Six Letters to a Mother on Church Questions - 1st Letter

SIX LETTERS TO A MOTHER ON CHURCH QUESTIONS

by Richard Holden 

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First Letter

Bath, 12th December, 1872

DEAREST MOTHER,

It is now over six months since I “took my place” among “Brethren”, and I feel it is time I gave you some account of the grounds of that step.

It is already, as you will recollect, over eight years, since, for conscience sake, I laid aside the gown and surplice, without seeing anything better to which I could with hearty conviction attach myself. You know already how, although I enjoyed much pleasant and profitable communion with those among whom I spent the following seven years abroad, I was never able to see my way to a full identification with their “unattached” Church system, and how I came home last year for the express purpose of investigating the position and views of “Brethren”, concerning whom I had obtained some imperfect information. You also know how, after leaving you in Düsseldorf, I gave myself, during last winter, to the examination of the subject, and how, early in the past summer I took my stand. I don’t mean to tie you with the history of the process of investigation through which I reached my final convictions, but I must just touch rapidly on one or two facts in the past, that may help you to understand me better.

Two-and-twenty years ago the Lord converted me in my own chamber - the time you will recollect. One of the first movements of the new life within me was the outgoing of my heart towards all who loved the Lord. I had a vivid sense of the brotherhood in Christ, which from the first over-leaped "denominational" boundaries. I felt myself "one" with all who were in Christ, and had an instinctive and painful perception of the wrongness divisions among the Lord's people. I sorrowed over the separations, but soon learned to acquiesce in the hopelessness of the position, and got used to it. Feeling, however, that a sectarian spirit was not the mind of Christ, I carefully avoided nourishing it in my own heart, and rejoiced in all movements of a union character, as the nearest feasible approach towards the long-lost oneness. I was convinced that the unity advocated by Papists and High Churchmen was a sham - a unity of death and not of life - I could never feel the slightest sympathy with their thoughts or efforts.

Still I saw in the Scriptures that it was the mind of God that His Church should be one. I saw that the chief obstacle to the oneness was the differing views as to "Church government." I could not find in God's word a solid foundation for any one of the various "systems" I saw around me - nothing in any that commanded my faith, as being of God. I was long perplexed that God should have left the subject, as I thought, so much in the dark, and I finally settled down on the following conclusion.

I reasoned thus: In both Testaments there is the same Divine mind revealing itself - a mind superior to all caprice. In the older I see that Divine mind regulating human worship and service with the utmost minuteness of detail. In the other I see the same mind acting under a changed dispensation, and I find apparently as studied an absence of exact prescription as there had been its presence in the former. Liberty, I argued, must be the intention here, and unity in diversity the Divine ideal of the Church. The radical error of sectarianism I thus deemed to be the straining after a forced uniformity; its preventive or its remedy, the full recognition of mutual liberty in Christ - communion, unhindered by differences, where vital truth was held, and each Church left to cast itself into whatever mould it judged most suitable.

Standing on such ground, you can readily understand that I viewed all questions of "Church government" as simple matter of expediency, and, excepting in so far as one might commend itself more than another on that score, I should have had no conscientious difficulty about fellowship with any orthodox communion. I did not quit the "Church” (so-called) from any scruple as to its constitution, but on account of the doctrinal error tolerated in it. 

Scarce any view of the subject could have been more opposite to the revealed mind of God (as now see it in the Word), or more dishonouring to Him who "is not the author of confusion"; and yet I feel it still to be the only logical position if it be assumed that there must be some "system” of Church organization, with an "ordained" - or, as it sometimes called, a “settled” - ministry. 

The prepossession of my mind by this quasi-axiom of a must be was the hindrance to my understanding of the Divine thought about the Church as unfolded in the New Testament; as it has been, I believe, the hindrance to Protestants generally from the Reformation downward. The Reformers were godly and faithful men. They did God's work nobly up to the measure of the light they discerned. They did perfectly right to separate from Rome and her corruptions. Their work was of God; it was owned of God, and has been the source of incalculable blessing. But it was not perfect. A radical defect dwarfed it in its very cradle. They failed to take a true estimate of the Church's position before God, as it then stood. Never having seen it in its integrity, they failed to perceive and confess the ruin. 

