§ 107. Assumption into living fellowship with Christ, regarded as a man’s changed relation to God, is his Justification; regarded as a changed form of life, it is his Conversion.
- Seeing that we are here concerned simply with the situation of the individual in his transition from the corporate life of sinfulness to a living fellowship with Christ, we must use this situation to explain the necessary connexion of the two elements just specified. ‘Form of life’ is to be understood simply as the fashion in which the time-elements of life happen and arrange themselves; and self-consciousness is viewed as passing into action, that is to say, as basis of the will. In the condition left behind, the stirrings of a self-consciousness suffused with a consciousness of God were never determinative of the will, being but casual and fleeting; the sensuous consciousness alone was determinative. When life is linked to Christ it is the other way about, and this change is expressed by the term ‘conversion.’ As a matter of fact, our relation to God is really an affair of the quiescent self-consciousness, looking at itself reflected in thought and finding a consciousness of God included there. Now we know that only one relationship to the divine holiness and righteousness is proper to the corporate life of sinfulness, namely, the self-consciousness of guilt and merited punishment.1 Obviously this relation must vanish at the very beginning of living fellowship with Christ, and not at some later stage of its development towards perfection, for the two are contradictory; there can be no true consciousness of fellowship with Christ as long as that other consciousness persists.
It is clear also that the two elements cannot be held separate in such a manner that a conversion could even be imagined without justification, or a justification without conversion. Justification would then be a resolve to forgive oneself on the ground that sin is unavoidable, a vanishing of the old relation to God without any new relation taking its place, and therefore not really justification at all but a complete cessation of the God-consciousness within the self-consciousness—that is, hardening. A new relation can arise only through the union with Christ which effects conversion too. Equally inconceivable is a new direction of the will, based on becoming one with Christ, in which the consciousness of guilt and punishability persists. The new man would then have to remain altogether unconscious, or, to put it otherwise, there would have to be an assumption into fellowship with the perfection of Christ that did not include fellowship with His blessedness. If this ever seems to happen, the explanation is either that the consciousness of guilt is merely a delusive carrying-forward of past feelings into the present, or that ‘conversion’ has been a mere desire to become better by one’s own resources, without any genuine living fellowship with Christ. Conversion and justification, being thus utterly inseparable, must also be regarded as happening simultaneously, and each is the infallible criterion of the other.
- In the fuller treatment of these matters much diversity is found in the text-books, identical expressions being taken by different writers in different senses; and the present writer may be open to the charge that he, too, chooses his terms arbitrarily. For, to compare the expressions ‘regeneration’ and ‘conversion,’ there is no real indication that the second conception is just a part of the first; it is quite as legitimate to put it the other way about. Still less is there anything in the expression ‘justification’ pointing to the beginning of a new form of life; if we consider that the condition being superseded is one governed by law, the expression rather suggests that this condition is to continue than that it is to lapse. Moreover, other expressions as significant and as scriptural as conversion might also put in a claim to be preferred; and in view of the great wealth of expression, mainly pictorial, of which Biblical writers 2 avail themselves in this connexion, variation is unavoidable. The important matter is the exact exposition of the actual meaning of the expressions rather than any particular choice of words. The choice made here is justifiable on the one hand because regeneration expresses in the most definite way the beginning of a consistent life; and on the other hand because the relation to the past, which in the general expression ‘regeneration’ falls very much into the background, comes to be the ruling consideration in the more particularized expressions ‘conversion’ and ‘justification.’ The use of the word ‘conversion’ for the transformation, the right-about-turn to better things, makes evident that it is the beginning of a new page, a new order in contrast to the old. Justification, too, presupposes something in respect of which a person is justified; and since no error is possible to the Supreme Being it must be assumed that something has happened to a man between his former and his present state by which the divine displeasure has been removed and without which he could not have become the object of divine favour. However, it seems inadvisable to introduce still other figurative expressions from the Bible; for without a fine-spun and unprofitably lengthy discussion one could not distinguish all the various aspects of what is, after all, only a momentary point of departure; not to speak of the fact that enlightenment and renewal can be used just as well of what is continuous and permanent, and referred to the sphere of sanctification.
The order seems, in view of the symmetry of the definition, a matter of entire indifference; many considerations, however, make it more convenient to begin with conversion.