The Christian Doctrine of Fasting.
By H. Bushnell
TO THE EDITORS OF THE INDEPENDENT: LET me answer a word to the leader in your last week's paper on "Christ's Doctrine of Fasting." It is not enough to say that I totally disagree with it. I think I know it to be unscriptural, and I believe it to be pernicious in the sentiment. It allows just one occasion for fasting, and that is a false one; viz., when a man is in so great affliction that he cannot eat. That is not fasting, but simple revulsion from food. The very last thing which an afflicted man should do is to fast, meaning anything by the term. He should rather constrain himself to eat what will sustain him. The principle laid down that fasting is proper only when it is "a natural expression of feeling" is equally mistaken. It is a use and a very important use of fasting, as of every other kind of expression, that we come by means of it into states and sentiments we before had not, or had only in a lower degree. If the soul is full, and only spills over in expression, we get, of course, no result beyond simply getting rid of the surplus. But how stands the Scripture? First of all, Jesus himself fasts forty days and forty nights; not because he is afflicted, but because he is tempted—tempted in a considerable degree through the body, that recalls from bearing any so heavy burden. He will bring it under and make it bear the strain of his divine feeling and cross; therefore he fasts. Next we hear him discoursing, in his Sermon on the Mount, on three great forms of religious exercise; on alms, on prayer, on fasting—treating them all just alike, correcting the same ostentations and hypocrisies by which the Pharisees have corrupted them all. Did he tell the disciples to stop their alms and leave off praying? No more did he put by fasting. It was not the manner of Christ to give up, or bring to an end every practice that had been abused. It was not his way, if repentance runs down to penance, to put a stop to repentance. Moreover, his promise to right alms, right praying, right fasting, generally annexed to each—"The Father that seeth in secret shall reward thee openly"—does not look very discouraging to either. Again, explaining why his disciples do not fast when he is with them, he adds, "But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then shall they fast in those days." "In those days"—that is, in those after times; not for some one or two days, when their grief is fresh and will not allow them to eat. All this on the principle that fasting is in point, not as a propulsion toward what is visible, but only toward what is invisible. How can they fast when the bridegroom is present to their senses? Taken away from their senses, they will fast to find him, and push their way in to the secret place where he dwells. At a later time, he tells his disciples that the highest power with God is attainable only by fasting—"This kind goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting." Does he mean, by not eating when they are too much afflicted to eat? Again, Cornelius, the centurion, testifies: "Four days ago I was fasting till this hour," and tells how God met him in the nights of vision, bidding him send to Joppa for Peter. Meantime, while the messengers are on the way, Peter is fasting on the housetop, where, as he "becomes very hungry, and would have eaten," he fell into a trance; and the result of the two fastings of the two men was, the discovery that Christianity was for the Gentiles. Again, at Antioch, quite a number of "prophets and teachers," including the apostles Barnabas and Saul, are assembled together in fasting, and there the two latter are separated, by the laying on of hands, for a great and important mission. And, still again, these two apostles, who probably knew what dignity there was in fasting, and whether it was Christian or not, went hither and thither, and "ordained elders in every city, and prayed with fasting," commending them to the Lord. Once more Paul remembers that he was in "fastings often." He also recommends to the Corinthian disciples that they give themselves occasionally to "fasting and prayer"—"for a time." Not that we hear of their being specially afflicted, but that there were particular reasons why fasting a little might do them good. Are there no Corinthian sensualities and lustings nowadays for which it would be equally good? But what are the uses of fasting? What rational and practical significance can it have? It may be useless, I grant. Where it is practiced as a superstition, or carried to excess, it can be only hurtful. Maceration is one thing; true fasting another and very different thing. But when rightly practiced, there are uses enough. 1. There is much the same natural use as for Sabbaths: one is a fasting from work, the other from food. And the reason for both is much the same; viz., that the body is dulled and drugged and broken, either by a ceaseless drag on the muscles, or by a ceaseless crowding on the digestion. It will be more supple, and lively, and clear, and capable in both, if a little rest or respite is allowed. I believe it would do us Americans a great deal of good, both as Christians and as men, if we had a set of Sabbaths given for the stomach, and the more so now that the poor fagged organ has more hard work to do on our Sabbaths than at any other time. Besides, nature has a way of getting her digestion-Sabbaths without consent of anybody; appointing, every little while, her day of headache, or cold, or colic, and so, having gotten her rest by a kind of armed cessation, she lets us go on our way, a little more chastised and probably a good deal less recruited than we should have been by a rational fasting. 2. Fasting puts the body under, where it ought to be, and asserts the sovereignty of the mind—trims the vessel to sail even, and hastens in that manner the voyage. Paul set himself to "keep under the body," and put it down also as a fixed matter that he would "not be under the power of any." Could there be a more absurd figure for a Christian than that he is a man whose body is uppermost? And yet what multitudes of disciples have their life hid, not with Christ in God, but under their bodies—drugged by all the stupors, tossed by all the tempests, wrenched by the appetites, fouled by the lustings, fooled by the vanities of the body? And what a noble triumph it is when the soul gets uppermost? How like a sovereign it feels in its empire? How clear and bell-like is the ring of its sentiments. 3. It is another very great use that painstaking is the only way to get near to God; not that the pains please God, but that the taking pains puts the soul in train, harnesses the powers, sharpens and purges the insight, and makes the holy struggle glow because there is heat in it. It does a man's soul infinite good to make sure to itself that it is in earnest, and the only way to do this is to get into the boat and stem the current, not to float down it. We live between two kinds of hunger—soul-hunger and body-hunger. An earnest Christian wants to feel the soul-hunger and somehow get food for the soul; and when he finds how ready the body is to suffer and whimper if it is not fed at the moment, he scores it, he retaliates upon it, demanding that it sometimes allow itself to be postponed, just as the magnificent hunger of the soul is so commonly postponed to it. But there is an objection heard from all quarters. "I have tried fasting," says the delicate disciple; "It makes me hungry and sick. I think of nothing but eating, and am utterly incapable of any spiritual exercise." Is he ever capable?—that is the important question. It is very true that if a man knows how to go to his table, and does not know how to go to God, he will most certainly think of going to his table. A fast that only makes a vacuum is likely to be a very unsatisfactory affair. Just contrary to this, a Christian who is able to say to the body, "Stay down there while I go up," and really go up, will be full and fresh and free, and the shortest day that he finds will be the day that misses a dinner. A little skill is wanted in fasting as in everything else, and everything turns on finding how to feed, without feeding always the body. These strictures I make, not because of the article merely to which they refer, but because I hear so many things, in a similar strain, from our young ministers and our theological students here and there. We fancy that we are going deep, because we touch bottom where we are, when we happen to be in the shallows. This naturalism in which we are steeped shallows everything, and the pigmies and General Thumbs of grace have it for their wedding-day. We are ready to assume that Pharisees and hypocrites are the only fasting men. Have there been no grand witnesses, heroes, mighty men, Titans of God, besides? A little deference to history ought to show us that grown people have lived, even if they live no longer. H. Bushnell, in N. Y. Independent.