I do not mean that they failed to perceive many of the errors that corrupted the Church - their perception of these was what drove them out of Popery - but that they failed to discern the true bearing of those errors on the Church's position, and, consequently, to take up the true attitude before God. They looked on them too much as the "errors of Popery". They did not perceive that the whole Church (so far as committed to man's responsibility) was involved in a common ruin, and that there existed no authority competent to its reform.

Suppose, dear mother, that when we were yet children, you had set two of us a task, and told us to have it ready against your return in an hour, and we disobeyed you and failed to do it?

Suppose that you had then put us in corners of the room, and told us to stand there for half-an-hour?

Suppose that both of us were sorry for what we had been guilty of, and on talking it over together, after you had left, one said to the other, “I think we had better take up the task again and finish it against mother comes; she will be sure to be better pleased with us, and it will be much more sensible than standing here wasting our time in doing nothing”; while the other replied, "No; we have no authority from mother to do that now; the right thing is to stay where she has put us, and where we have brought ourselves by our naughtiness. I can’t take part with you in what you have set about, and I advise you to drop it, and go back into your corner”. 

Which of the two would you have commended when, on your return, you found one at work on the unfinished task, and the other in his corner? Would you not have told the former that to take up the task again was only a fresh exhibition of self-will and a renewed act of disobedience?

Well, that is just, in principle, the mistake the Reformers made, and that we have all been going on in - the mistake has resulted in all the existing confusion, and will, so sure as Scriptures speaks truth, bring down God’s judgment on the professing Church at the last.

All reform movements have, from the first, proceeded on the principle that somewhere or other in the Church there existed authority competent to this, though their promoters have differed widely as to where such authority was vested. Some have thought they found it in civil rulers, some in bishops, some in synods or presbyteries, others in the congregation or in their individual selves. But whatever shape the ideas have taken, the underlying principle has invariably (or with but rare exception) been, that by some existing authority, whatever of Church order existed under the apostles might be restored; and hence the effort of each sect has always been to sustain from Scripture, with or without the help of tradition, that this or that system was after the true apostolic model. 

A false start brings a bootless journey. An unsound foundation makes a rickety building. Once off the track there is no getting on it again, till you know you are off it, and where and how. Failure and ruin have overtaken the present dispensation, just as they did those that preceded; and God's children will hardly discern the pathway of duty through the ruin, till they understand something of its nature and extent.

We must see what the Word of God and the facts of the case teach us about it.

I will touch on just one or two of the more prominent features of the ruin.

As one casts the eye over Christendom - or what professes the name of Christ - one is at once struck by the number of "Churches" into which it is divided - not in the sense of local assemblies of one great body, as the plural is employed in Scripture, but independent bodies, owning no mutual connection, and having no mutual co-operation, but fenced off from each other by carefully-guarded boundaries, and oftentimes pitted against each other in bitter hostility - a jargon of names which it is painful to listen to. One does indeed detect occasional overleaping of the boundaries, for the interchange of courtesy or a little outside co-operation. Now and then a minister of one denomination will invite one of another sect to fill his pulpit or minister to his flock on an occasion, or will place himself alongside others on the platform of a Bible Society meeting or in the congress of an Evangelical Alliance; but such fitful efforts at union only serve to indicate, that there is an inner consciousness in Christian souls that the divisions are wrong, and that things are out of joint.

