Pendulum of Human Nature

Dear Friends,

There is something almost inevitable about human nature that causes it to move from one extreme to the other; like the famed pendulum of the clock, having swung to one side of a theological position it then swings to the other and finds it hard to settle in a vertical position for very long.

In recent years, we have seen a distinct movement away from what has come to be called “subjective” Christianity, and this we welcome with all our heart. Subjective Christianity is really bound up with what a person “feels” about a certain or given course of action or volume of truth. What determines the course to be taken, or the acceptability of the truth presented, is how the person is made to “feel” about the thing in question. So there has developed the formula that Christianity is “better felt than telt.” That is, the credibility of the Christian faith lies with experiencing some good feeling within one's heart and not with the exercising of a God-given faith in the revelation of His will given to us through His Holy Word.

The latter would come under the heading of “objective” Christianity, and the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is simply illustrated in this way: some one buys a new motor car – say a black Anglia; no doubt, because he personally “feels” that's the colour and kind of car he wants. His friends have all different ideas: one thinks it's good to have an Anglia, another prefers to have a Morris; one thinks that black is a nice colour, another thinks black is a terrible colour. Now they are all absolutely correct as far as their subjective judgment of the car is concerned; it is a good car and it is not a good car; it is a nice colour and it is not a nice colour, in so far as each individual person's feelings are concerned. What is collectively beyond dispute, however, is that it is a motor car! Whether it is a good motor car or not, or a nice colour or not, depends entirely on each and every person's subjective assessment on those points, but one thing is perfectly clear the object before them is a motor car.

Now then, objective Christianity says that what the Lord has delivered to us in His Holy Word is an “objective” volume of truth given to us as the means of conducting our Christian life. The Word of God must not be subjected to our feelings, but our feelings must ever be subjected to the Word of God. Our feelings as to whether or not we should run our lives or conduct our churches in a certain manner will only prove to be the blind leading the blind, and the footsteps of the saints are always to be directed to what the Lord has to say in His revealed Word. Caleb and his fellow-Israelites provided a good illustration of this; remember why the ten spies wouldn't enter the land and what they did to the people? They “made the heart of the people melt,” it says. They began to relate their own feelings about the “giants” and how they were but “grasshoppers” before them, and the people began to quake. But read the account of Caleb, and Joshua, too; time and time again we find Caleb using expressions like this – “as the Lord said” – “He spake” – “according to as the Lord spake” – and so on. He looked to what God had said and with objective faith in that word he conducted his life accordingly.

Now, of course, the crux of the matter comes in this way: Caleb knew what God was revealing to him through what He spoke, and so was able to take that word objectively. But, and essentially lazy evangelicalism has long-since ceased to search out the Word of the Lord, and a preacher who can go the rounds of the well-known gospel and “ministry” texts is immediately cast as an expositor of God's truth. Evangelicalism for years has held up the Bible, declaring that it “believes” it from Genesis to Revelation, yet hardly aware of what lies outwith John 3 verse 16 and the other well-attested grounds of orthodoxy. And it is when the whole counsel of God begins to be declared that we see also the clearest rift between the objective and the subjective in a great many people's Christianity. Don't “Tell” me what the Bible says, I know how I “feel,” and that's the important thing; it can't be wrong, or else I wouldn't feel so much at peace. You get it in the silly chorus, “You ask me how I know He lives, He lives within my heart.” Poor bereft soul! The only way we know He lives is through the objective truth of the resurrection revealed to us in the infallible Word of our God; “For I delivered unto you,” says Paul to the Corinthians, “that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures … and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” No “feelings” set forth there by Paul to make the resurrection credible to him or to any one else; and any “feelings” that he might have would be deemed allowable or unallowable in so far as they squared with the objective word of scripture.

But, and with this we briefly close, in swinging the pendulum from the subjective to the objective, let us not run the hazard of imagining that we are to abandon “heart” religion. An objective faith in the Word of God that does not warm the heart is no faith at all.

Yours Sincerely,
   W.J. Seaton