§ 100. The Redeemer assumes believers into the power of His God-consciousness,1 and this is His redemptive activity. 1. In virtue of the teleological character of Christian piety, both the imperfect stage of the higher life, as also the challenge of it, appear in our self-consciousness as facts due to our own individual action—though we do not feel responsible for the latter in the same way as for the former. In virtue, however, of the peculiar character of Christianity this challenge is also apprehended in our self-consciousness as the act of the Redeemer.2 These two points of view can be reconciled only by supposing that this challenge is the act of the Redeemer become our own act. And this, accordingly, is the best way of expressing the common element in the Christian consciousness of the divine grace. Hence, from this point of view, the peculiar work of the Redeemer would first be to evoke this act in us. But if we regard the matter more closely, it is clear that what we have thus described is in every case an act both of the Redeemer and of the redeemed. The original activity of the Redeemer, therefore, which belongs to Him alone, and which precedes all activity of our own in this challenge, would be that by means of which He assumes us into this fellowship of His activity and His life. The continuance of that fellowship, accordingly, constitutes the essence of the state of grace; the new corporate life is the sphere within which Christ produces this act; in it is revealed the continuous activity of His sinless perfection.
But His act in us can never be anything but the act of His sinlessness and perfection as conditioned by the being of God in Him. And so these too in addition must become ours, because otherwise it would not be His act that became ours. Now the individual life of each one of us is passed in the consciousness of sin and imperfection. Hence we can know, the fellowship of the Redeemer only in so far as we are not conscious of our own individual life; as impulses flow to us from Him, we find that in Him from which everything proceeds to be the source of our activity also—a common possession, as it were. This too is the meaning of all those passages in Scripture which speak of Christ being and living in us,3 of being dead to sin,4 of putting off the old and putting on the new man.5 But Christ can only direct His God-consciousness against sin in so far as He enters into the corporate life of man and sympathetically shares the consciousness of sin, but shares it as something He is to overcome.6 This very consciousness of sin as something to be overcome becomes the principle of our activity in the action which He evokes in us. But our own immediate experience in being thus assumed into the fellowship of Christ will be explained in the first Doctrine of the second main Division, which deals with forgiveness. And the further development of this fellowship in time, through a series of common actions, is the subject of the second Doctrine, dealing with sanctification. Here we have only to explain more exactly what the Redeemer does and how He accomplishes it.
- All Christ’s activity, then, proceeds from the being of God in Him. And we know no divine activity except that of creation, which includes that of preservation, or, conversely, that of preservation, which includes that of creation. So we shall have to regard Christ’s activity too in the same way. We do not, however, exclude the soul of man from creation, in spite of the fact that the creation of such a free agent and the continued freedom of a being created in the context of a greater whole is something which we cannot expect to understand; all that we can do is to recognize the fact. The same is true of the creative activity of Christ, which is entirely concerned with the sphere of freedom. For His assumptive activity is a creative one, yet what it produces is altogether free. Now the being of God in Him as an active principle is timeless and eternal, yet its expressions are all conditioned by the form of human life. It follows that He can influence what is free only in accordance with the manner in which it enters into His sphere of living influence, and only in accordance with the nature of the free. The activity by which He assumes us into fellowship with Him is, therefore, a creative production in us of the will to assume Him into ourselves, or rather—since it is only receptiveness for His activity as involved in the impartation7—only our assent to the influence of His activity. But it is a condition of that activity of the Redeemer that the individuals should enter the sphere of His historical influence, where they become aware of Him in His self-revelation. Now this assent can only be conceived as conditioned by the consciousness of sin; yet it is not necessary that this should precede entrance into the sphere of the Redeemer. Rather it may just as well arise within that sphere as the effect of the Redeemer’s self-revelation, as indeed it certainly does come to full clarity only as we contemplate His sinless perfection. Accordingly, the original activity of the Redeemer is best conceived as a pervasive influence which is received by its object in virtue of the free movement with which he turns himself to its attraction, just as we ascribe an attractive power to everyone to whose educative intellectual influence we gladly submit ourselves. Now, if every activity of the Redeemer proceeds from the being of God in Him, and if in the formation of the Redeemer’s Person the only active power was the creative divine activity which established itself as the being of God in Him, then also His every activity may be regarded as a continuation of that person-forming divine influence upon human nature. For the pervasive activity of Christ cannot establish itself in an individual without becoming person-forming in him too, for now all his activities are differently determined through the working of Christ in him, and even all impressions are differently received—which means that the personal self-consciousness too becomes altogether different. And just as creation is not concerned simply with individuals (as if each creation of an individual had been a special act), but it is the world that was created, and every individual as such was created only in and with the whole, for the rest not less than for itself, in the same way the activity of the Redeemer too is world-forming, and its object is human nature, in the totality of which the powerful God-consciousness is to be implanted as a new vital principle. He takes possession of the individuals relatively to the whole, wherever He finds those in whom His activity does not merely remain, but from whom, moving on, it can work upon others through the revelation of His life. And thus the total effective influence of Christ is only the continuation of the creative divine activity out of which the Person of Christ arose. For this, too, was directed towards human nature as a whole, in which that being of God was to exist, but in such a way that its effects are mediated through the life of Christ, as its most original organ, for all human nature that has already become personal in the natural sense, in proportion as it allows itself to be brought into spiritual touch with that life and its self-perpetuating organism. And this in order that the former personality may be slain and human nature, in vital fellowship with Christ, be formed into persons in the totality of that higher life.