Sabine Baring-Gould
Samuel J. Stone
Cecil Frances Alexander
Joseph ScrivenMatthew 16:13-23
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man."
What Makes Us Christian?
Our text suggests that we believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God because the Holy Spirit has revealed this truth to us, not because we have learned it from the human perspective. On the other hand, we fail to grasp the necessary, saving significance of Christ’s vulnerable, self-giving love because we think from the human perspective rather than from the divine perspective. The question is how we can put ourselves in position to hear from God and not merely from our own reasoning.
What does it mean to become a Christian? Surely it means that we have faith in the good news that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Savior of all who trust him, Lord of all who obey him. Further, it means not being in the process of being conformed to this world, but rather being in the process of being, degree by degree, transformed by the renewal of our minds in keeping with the perfect will of God that has been revealed in Jesus.
In defining a Christian, I am not judging the salvation of any person. Jesus is the only Savior; he is also the only Judge. He knows the motives of our hearts and the confusions of our minds better than we know our own, let alone what we know of the hearts and minds of our neighbors. It is not our position to judge ourselves or others; it is Jesus’ business, and no one could be more for us than he! I am just talking about what it means to become his follower, to let him be the one friend who most counts through all our lives.
What does it mean to become a Christian? Surely it means that we have faith in the good news that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Savior of all who trust him, Lord of all who obey him. Further, it means not being in the process of being conformed to this world, but rather being in the process of being, degree by degree, transformed by the renewal of our minds in keeping with the perfect will of God that has been revealed in Jesus.
In defining a Christian, I am not judging the salvation of any person. Jesus is the only Savior; he is also the only Judge. He knows the motives of our hearts and the confusions of our minds better than we know our own, let alone what we know of the hearts and minds of our neighbors. It is not our position to judge ourselves or others; it is Jesus’ business, and no one could be more for us than he! I am just talking about what it means to become his follower, to let him be the one friend who most counts through all our lives.
The Enlightenment and Christian Faith
From the mid-17th through the early 19th centuries, a period sometimes called the Enlightenment, the grounds for a crisis of faith were being laid in Western culture. The Enlightenment was a strong movement to base our concept of reality on our observations and theories of physical cause and effect. The Enlightenment certainly brought many good things to our culture, but it also weakened the foundations of faith in divinely revealed truth and in supernatural reality.
Before the period of the Enlightenment concluded, many leading thinkers, most of whom admired the ethical guidance of Jesus, were questioning the doctrines of the virgin birth of Jesus, the atonement achieved by Jesus on the cross, and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead—indeed, questioning anything that involved prophecy or miracles, the supernatural working of God, or even the personal existence of God.
In the years 1835 to 1860, Charles Darwin’s work on the evolution of the species emerged to challenge human understanding of how and whether God had created life. In the years from 1840 to 1860, the work of Karl Marx emerged to claim a material/economic/social class basis for all human ideologies and to suggest that religion was simply a way that economic elites manipulated poor people to keep them from claiming their power as workers. As the Nineteenth Century unfolded, academic criticism of the Bible began to say things such as that Moses had little to do with creating the first Five Books of the Bible, but that these books and most other Bible books, including the Gospels and Letters of the New Testament, resulted from a long cultural process and from ongoing, politically motivated editing. Some preachers were soon backing away from the biblical and historic claims of Christian faith. They put forward re-imaginings of Jesus that matched the social ideals of their time, which look really pitiful now, just as our current-day re-imaginings of Jesus will look in a few decades. This is what happens when we set our minds on human reasoning and not on the ways of God. The battle was on.
Let me be clear. 1. I am not preaching against science. Science helps us in many ways, and, given enough time, science will correct most of its own errors. 2. I am not preaching on behalf of reactionary religion that condemns science without understanding it in order to defend traditional worldviews which are not the point of biblical revelation in the first place. 3. I am not judging the hearts of the religious leaders who surrendered major Christian doctrines. Many of these leaders were compassionate for the poor and forgotten, and were reacting against less compassionate teachings of other religious leaders who claimed to be Bible-based. It was sometimes with good intentions combined with unawareness that they threw out the baby with the bathwater. 4. What I am preaching is that, when the teachings of some portion of the church do not match the compassion of Jesus, we should practice discernment and throw out faulty human interpretations, not the scriptural truth itself.
Many of us tend to think that the battle for biblical truth is something that has happened in our own lifetimes, but this is not true. The battle has been going on for a long time. It came to a head in the 1860’s when faithful Christians made response in two well-known hymns to the heresies and schisms then being spread through the church. “Onward Christian Soldiers” in 1864 and “The Church’s One Foundation” in 1866 may not seem like similar hymns, but their authors had a similar concern that shows up in verses that are seldom sung today.
Before the period of the Enlightenment concluded, many leading thinkers, most of whom admired the ethical guidance of Jesus, were questioning the doctrines of the virgin birth of Jesus, the atonement achieved by Jesus on the cross, and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead—indeed, questioning anything that involved prophecy or miracles, the supernatural working of God, or even the personal existence of God.
