_6_Christianity the Absolute Religion

The Christian religion is the “absolute,” that is to say, the absolutely perfect, religion. It is not in need of any supplementation or improvement, and it cannot be developed to a higher degree of perfection. It is unsurpassable.

By that we do not mean that it presents a “logically complete whole,” a system of religious thought in which there are no gaps for the human mind. The Apostle Paul does not claim this sort of perfection for the Christian religion; on the contrary, he calls the religious knowledge of the Christians, including his own, a fragmentary one (1 Cor. 13:12).

Again, Christianity must not be called the absolute religion in so far as it teaches the “most perfect morality.” To be sure, the Christian religion teaches the best, the perfect, system of ethics. The Christian morality cannot be surpassed, for it centers in the command: “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt. 22:37-40). But this does not constitute the Christian religion. The love of God and of the neighbor is the daughter of faith. We love because we know that “God loved us and sent His Son to be the Propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-21). Paul motivates his exhortation concerning the Christian moral life thus: “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God [manifested in Christ] that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Rom. 12:1).55

Christianity is the “absolute,” altogether perfect, and unsurpassable religion for two reasons.

The first reason is that it conveys the perfect salvation. It does not ask man to reconcile God through his own works or own virtues as all non-Christian religions do, but it teaches man to accept and obtain by faith the perfect and unsurpassable reconciliation effected by Christ — “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor. 5:18-19). In other words, the Christian religion is absolutely perfect because it is not a moral code instructing men how to earn the forgiveness of sin themselves, but rather it is faith in that forgiveness of sins which was gained through Christ’s vicarious fulfillment of the Law and His substitutionary suffering of our punishment (Gal. 4:4-5; 3:13; Acts 26:18; Luke 24:46-47). Because through Christ’s satisfactio vicaria God is reconciled, the sins of the world forgiven, and this forgiveness proclaimed in the Gospel, the person who by the working of the Gospel (Rom. 10:17; 1 Cor. 2:4-5) believes in the Gospel, is through this faith — without the deeds of the Law, — declared righteous before God (Rom. 3:28; 5:1), and that means that he is perfect () in the sight of God (Col. 2:10; 1 Cor. 2:6).56 For this is God’s method: to him who is inherently ungodly () his faith is counted for righteousness (Rom. 4:5); Christ’s perfect righteousness covers the sinner’s own unrighteousness (1 John 2:1-2).

It is thus clear that in order to preserve the absolutely unique character of the Christian religion, we must keep the satisfactio vicaria inviolate. If we held that the work of Christ did not fully reconcile God but needs to be supplemented by the “infused grace,” the keeping of the commandments of God and the Church, as Rome teaches,57 or by “the reshaping of man’s life into its divine form,” as the modern Protestants teach,58 we should thereby divest the Christian religion of its specific character and reduce it to the level of the religions of the Law; and the assurance of grace and of the sonship with God would be replaced by the monstrum incertitudinis. But as long as we teach and believe that Christ’s vicarious atonement has fully reconciled God and that we are thereby fully justified by faith (Rom. 3:28) and have peace with God (Rom. 5:1 ff.), Christianity will be for us eo ipso the absolute religion; we shall look for nothing better, nothing higher. And it is the sacred duty of theological professors to warn their students most earnestly against the modern “theories of atonement,” some of which directly reject Christ’s satisfactio vicaria as too “juridical” and “perfunctory,” while others charge it with insufficiencies.59

In the second place, the Christian religion is perfect and unsurpassable because its source and norm is not the word of men, but God’s own Word, which is perfect and beyond criticism. For the Church of our day this is the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures (sola Scriptura). Is Scripture indeed the very Word of God? Christ and His Apostles assure us of that (John 10:35; 2 Tim. 3:16-17; 1 Pet. 1:10-12; Eph. 2:20). Though it was written by men, we are bound to receive it not as a mixture of human and divine thoughts and words, but as God’s own Word, infallible, inviolable. This point will be elaborated in the chapter on “The Inspiration of Scripture.” What we are pointing out here is that if Scripture were a mixture of God’s Word and man’s word and not God’s own infallible Word, it would be subject to human criticism — and that would spell the end of the absoluteness of the Christian religion. The science of criticism is constantly advancing new theories; in twenty-five years, possibly sooner, it may invalidate its present-day findings as to what constitutes the essentials of the Christian religion, having then found that much more will have to be deleted. Adolf Harnack, who will have “historical” criticism decide what is essential or non-essential in the Christian religion, says (and from his point of view he is right): “I imagine that a few hundred years hence there will be found to exist in the intellectual ideas which we shall have left behind us much that is contradictory; people will wonder how we put up with it. They will find much to be hard and dry husks in what we took for the kernel; they will be unable to understand how we could be so shortsighted and fail to get a sound grasp of what was essential and separate it from the rest.” 60 And this applies not only to the liberal theology represented by Harnack. It applies also to those modern theologians who are classified as “positive,” conservative theologians. For by their rejection of the inspiration of Scripture they have, like Harnack, surrendered its infallible, divine authority; and they are laboring under a delusion when they imagine that one can assume a critical attitude toward Scripture and at the same time maintain the absoluteness of the Christian religion. Making the “Christian ego,” the “Christian faith consciousness,” the “religious experience,” the source of the Christian religion instead of Holy Scripture, the divine fountain, removes the Christian religion into the domain of subjective human opinion, and in place of the “absolute” Christian religion there are “uncounted divergencies” of religious opinions. It is, therefore the sacred duty of the theological professors of our age to warn students most earnestly against all modern theologians who refuse to recognize Holy Scripture as God’s infallible Word.

