Experience and Belief

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 5, 1878

Experience and Belief.

ONE'S view of Christ is greatly affected by his experience. If there be a man who has never had a fierce fight with his passions, and been conquered; who has never felt self-condemned for sin, or baffled in his efforts after a higher life; who has never shuddered before the broken law of a majestic God, or longed for a mediator who could assure his trembling soul and lift his weakness into strength; if a man has felt none or only a little of this, he is very likely to find Christ only an unselfish friend of the race, and a martyr to the truth, instead of seeing in him the Redeemer and Saviour of souls. One needs Paul's experience in seeking justification by the law, and that triumphant after-experience narrated in second Corinthians, before one is likely to unite with him in the confession that he is "God over all, and blessed forever," and that in him "dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily."

So long as we can maintain a deep and true religious experience we shall be able to keep our hold upon a sound and vital theology. But when our religion becomes one of only superficial sentiment, generous sympathies, and decent behavior, as we find it within ourselves, it will probably be little more than a surface theology, as we imagine it to be in our unstudied Bibles, or as we set it down in our indefinite and uncared-for creeds.—Morning Star.