The fact of assurance

Well did James Denney once observe that whereas assurance is a sin in Romanism, and a duty in much of Protestantism, in the New Testament it is simply a fact.

(JI Packer, Knowing God)

RVG Tasker on James Denney

"It was the greatness of James Denney that he refused to separate Christian theology from Christian evangelism. Well acquainted with the biblical criticism of his day, and ready always to evaluate such criticism with the care and patience of the true scholar, he nevertheless remained very sure that the nerve of Christianity is that it is a gospel to be preached; and that the power of that gospel lies in the truth contained in the words 'Christ died for the ungodly'. 'I haven't the faintest interest', he once said, 'in theology which does not help us to evangelize.' And the 'theology which helps us to evangelize' is the theology which recognizes 'the centrality, the gravity, the inevitableness and the glory of the death of Christ', wherein the unity not only of the New Testament but also of the entire Bible is to be found."

(p.8, James Denney, e.d. RVG Tasker, The Death of Christ)

I really must get round to reading Denney properly. I've got a few others higher up my list though at the moment.

James Denney on the incarnation (x7)

Here are a whole load of quotes from James Denney's The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation in which he attacks an understanding of the incarnation which gives the sinful state of our humanity a back seat.

When I hear about the incarnation it is often described as primarily a metaphysical or epistemological event. Consequently salvation is then seen as similarly metaphysical or epistemological. In contrast the Bible sees it primarily as a act of reconciliation to deal with our moral alienation from God.

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"It is not too much to say that the metaphysical incarnation which was the vital centre of Athanasius' thought - his sacramental union of the divine and the human in the incarnate Word - had dulled his sense of an ethical union and communion of man with God, and of the powers by which such a union and communion can be impaired and destroyed, or perfected. [footnote: "It is significant that he only mentions the forgiveness of sins once, and then only in connection with Christ's work as seeking and saving the lost during his life on earth (14.2)] The same holds of Greek theology generally, and of the type of piety akin to it. It is too much out of relation to the world in which moral creatures, conscious of their estrangement from God, and needing and longing for reconciliation to Him, live and move and have their being." (pp.42-43)

"Christ had no reason for coming into the world but to save sinners. This is the true experimental and Biblical ground on which to stand. Attractive as it may appear to speculative minds, the idea that Christ would have come apart from this redemptive purpose - to complete creation, or give humanity a Head - departs from the line of religious and especially of Christian interest. It finds the motive of the incarnation in some speculative or metaphysical fitness, and not where Scripture and experience put it, in love." (p. 59)

"God became man because only thus could sin be dealt with for man's salvation, and God's end in the creation of man secured. In other words, the rationale of the incarnation is in the atonement. It is through the atonement that the incarnation is seen to be rationally necessary and therefore credible." (p. 65)

"He must be man that He may be entitled to act for the sinful race, and He must be God that He may be able to offer to God the immeasurable satisfaction which shall be equal to the necessities of the case. Hence the need for the incarnation or the God-man. It is the necessity of making satisfaction for sin, in order that men who have sinned may nevertheless attain the destiny of blessedness in eternal life with God, which explains the one dogma of the Christian faith - namely, the incarnation. As it has already been expressed, the rationale of the incarnation lies in the atonement. Were it not for the atonement, no one could say that the incarnation had any necessity in it which appealed to reason." (p.71)

"Nothing is commoner, for instance, than for those who conceive the incarnation as the taking up of human nature into union with the divine, to say that the incarnation is itself the atonement; in the person of the God-man humanity as such is reconciled to God. To the writer such expressions are as good as meaningless, and neither for the evangelist nor the theologian can he see that they have any value. But looking at the actual life and death of Jesus as the proper definition of the term incarnation - the sum of reality apart from which incarnation is an empty sound - he would have no difficulty in saying that the incarnation and the atonement, or the incarnation and the work of reconciling man to God, were all one. The traditional dogmatic conception of the incarnation, with which the idea of an incarnation independent of sin, and designed to consummate creation, is usually connected, does not lift us into a region of eternal or ideal truth; it does not enlighten our minds in the knowledge of Christ; it only lifts us out of the region of historical and moral reality. We have the practical interest of Christianity as well as the broad sense of the New Testament with us when we stand by the view that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." (pp. 183-184)

"The only incarnation of which the New Testament knows anything is the appearance of Christ in the race and lot of sinful men, and His endurance in it to the end. Apart from sharing our experience, that sharing of our nature, which is sometimes supposed to be what is meant by incarnation, is a abstraction and a figment. But everything in that sharing our experience is essential." (p.242)

The Son of Man

Commenting on Jesus' use of the term 'Son of Man' and its dependence on Daniel 7 James Denney writes:

what primarily determined its significance was its contrast to the lion, the bear, the leopard, and the terrible beast with iron teeth. When Jesus defined it and made it His own - when he turned 'one like unto a son of man' into 'the Son of Man,' and used the name almost as a periphrasis for 'I' - He intimated to those who were able to understand it His consciousness of being head of a new, universal, and everlasting kingdom, in which all that was truly and characteristically human should have authority. The wild beasts had had their time; not the hour had come for the dominion of the human; man claimed his sovereignty in Jesus [...] It is one great part of His work, in this very character of the Son of Man, to revolutionise the current idea of sovereignty by exhibiting the true and everlasting one [...] It is not, then , simply nearness to us, brotherly tenderness and sympathy, that the name 'the Son of Man' expresses; it is nearness, brotherly tenderness and sympathy, ministering life and ransoming death, as the essential marks and attributes of the one true King of our race [...]

the point of the name lies in its combination of two things in one person - an entire identification with men, which makes all that is theirs His; and a sovereignty exercised in purest humanity which makes this true brother the Redeemer of His kind.

(italics original, pp. 36-39, Studies in Theology)

What Jesus had to say about himself

I was kept up last night reading an old set of lectures by James Denney I had just picked up for £1.50. One in particular was excellent entitled 'The Witness of Jesus to Himself'. I have tried to give get down an outline of what he had to say in his own words:

1. The 'present, permanent, and all-embracing significance of Christ is the mark of the Christian religion in all its historical forms'.

2. 'Jesus, in all the accounts we have, speaks much about Himself. He knows that He is a problem to those by whom He is surrounded, and that on the true solution of the problem everything depends.'

3. 'What, I think, strikes every reader of the gospels, and what must have been immensely more striking to those who heard Him speak, is the moral authority claimed and exercised by Jesus.'

1. 'Christ claimed, authoritatively, to be the consummator of the old religion.'
2. 'it was part of the moral authority exercised by Jesus that He criticised, and where He thought fit, abrogated, even what had hitherto possessed divine authority.'
3. 'But Christ's authority is principally exercised, in the first instance, in the demand for personal obedience and personal confidence. Follow me is a summary of all He has to say to men.'

4. 'He claimed a unique knowledge of God, and claimed it on the basis of a unique relation to Him. He revealed God as the Father, and He was able to do so because He knew Himself as the Son [of God].'

5. When Jesus referred to himself as "the Son of Man" 'He intimated to those who were able to understand it His consciousness of being head of a new, universal, and everlasting kingdom, in which all that was truly and characteristically human should have authority.'

6. 'with all His identification of Himself with our interests - making common cause with us as men to the very utermost - Jesus, it is plain on every page of the gospel, was conscious of the immense interval which separated Him from us.'

7. 'Jesus often puts Himself forward [with] the character of a Judge [...] Jesus looked into the future, but what He saw there was not the coming of another, but His own coming again.'

You may notice the overlap with John Stott's three points.