In short, if we would hold the absoluteness of the Christian religion, we must hold to both the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious satisfaction and the doctrine that Scripture is the Word of God.

We may also call attention to the fact that, according to Scripture, Christianity did not gradually acquire its “absolute” character but was from the very beginning the “absolute” religion. The objection that the Christian religion is a historical phenomenon and, like all history, cannot have absolute but only relative qualities, is not valid. It operates with a petitio principii. It takes for granted that the omnipotent God, He who shapes and rules history, could not or would not intervene in the “history of mankind” in such a way as to reveal to mankind immediately after the Fall that Christ is the Savior from sin and death. But the fact is that God did intervene in just that way, as Scripture states clearly and emphatically. In the promise given immediately after the Fall, God declared that the Seed of the woman should crush the head of the Serpent, that is, destroy the works of the devil, deliver men from sin and death. God announced to the human race that it could be saved in no other way than through the work of the Savior. And the entire Scripture of the Old Testament proclaims this absoluteness and exclusiveness of the Christian religion; Peter plainly states (Acts 10:43) that “to Him give all the Prophets witness that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins.” And Christ Himself says that the entire Scriptures of the Old Testament testify of Him [Christ] as the Giver of eternal life (John 5:39; John 5:46); and He states particularly that Abraham, the father of the believers, believed in Him (John 8:56). When Scripture speaks of a covenant that had become old () and needed to be changed (Jer. 31:31-34; Heb. 8:6-13), it does not mean the Gospel of Christ, but the covenant of the Law from Mount Sinai, which had come later (Gal. 3:17 ff.). In short, according to Scripture the Christian religion is not, like other religions, the result of a natural historical development; it is not one of many kindred religions; not a religion absorbing and supplementing other religions; but it was from the very beginning the absolute religion, absolute and exclusive in the strict sense of the term, presenting the woman’s Seed as the sole Deliverer from sin and death, the one Savior of all mankind, thus declaring all other religions, of whatever name or form, to be delusions and having no right to exist.

It is, therefore, incorrect to speak of the Christian religion as the “highest,” the “most perfect” religion, the “acme” of religions. The use of these terms creates the impression as though there were only a difference in degree between Christianity and the non-Christianity religions, while in fact they differ radically. There is an essential difference as respects their origin (God-made, man-made), their nature (Gospel, Law), and their effect (assurance of salvation, hopelessness). Christianity differs from all non-Christian religions not as light differs from dusk, but as light differs from darkness (Eph. 5:8: “Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light”; Is. 9:2 ff.; 60:2). The difference is not that between life and the beginning of life, but between life and death (Eph. 2:1-5: “You hath He quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins”); not between the worship of God and some faint beginning of divine worship, but between the worship of God and the worship of demons (1 Cor. 10:20: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God”; Acts 26:18). Christianity produces not only the “highest satisfaction,” but the only satisfaction (Rom. 5:1 ff.: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” etc.; Gal. 2:16).

Some have argued against the absoluteness of Christianity on the basis of the difference between the Old and the New Testament. But this difference pertains only to the increasing clarity and the extent of revelation; there is no difference as to the content of the divine revelation. Both Testaments teach that the one and only way of life for men is faith in Christ, salvation without the deeds of the Law. Christ tells the Jews: “If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins” (John 8:24). But in order to ward off the idea that He was thereby introducing a novum, He declares that He is the true content of the Scripture of the Old Testament: “They are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39). Paul, too, protests against the erroneous idea as though by teaching justification not by the Law, but by grace through faith in Christ, he is teaching a new method of obtaining justification; he shows that the method had been “witnessed by the Law and the Prophets” (Rom. 3:21 ff.) and that only this conception of the religion of the Old Testament is historically correct (Romans 4).