In the years 1835 to 1860, Charles Darwin’s work on the evolution of the species emerged to challenge human understanding of how and whether God had created life. In the years from 1840 to 1860, the work of Karl Marx emerged to claim a material/economic/social class basis for all human ideologies and to suggest that religion was simply a way that economic elites manipulated poor people to keep them from claiming their power as workers. As the Nineteenth Century unfolded, academic criticism of the Bible began to say things such as that Moses had little to do with creating the first Five Books of the Bible, but that these books and most other Bible books, including the Gospels and Letters of the New Testament, resulted from a long cultural process and from ongoing, politically motivated editing. Some preachers were soon backing away from the biblical and historic claims of Christian faith. They put forward re-imaginings of Jesus that matched the social ideals of their time, which look really pitiful now, just as our current-day re-imaginings of Jesus will look in a few decades. This is what happens when we set our minds on human reasoning and not on the ways of God. The battle was on.
Let me be clear. 1. I am not preaching against science. Science helps us in many ways, and, given enough time, science will correct most of its own errors. 2. I am not preaching on behalf of reactionary religion that condemns science without understanding it in order to defend traditional worldviews which are not the point of biblical revelation in the first place. 3. I am not judging the hearts of the religious leaders who surrendered major Christian doctrines. Many of these leaders were compassionate for the poor and forgotten, and were reacting against less compassionate teachings of other religious leaders who claimed to be Bible-based. It was sometimes with good intentions combined with unawareness that they threw out the baby with the bathwater. 4. What I am preaching is that, when the teachings of some portion of the church do not match the compassion of Jesus, we should practice discernment and throw out faulty human interpretations, not the scriptural truth itself.
Many of us tend to think that the battle for biblical truth is something that has happened in our own lifetimes, but this is not true. The battle has been going on for a long time. It came to a head in the 1860’s when faithful Christians made response in two well-known hymns to the heresies and schisms then being spread through the church. “Onward Christian Soldiers” in 1864 and “The Church’s One Foundation” in 1866 may not seem like similar hymns, but their authors had a similar concern that shows up in verses that are seldom sung today.
Onward Christian Soldiers
Sabine Baring-Gould was a wealthy heir of an aristocratic family, a Cambridge-educated Anglican priest, an educator, and much more. He was one of the most brilliant and eclectic minds of Victorian and Edwardian England. He spoke six languages, and he wrote about 150 books, including 30 novels and a mammoth 16-volume Lives of the Saints. His work covered a huge range of topics: theology, social commentary, travel, history, geography, linguistics, archaeology, architecture, art, folk tales, folk songs, and so on. He was something of an eccentric. He once taught a class with his pet bat perched on his shoulder. He was a friend of figures as varied as the authors Arthur Conan Doyle, who was anything but orthodox, and George Bernard Shaw, who was a vigorous opponent of Christian faith, and it has even been suggested that Baring-Gould was one of the inspirations for their most famous literary characters: Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Shaw’s Henry Higgins. Like Holmes, Baring-Gould had an impressive array of detailed and seemingly trivial information always in mind for surprising applications. Like Higgins, Baring-Gould arranged for the education of a much younger woman from much lower social class to be his beloved wife. By the way, they had fifteen children, and when his wife died, Baring-Gould put on her gravestone the words, “Half My Soul.” Who would have guessed that a character as eccentric as Baring-Gould, with interests so broad, with friends so diverse, with behavior so unconventional, would be the writer of “Onward Christian Soldiers”?
“Onward Christian Soldiers” is a much misunderstood hymn. It is not at all about participation in the military; it is not about marching to war; it is about marching as to war. Bottom line: it is about standing up for the truth of Jesus. The initial version was written for school children. But the completed six verses have a message that seems better suited to adults. We seldom sing all six verses, but I will read verses 3, 4, and 5 now:
3. Like a mighty army moves the Church of God;Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.We are not divided, all one body we,One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
4. What the saints established that I hold for true.What the saints believèd, that believe I too.Long as earth endureth, men the faith will hold,Kingdoms, nations, empires, in destruction rolled.
5. Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,But the church of Jesus constant will remain.Gates of hell can never ‘gainst that church prevail;We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.
What I value about Baring-Gould is that he proves that you do not have to be stupid, boring, narrow, or uncompassionate to defend orthodox faith; nor do you have to shun unorthodox or unbelieving friends.
The Church's One Foundation
“The Church’s One Foundation” was written by an Oxford-educated Anglican priest, Samuel John Stone, who succeeded his father as the rector of St. Paul’s Church, Haggerston, a poor section of London. Samuel Stone arranged special daily prayer services and space for reading and resting in order to benefit poor commuting workers, many of them young women working as domestic servants. He helped build numerous churches to serve the poor, earning him the title, “the poor man’s pastor.” His hymns have been described as “rhythmic, vigorous, and scriptural.” He was greatly concerned that the criticism of the Bible emerging in his time would undermine the faith and mission of the church. Again, I will read the seldom sung middle verses:
The Church shall never perish! Her dear Lord to defend,To guide, sustain, and cherish, is with her to the end:Though there be those who hate her, and false sons in her pale,Against both foe or traitor she ever shall prevail.
