our day to seek with humility and patience for a theology which will have only one absolute, namely, the Word made flesh?
May I please remind you that there is a question mark at the end of that sentence. I cannot think that this retreat from history into private experience can be more than a temporary thing. Surely, what is required of us is a recovery of the sense of history as a whole and an understanding in terms of present-day events of the biblical faith that God is
leading the whole world to its consummation through the mission of the church. Let me repeat again the thesis which I tried to suggest as the substance of these lectures, that what we are witnessing in the world today is the process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up into that single history whose center is the cross and whose end is the final judgment and mercy of God.
This, in turn, will involve the recovery of a theology which takes the visible church with the fullest seriousness but which, unlike the Middle Ages, conceives that church from start to finish in radically missionary terms. Let me say a little more if I may when I come to the third major heading, "The Church As the Instrument of Mission." And let me turn now to the second
major heading in our search for a theology of mission, namely, the world to which the mission is directed. On the plane from Bombay to Rome -- I do assure you of the fact that I only stopped for two hours in Rome and then went on -- on the plane from Bombay to Rome, I spent my time reading
right through the New Testament once, with a single question in my mind. Namely, what does the New Testament say about the world? And I confess that as a result of doing that, I was profoundly struck by the paradoxical character of what the New Testament teaches about the world. Let me just try to suggest it to you in a few rather
uncoordinated pairs of terms. Firstly, the world belongs to Christ, but it lies in the power of the Devil. The treasures of the world are offered to Him by wise men from far-off pagan nations, but it is the Devil who offers Him the rulership of the world. The world was made by Him, but the world knew Him not. He came to His own,
but His own received Him not. Secondly, He came to save the world, to be the means whereby God should reconcile the world to Himself. He came because God so loved the world. He came not to judge the world but that the world should be saved. Yet, His coming is the judgment of this world. His flesh,
His humanity, is bread for the life of the world. And yet, the offer of that bread, of that sustenance, precipitates judgment. It is the moment at which many of His disciples go back and one of the 12 is declared to be a devil. He has come to gather all men and all nations into one. He is the Good Shepherd
who will bring all together that they may be one flock under one Shepherd. But His coming provokes the hatred of the world. The world hates Him and His disciples. Over against Christ emerges in the New Testament the figure of the Antichrist, the false embodiment of power gathering multitudes together, deceiving even
the elect with signs and wonders. The story of the things to come is depicted as the story of an increasingly fierce conflict between the power of Christ and Antichrist culminating in the victory of Christ. I don't think much notice is paid to the figure of Antichrist in modern, at least English,
theological writing. Those of you who have read that terrible novel of George Orwell, 1984, will perhaps agree with me that Big Brother in that novel is a perfect delineation of Antichrist. That is to say, his essential character is that he looks like Christ. He looks like the universal Savior, the answer to all human needs.
Trust in Big Brother. Big Brother is watching you. Some of you also will have read that unforgettable fragment of Soloviev called A Vision of Anti-Christ with its uncanny perception of the things that were to take place, which have taken place during the 50 years since he wrote it. The point is not merely that there are two opposed
forces but that the opposition is of such a character that it can deceive even the elect. And let us be careful lest we identify the Antichrist too quickly with those things from which we differ. The point is that Antichrist looks like Christ and does things which look like the deeds of Christ. Fourthly, Christ calls a people out of the
world, but He sends them into the world. There is an absolute separation and yet an absolute identification. "They are not of the world as I am not of the world." "I have sent them into the world." "Sanctify them in Thy truth." "You are the salt of the earth," salt to be hidden. Otherwise, it's no use. Called out
to be a church, an ecclesia, but the end of it all is not a church but a city wherein there is no temple. Not a new church but new heavens and a new earth and a new Jerusalem, a city. Fifthly, this people chosen out of the world is at the same time judged by the world for its apostasy. "The world
which does not know God knows God better than the church which does. I have not found such faith. No, not in Israel. I say unto you that many shall come from the East and from the West and shall sit down in the Kingdom of heaven, and the sons of the Kingdom shall be cast out. The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it. The Queen of the South will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it."
Or what about this from St. Paul, quoting Isaiah: "I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation. With a foolish nation, I will make you angry." And Isaiah is so bold as to say, "I have been found by those who did not seek me. I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me. But of Israel," he says, "all day long have I held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people. The peoples that
know not God know Him better than the peoples that do. God uses the disobedience of the heathen to provoke His own people to repentance" -- the obedience of the heathen. I'm sorry. God uses the obedience of the Gentiles to provoke His own people to repentance. Sixth, Christ is the final judge of the world. All men are ultimately judged by their relationship to Him. And yet, He is hidden
in the world. Hidden so that even His own people do not recognize Him. "Lord, when saw we Thee and hungered and fed Thee? When saw we Thee thirsty and gave Thee drink?" Hidden in the world so that even His own people do not recognize Him. And therefore, to meet Christ, you have to go right into the world, into the place where apparently He is not. These are only just
untidy and uncoordinated fragments that come out of a quick reading through the New Testament with that question in mind. How can we summarize them? Is not perhaps better just to leave them as they are with all their ragged edges and think about them because is there not constantly a tendency for us church people not to take the world seriously enough in our churchly thinking? We take it seriously
enough from Monday to Saturday. Is there not need for us to look again at this profoundly paradoxical relationship between Christ and the world? Let me try, in a very brief way, to sum it up in four points. In a more systematic way, I mean. Firstly, fundamentally, God made and God loves the world.
