Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org
Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org
Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org
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sanctification; for in both cases a believer testifies to a work consciously wrought in him by the<br />
power of the Holy Spirit. Fancy and fanaticism are deeply seated in human nature. Nevertheless,<br />
experience is experience. Unless Methodists have wholly misread the Bible, it teaches the working<br />
of the mighty power of God in human souls. If it is a reality, we cannot but know it. If it is a<br />
delusion, let us give up at once and forever the contention that religion is the life of God in the soul<br />
of man, and deny that men are partakers of the divine nature. When freed from self-deception and<br />
the possible admixtures of error imposed from without by traditional formulas, in the light of which<br />
another seeks to lead the subject of experience to explain it, experience stands in the soul itself for<br />
indisputable reality -- otherwise all the personal religious foundations are gone. If there are not<br />
verifiable certainties of Christian experience, Methodism has been from the beginning a stupendous<br />
blunder. The late Dr. R. W. Dale, in his "Living Christ and the Four Gospels," gives a vivid picture<br />
of the dissipation of a Christian scholar's doubts by a plain man's experience. The learned divine<br />
leaves his study and finds his way to a humble home where "he sits by the side of some poor, aged,<br />
and illiterate man, whose strength is slowly wasting, and the conditions of whose life are very<br />
cheerless; but the old man had traveled by the same path that all the saints have traveled. As the<br />
scholar listened, he could recall, at point after point, identical experiences of his own. It was as if the<br />
man were telling the story of years which he had spent in some foreign country which the scholar<br />
also had visited. They had seen the same cities and harbors and churches and palaces, the same ruins,<br />
the same mountains and rivers, the same crops, the same trees and flowers. The old man's account<br />
of them was very different from what his own account would have been, the old man's theories and<br />
explanations of them and his own were still more different, but it was certain that what he had seen<br />
the old man had seen."<br />
The doctrinal rather than the experimental presentation of Christian truth has characterized for<br />
the most part the method of theologians. To this rule, John Wesley, as in so many other particulars,<br />
was a noteworthy exception: in few other things have his wisdom and independence, his common<br />
sense and courage, been more conspicuously displayed. The Christian consciousness, with its<br />
well-defined peculiarities, of which many German theologians since Schleiermacher's day have made<br />
so much -- some of them seeking to draw the entire system of dogmatics from this source -- had in<br />
Wesley's time been ignored or underestimated. As in many questions of Biblical criticism, both as<br />
to method and results, the founder of Methodism anticipated some of the most recent advances of<br />
the highest scholarship -- compare his text emendations and translations in his "Notes on the New<br />
Testament" with the Revised Version of 1881 -- so he was one of the earliest theologians and<br />
religious teachers to draw attention to the doctrinal as well as the practical value of religious<br />
experience, and to insist on the evidential value of the Christian consciousness. Every thoughtful<br />
reader of that most marvelous record of apostolic activities outside the Holy Scriptures, Wesley's<br />
Journal, must have been struck with the confirmation of his own faith which John Wesley derived<br />
from the experiences of the people called Methodists whom God raised up under his ministry.<br />
Dr. Brooks seems to me to have kept in the main to the well-defined truths of Wesleyan<br />
orthodoxy on the subject of entire sanctification. He is not only Wesleyan, but, what is better, he is<br />
scriptural, devoting his first eleven chapters to "the removing of those things that are shaken, as of<br />
things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." Whatever be the<br />
advance in modern forms of statement, it is necessary to allow that the essential, delivering truths<br />
of the gospel have been recognized in their true light, and realized in their appointed power, since