Though with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed,By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed:Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, “How long?”And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!
There Is One Way
We have heard the work of Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander once before this summer. She was the translator from Gaelic of the much older hymn known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” that our Opera of the Ozarks guest sang the Sunday we focused on Celtic hymns. Some of her other hymns you may know are: “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” from which the line, “All Creatures Great and Small,” comes, “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” “Once in Royal David’s City,” and the hymn we will sing today, “Jesus Calls Us O’er the Tumult,” which urges us to choose Jesus and his mission over any worldly distraction.
Cecil was British, but was born in Dublin. She married an Anglican clergyman who later became a Bishop and Archbishop in Ireland. She used money from her publications to found and fund charitable missions for the deaf and mute. She was heavily influenced by the Oxford Movement and its concern for the loss, in its culture and even in its church, of Bible-based faith. Here are a few verses from one of her lesser known hymns expressing this concern as it speaks of Jesus as the Way, the Truth, the Life:
There is one Way, and only one, out of our gloom, and sin, and care,To that far land where shines no sun because the face of God is there.
There is one Truth, the Truth of God, that Christ came down from Heav’n to show,One Life that His redeeming blood has won for all His saints below.
O Way divine, through gloom and strife, bring us Thy Father’s face to see;O heav’nly Truth, O precious Life, at last, at last, we rest in Thee.
This concern for upholding biblical faith is not a mere academic problem. Sometimes life is hard and cruel. What will we do in such times if we have not a faith that is greater than our own passing ideas and fancies, if we have not a Savior whose love is faithful and sure in all circumstances?
Why Our One True Friend Is So Important
Consider the life of Joseph Scriven, who like Cecil Frances Alexander was born of a prosperous family in Dublin, Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College there. At age twenty-five, two things happened that drove him from Ireland. His religious views alienated him from portions of his family. His fiancé drowned the night before their scheduled wedding. Isolated and in grief, Scriven moved to Canada. In Canada, a second fiancé also died, this one of pneumonia.
From that time, Scriven developed a totally different pattern of life. He began to take the Sermon on the Mount literally. It is said that he gave freely of his limited possessions, even sharing the clothing from his own body. A man who, seeing Scriven in the streets of Port Hope, Ontario, with his woodcutting equipment, asked, "Who is that man? I want him to work for me." The answer was, "You cannot get that man; he saws wood only for poor widows and sick people who cannot pay." Upon learning of his mother's serious illness and unable to be with her in far-off Dublin, he wrote a letter of comfort enclosing the words of a poem he had written for her. Sometime later when he himself was ill, a friend who came to call on him chanced to see the poem scribbled on scratch paper near the bed. The friend read it with keen interest and asked Scriven if he had written the words. Scriven, with typical modesty, replied, "The Lord and I did it between us." Although not great literature, the poem expressed clearly the heartfelt comfort Christians may draw from prayerful trust in Jesus. It has become one of the favorite hymns of all time, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus” reminds us why it is so terribly important to hold onto the biblical Jesus reported to us in the inspired Scriptures. If we continually re-imagine Jesus to fit our changing likings, we will not have left to us in our times of need a real and faithful friend who is unfailingly able to connect us to our Creator. If we want to have something to offer the world that is better than the musings of television talk shows and of the self-help shelves at the bookstore, we had better get something that comes from God, the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the sacred Scriptures by the Apostles.
From that time, Scriven developed a totally different pattern of life. He began to take the Sermon on the Mount literally. It is said that he gave freely of his limited possessions, even sharing the clothing from his own body. A man who, seeing Scriven in the streets of Port Hope, Ontario, with his woodcutting equipment, asked, "Who is that man? I want him to work for me." The answer was, "You cannot get that man; he saws wood only for poor widows and sick people who cannot pay." Upon learning of his mother's serious illness and unable to be with her in far-off Dublin, he wrote a letter of comfort enclosing the words of a poem he had written for her. Sometime later when he himself was ill, a friend who came to call on him chanced to see the poem scribbled on scratch paper near the bed. The friend read it with keen interest and asked Scriven if he had written the words. Scriven, with typical modesty, replied, "The Lord and I did it between us." Although not great literature, the poem expressed clearly the heartfelt comfort Christians may draw from prayerful trust in Jesus. It has become one of the favorite hymns of all time, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus” reminds us why it is so terribly important to hold onto the biblical Jesus reported to us in the inspired Scriptures. If we continually re-imagine Jesus to fit our changing likings, we will not have left to us in our times of need a real and faithful friend who is unfailingly able to connect us to our Creator. If we want to have something to offer the world that is better than the musings of television talk shows and of the self-help shelves at the bookstore, we had better get something that comes from God, the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the sacred Scriptures by the Apostles.
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