I think, the Wrangler said, it’s white,Still, it’s important to be right,So while fresh evidence we lack,It might seem safer to say black.
That is not a bad maxim for scholarship, but it won’t do for the whole of life. A person who lives on thought only, is starving part of himself. He is like a would-be athlete who spends all his time doing push-ups so he will have shoulders like a buffalo, but keeps a pair of spindly legs.
But there is a great deal yet to say. So far I might have been talking merely about an attitude to life, and stressing the importance of not neglecting any side of our nature. This is no doubt true, and it is not Christian faith. This is, as Paul tells us, directed towards a very definite Christian fact. “If they shall believe in their hearts that God raised Christ from the dead.” Here is the root of Christian faith in more senses than one. See what it is that Paul picks out here. It is not any particular deed or saying of Jesus himself. The central faith is that God raised him from the dead, the life and death of Jesus was the central context of God’s action, of the divine invasion of human life. Faith therefore means the relating of ourselves, of our whole selves, thought, feeling and will, to God in Christ. Faith is the incredible bridge which spans the gulf between God and a human being. Faith lays hold of Christ who is God and man.
Faith then is our relation with God, not so much our hold on God as his hold on us. As such (let us work this out) it does involve thought. It involves everyone in thought, according to their capacity for thought. You must think about Christ. You must think about God. You must think about life to find out its purpose in relation to God.
Similarly, it involved feeling. Suppose you do think in faith about Christ; you remember that he died for you, that you have again, and again, and again sinned against him. Do you not feel it? If Wordsworth will say about the prospect of the city of London “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty”8 then I say dull indeed would be the Christian soul who could survey the wondrous Cross and be content to catalog it in the card index in his brain.
And it involves will, all the practical activities of life, for as Paul says, “a person believes unto righteousness.” This too is a relation, a right relation with God, but it is worked out in the practical affairs of life. Thinking and feeling that stop short of this remind me of the nursery rhyme about the centipede.
The centipede was happy quite,Until the toad in fun,Said ‘Why which leg comes after which?Which worked him up to such a pitch He lay distracted in a ditch,Considering how to run.9
With the heart a person believes, believes in the living Christ and the end of that faith is righteousness. Faith is an affair of the heart, it means being right with God, and it has the most practical of consequences. Secondly, with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
WITH THE MOUTH CONFESSION IS MADE UNTO SALVATION
Faith is an affair of the heart, of the whole moral life of a person. It comes out in righteousness, in the conformity of the whole life to the will of God. It comes out also in speech. It is emphatically a thing not to be concealed, to be hushed up. It is (as Ignatius said more than eighteen centuries ago) a thing for sharing. I hope no one will misunderstand this. It is not a plea that we should ram religion down people’s throats, that we should continually (or ever) be making priggish assertions of our own particular beliefs. The trouble is that the most vocal people are not those who really believe in God, but in fact those who believe in themselves and conceal the fact under a veneer of Christian language. The noisiest people are not by any means the best and most faithful Christians.
Do you remember how Coriolanus greets his wife Virgilia in Shakespeare’s play? “My gracious silence,” he calls her. There is good advice in that, for more than the ladies too. He means that his wife’s silent greeting to him means more than all the cheers that meet him as a victorious general. I have known very many Christians who have deserved that title. By their silence they have done so much for Christ and more, than we noisy people who stand in the pulpits. If you are one of Christ’s “gracious silences” don’t by any means covet someone’s glib tongue. A tongue is a deadly danger, as your own New Testament warns you. What do I mean then by quoting this phrase?
“With the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” I can put it this way. Members of the German Church talk much these days about a “state of conferring.” By that they mean that sometimes there are occasions when the issues of the faith become so much alive that the Church must speak and define. There were such occasions in the fourth century, hence the great crop of creeds which sprang up at that time, some of which are still used today. Such a time occurred again at the Reformation. Luther and others could see the deadly peril of the Church and they knew they had to speak out freely and precisely—hence the Augsburg Confession and the Helvetic Confession, the Formula Concordiae and other documents. Now, say the conferring Christians in Germany (and I believe they are right) do so again for we live in such times. Nazi paganism has pushed the Church into a state of confession again. Hence they have made this Barmen Declaration.
I want to make clear the point that is in my mind. I am using this ancient and modern history as an illustration. My point is that for the individual and for the Church there are times of confession, when the duly honorable, safe, and Christian thing to do is to confess one’s faith. What Paul has here chiefly in mind is baptism, in a day when inevitably baptism was not a rite for children, but the admission of adult converts into the Church. It is hard to conceive of anyone deciding to be a Christian without making public confession of faith in one way or another, without saying, “Jesus is Lord—for me too.”
And other times? How can I define them? How can I tell you to be a Christian and not to be a prig? No one can do that for you. I can tell you this—the closer you live to Christ, the more certainly you will know. If you really have the faith in your heart, I am not worried about the words in your mouth. If you are really joined to God in Christ, he will give you the right words at the right time and place. There is a vast amount more to say about this, but this must do for now.
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7. Editor’s Note: Charles Kingsley (1819–73), for whom CKB was named, was a famous nineteenth-century Anglican priest, social reformer, university professor, historian and novelist. He was particularly associated with a form of Christian socialism.
8. Editor’s Note: This is lines two and three of Wordsworth’s poem Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802.
9. Editor’s Note: A poem attributed to Katherine Craster in the mid-nineteenth century, which came to be called “the Centipede’s Dilemma.”
“CONFESS WITH THE MOUTH AND BELIEVE IN THE HEART”—Romans 10.9
[Preached three times from 7/28/02 at Bishop Auckland to 5/14/06 at Sacriston]
When you read these words you are reading one of the oldest parts of the New Testament. You are seeing words that Christians were using before any part of the New Testament was written. Paul slips in these little pieces of tradition from time to time. He does it (for instance when he writes to Corinth—“I delivered unto you first of all that which I also had received, how that Christ had died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he had been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas. . .” And he goes on adding names of those to whom the risen Christ had appeared, until of course he comes to his own). This