The contrast between the Christendom of the nineteenth century and the Church of apostolic days is as marked as it is humiliating. The sacred writers picture to us a single united body in the midst of the world - one Church, and one only. There are, indeed, local assemblies or Churches, as demanded by the necessity of the case - perhaps more than one in a city, where numbers compelled - but all were in full communion, every part with every other part. There is mutual dependence, mutual co-operation, and one common name including all - “the Church of God”. They know no other, they seek no other, they need no other. Having no separate interests, no separate organizations, no separate corporate entity, they needed no distinctive "denominational" names. Ministering brethren were seen moving to and fro among the local churches in perfect freedom, and, where they come, they minister, not by courtesy or on sufferance, but as a matter of course. The germs of coming evil are there, it is true; the tendency to names and sects crops up in Corinth; but apostolic authority is still in acknowledged vigour, and the plague stayed for a time. Whatever inward contentions there may have been, the Church of God remained a unity till the close of the Scripture canon.

Look again at ministry as it now exists. How shocking the spectacle! Vastly the larger proportion of those who in Christendom profess to be ministers of Christ are unconverted men. Thousands of them are teachers of deadly error of every shade, down even to open infidelity. A man-made ministry has superseded a ministry in the power of the Holy Ghost; and fearful indeed have been the consequences. How dreadful the picture of congregations on congregations consigned to the care of men who either poison them with false doctrine or starve them through ignorance of the truth. True it is, that some Protestant denominations have sought to correct this horrible abuse, and with a measure of success; but, alas! one sees even these tending again towards the same old evil, as the inevitable consequence of seeking to reform abuses on merely human authority and grounds, instead of recurring at once and alone to those of God.

I will instance but one fact in evidence of the doctrinal confusion and its long and universal prevalence.

The (so-called) Apostles’ Creed is the oldest and by far the most generally accepted ecclesiastical document that exists. It dates from the second century. Look at its very first article. “I believe in God the Father Almight, Maker of heaven and earth”. Has it ever once struck you that there is here a flat contradiction of Scripture? I don’t suppose it ever has; it never arrested my own attention till pointed out to me, though as clergyman I used it constantly for years. But there the contradiction stands. It ascribes creation to God the Father, and to Him alone, whilst Scripture never once does so, but invariably to the Son, unless it be in general to God as such. Turn up the Word and look at it. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Now the Father is God, the Son is God, and Holy Ghost is God: which then of the three persons in the Godhead was the active agent? Look at Hebrews 1. Here again it is God who is introduced creating; but is distinctly declared to have been by the Son (ver. 2,8,10, etc.). Could anything be simpler? It is the testimony of both Old Testament and New. But look, further, at John 1:1-3. There again you have creation ascribed to “The Word” - the Son; and so in Col. 1:16.*

What shall we call this? Is it not, to say the very least, remarkable carelessness and trifling with God’s truth? And of what fearful misconstruction is it not susceptible, when viewed along with the fact that there is not in that creed a single ascription of Godhead to either the Son or the Holy Ghost? I no longer wonder at the so early introduction of Arianism into the church, and that the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were needed to undo the mischief the other had laid the foundation for. I do not mean that such was the intention of it; but it is a speaking fact that the very first known attempt made by man to improve on the divinely-appointed standard of doctrine, should have resulted in a creed whose very first article is a flat contradiction of the written Word, and to which a Unitarian might easily subscribe.

Who shall say, dearest mother, that this confusion, this jumble, we look around on, is according to the mind of God - the thing intended by Him? And if not according to His mind and intention, what else is it but failure - ruin - sin? It it not time for us to be asking whether there be not something better than quietly making the best of matters, and going on in the evil - wheter there be not a divine path - a path which God would have His children take in the midst of it all? Thank God there is; and I have found it at last by His grace: a path so simple and easy, so sure and so blessed; such a rest in the midst of the turmoil - a rest in God - that I long for you and all I love to share it with me. I pray that He may help me to set it clearly and simply before you, and you to discover it in His Word, and receive it to His glory. 

I shall write further about it soon, if He will, and meanwhile I commend you all to His love and grace.

Your ever affectionate son,
RICHARD HOLDEN.

*The agency of the Spirit is also introduced in Gen. 1:2; Job 26:18; Ps. 33:6, civ.30; where He appears to act as “the Spirit of Christ” or as His agent; as He does in the new creation under the Gospel, Rom 8:9, etc.