"God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." What a wonderful verse to have at the beginning of our sacred scriptures. That remains the solid foundation underneath all the agony of sin and redemption. God's tender mercies are over all His works. God purposes mercy for all men and for all His creatures. The
same Lord is Lord of all and bestows His riches upon all who call upon Him. There is no distinction between Jew and Greek. In other words, no distinction between churchman and pagan. The same God is rich towards all. But secondly, what does that mean? Does it mean an attitude of quietism? Does it mean that God is in His heaven and somehow everything will come out all right with the world?
No. The logic of the following verses is quite different: "The same God is rich towards all who call upon Him, for everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call upon Him in whom they have not believed, and how are they to believe in whom they have not heard, and how are they to hear without a preacher, and how are you to preach unless you are sent?" The logic of it does not lead into quietism; it leads into mission.
The meaning of the mercy of God is mission. Mission concerns the whole world, as I tried to show in those five points that we had yesterday. The missionary enterprise is the reaching out of God's mercy into the whole world. We need to bear that in mind, don't we? Because so often, missionary thinking has swung back and forwards between two
poles, between a sort of rigoristic exclusivism and a kind of optimistic quietism. On the one hand, the kind of missionary address that you have perhaps heard when the preacher at the end of it tells you that during the 25 minutes that he has been speaking, so many thousand souls have gone forever to their damnation. That kind of hysterical way of speaking about the negative aspect of the
gospel which repels us as impossible to reconcile with the mind of Christ. But then we easily swing back again to the other side, to an easygoing optimism which is perhaps much the more common attitude today, that God is good and that He will somehow see to it that everything comes out all right in the end. In the New Testament, the interesting thing is that we find these two things lying side by side without embarrassment. We find that Peter can say to
Cornelius, "I perceive that God is no respecter of persons and that in every nation, those who call upon Him are acceptable by Him." But that is in the context of an action which leads to Cornelius and his household being baptized. St. Paul can speak in Romans 2 about those that have not the law being given the law in their own [huts?]. He can speak about God rendering to every man according to his own
works, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, for God chose no partiality. But that is in the context of an argument that leads up to the cross as the one mercy seat where the total sinfulness of the human race receives a total pardon. The juxtaposition of these two attitudes of what we may call
exclusivism and inclusivism helps us, I think, to see the perspective of the New Testament in regard to the world. God loves the world. That is the fundamental, basic fact. Therefore, He sends His Son. Therefore, the Son sends you. The mission, with all its travail and agony, is the outreach of the love of God into the world. Some of you may have seen a very fine
and very full and scholarly study by a Dutch theologian whose name, I'm sorry, I've forgotten, on missionary motivation throughout the centuries of the Protestant missionary movement. And he comes down in the end to a very simple line from one of John (inaudible) Wesley's hymns: "Constrained by Jesus' love." And he concludes that in the last analysis, that is the only adequate,
ultimate missionary motivation. But thirdly, love in the end demands all and therefore brings man to the final issues of judgment. The necessary reverse side of God's love is God's judgment. Therefore, immediately after the great text in St. John: "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life." We have these words about judgment. God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned. He who does not believe is condemned already because he [is?] not believe. And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. The love of God necessarily has, as its obverse side, judgment
because love demands everything. We see it in our Lord's dealings with His disciples. We see how tenderly but inexorably He leads them to the final decisions, to the final issues. Never, as we were reminded last night, never transgressing that boundary which He Himself has created to protect our human freedom, our creaturely freedom. Safeguarding the right of even His own
disciples to desert Him and deny Him. Always standing at the door and knocking until finally either the door is opened or the door is finally barred. We see it in His treatment of Judas right up to the end, when He offers him the place of honor and the salt. There is, in the end, no halfway house. Every human soul must
either be finally, utterly surrendered to Christ or utterly cut off from Christ. The meaning of our individual human lives, yours and mine, is that God is dealing with us now day by day in those terms. That is the meaning of our personal histories with all their apparently inexplicable ups and downs and cross currents. It is God dealing
with you and me, leading us to the point where we are finally and utterly His, living lives centered in Him or finally and utterly centered in ourselves. And this is the point which I am trying to make and with which I will conclude. This does not concern merely the private spiritual history of each individual. It concerns the history of the world.
And in the Bible, these two are not separated. Man, as a body-soul unity, is set in the whole created world and in the world of men. He is part of a history which is moving to a real conclusion. Just as in the beginning God, so also in the end God. God, as He is leading each individual soul, so is leading the world
to a real consummation. The history of the world, then, is not a mere stage for a series of individual solo items, each to receive its praise or blame in the wings afterwards. It is a real drama, a real meeting of good and evil, leading to a real end. And the meaning of world history is the outworking to their final issues of the judgment and mercy of God
revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ. Those parts of the New Testament which we call apocalyptic and which we frequently ignore are surely the reminder of that fact. They ought to stand as a perpetual safeguard against our constant tendency to think of the gospel in terms merely of the private spiritual histories of each one of us. You cannot make that separation between each individual
history and the history of the world as a whole. As we were reminded last night, the most deep and interior commitment to God can only be made in the context of the real-life situations in which God has placed us. But again, those real-life situations are not a series of private worlds provided by God for each of us separately. Ultimately, the context of our surrender to God
must be this one world which He has created which He loves, which He has redeemed, and which He is tenderly but inexorably propelling towards the final issues of that redemption.