the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Presence (2)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or PRESENCE.—The ordinary word in the Gospels for ‘before’ (= in the presence of) is ἔμπροσθεν. Lk. also uses ἐνώπιον, which, with the exception of John 20:30, is not in the vocabulary of the other three Evangelists. He nearly always uses it of the presence of God. Other prepositions employed are ἐπί, (ἀπ ἐναντι, and ἐναντίον).—1. The value of a religion is the pledge it can give of the presence of God. In the heathen lands round Israel the Divine Being was localized in sacred places with the aid of idols. But the religion of Jehovah was rid of such a tendency through the work of the prophets, with the result that, when all other religions in the Roman Empire were vulgarized and eviscerated of power, Judaism remained like a Samson with locks unshorn, with a God who could keep His own secret, and with a faith still pregnant with possibility. True, the Divine presence had been manifested, according to the OT, in cloudy pillar and burning bush, had, indeed, been localized in the ark of the covenant. But steadily the conception of God had been clarified from material associations, and the way in which this was done may be gathered from Jeremiah 7. So thoroughly did the moral view of God prevail, that ‘the Law became God’s real presence in Israel’ (Schultz, OT Theol. i. p. 354). The ‘angel of Jehovah,’ so frequently mentioned in the OT, was simply ‘the messenger’ (מַלִאָךְ), so did all intermediaries dwindle in the blaze of the only God. But with this transcendence came aloofness. On the one hand, the Law became a very barrier between God and His people. Even those who followed hard after it, like Saul of Tarsus and the rich young ruler, thirsted only the more for the living God (Mark 10:17, cf. Romans 7:9-13, Galatians 3:21-23). On the other hand, Greek modes of thought, already affected by Oriental dualism, represented fully in Philo, but also anticipated in Palestinian theology (cf. Schürer, ii. iii. § 33), bridged the seeming gulf by theosophical and Gnostic speculations. At the very moment when Judaism had its opportunity, it failed to give that abiding pledge of the presence of God which should satisfy heart, mind, and conscience. Even the religions of Mithras and Isis, impure though the latter was, had a vogue in the Empire because they did something to meet the need which arose between the barren speculations and brutal superstitions of the age.
2. At this psychological moment came Jesus with His gospel as a challenge to the world of the presence of God. St. John himself expresses this thought no more decidedly, though much more fully, than St. Mark, even though in Mark 1:1 υἱὸς θεοῦ is a secondary reading. The common testimony of the Apostolic circle may be summed up in Hebrews 1:2 ‘God … hath in these last days spoken unto us in his Son.’ But nowhere is the thought that Jesus Christ was the presence of God set forth with such sublime effect as in the Prologue to John’s Gospel: ‘We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (Hebrews 1:14). No need was there now of an impersonal Word or impersonated Wisdom, as between God and us (Philippians 2:9, Colossians 2:8-19); or of sacrifices and ceremonies, as between us and God (Hebrews 9:14, Galatians 2:21); for the entire gulf between God the holy and us the sinful has been bridged in Jesus Christ our Lord (2 Corinthians 5:19, Ephesians 2:4-7). Thus through Christ our access to the Father is immediate (Romans 5:2) by one Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). ‘There were to be no more finite mediators between God and man; no temple of Jerusalem, where alone men must worship; no necessity for interposing angels to interpret between the Divine and the human. Man was himself to be brought into immediate contact with God, and was to experience the deep conviction that heaven and earth had met together’ (Matheson, Growth of Spirit of Christianity, i. 78). This faith that through Christ a man is always in the presence of God as a child in his father’s house was based on (1) the testimony, and (2) the teaching of Jesus.
(1) By the testimony of Jesus is meant the unconscious impress of His Personality. It is evident, to use with all respect a familiar phrase, that Jesus had a presence. The people marvelled because He spoke with authority, although an unlettered man (Matthew 7:28-29, Mark 6:2). His eyes were as a flame of fire (Mark 3:5, Luke 22:61). In the awe of His presence the Temple-courts were cleared, and the tempest calmed (Mark 11:15; Mark 6:51); so that His disciples cried, ‘What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ (Mark 4:41). He drew the children to Him, and cast out demons, and said, ‘If I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come upon you’ (Luke 11:20). These impressions upon His contemporaries simply correspond with His own self-consciousness. He gave up the workshop at Nazareth for the theatre of the world, because He knew Himself as God’s beloved Son (Luke 3:22; Luke 4:1; Luke 4:14). His first address in the synagogue is not recorded, because it was all in one word, ‘I am here’ (Luke 4:21). It was enough for the disciples that they should be with Him (Mark 3:14). It was the last folly of the Galilaean cities (Matthew 11:20 ff.) that they did not believe Him for the works’ sake; and of Jerusalem, that it knew not the day of its visitation (Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:41 ff.). There was only one legacy He had to leave, and that alone worth leaving, His spiritual presence (Matthew 28:20, Luke 24:49), which was the true Shekinah (Matthew 18:20, cf. ‘Ubi sedent duo qui legem traetant, Shekina cum illis est,’ Pirke Aboth, 3 (Schultz, ii. 67)). The difference in this respect between St. John and the Synoptists is that whereas with them the testimony of Jesus to Himself is mostly unconscious, with him it is altogether self-conscious. St. John never fails to lay stress on the autonomy of Jesus (Moffatt in Expos. vi. iii. [1901] 469), so that, even psychologically speaking, He is not of the world, though in it.
(2) Thus in Jn. the testimony of Christ is merged in His teaching. He speaks of His own presence as living water, heavenly bread, light and life to a needy world (John 4:14; John 6:48; John 8:12; John 11:25). To keep His word is to keep in the presence of God as He Himself does (John 14:23, John 15:10). And that presence is an inward abiding which nothing outward can disturb (John 16:22; John 16:33). All His words in the Synoptics similarly illustrate that—
‘To turn aside from Him is hell,
To walk with Him is heaven.’
Only with them His Person is, as it were, so transparent that they present God through Jesus rather than in Him, and we are left to draw the Christian inference that He Himself is the focus of the Father’s presence. It is the essential nearness of God that gives all significance to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8-9), to the teaching on prayer (Matthew 6:8; Matthew 6:8), to the interpretation of worship (Mark 7:8, cf. John 4:23), to the illustrations from nature (Matthew 10:29), to the exhortations against anxiety (Luke 12:30-32), towards watchfulness (Luke 12:35-36), against covetousness (Luke 12:20-21), towards compassion (Matthew 10:40-42). The sphere in which all the teaching moves, which makes it simple and intimate to the heart, and transcendent in its appeal and its authority, is the presence of God the Father, the truth that—
‘Spirit with spirit can meet, Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.’
But the immanence of God reaches a further stage in the gospel of Christ. Not only does Jesus bring God close into His world, as if οὐρανός meant the atmosphere one breathes rather than the firmament above (cf. τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, Matthew 6:26 etc.), but, according to Jesus, God is immanent in the human nature that makes room for Him. This is expressed in terms of (a) relationship (Mark 3:35, Matthew 5:16; Matthew 5:44, John 1:12), (b) identification (Matthew 10:40; Matthew 25:40), (c) indwelling (John 14:16-17). This last is called the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. In order to give His own outlook to all disciples, Jesus promised His other self, the Paraclete or Comforter, in whose company and through whose intercession we live on the plane of sons, not only being in the Father’s presence, but He being present in us. Although this doctrine is fully allowed for by the Synoptists (Matthew 10:20, Luke 24:49), it is the special contribution of St. John. ‘Jesus answered, If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him’ (John 14:23). From different points of view it may be said that Jesus enjoyed the presence of God, that He was that presence, and that He gave it. This threefold presence is really the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity.
3. What then are we to gather from all this but that, according to Christianity, Christ as God incarnate is the pledge that God is present, not only Creator-like in the universe, but Father-like in the believing heart and the consecrated life? That is really the meaning of His exhibition of God in human life, and the impartation of His own Spirit. And our safeguard against the errors of Pantheism and of all such systems as tend to merge the Divine in the human instead of moulding the human by the Divine, is to be found in one small but significant phrase, ‘ἐν Χριστῷ.’ The Christian consciousness must always testify with a modern thinker (W. S. Palmer, An Agnostic’s Progress): ‘When I lifted up my eyes to God, I found God not only looking through my eyes but looking into them.’ It is among a people redeemed from their sins and consecrated to service that God will tabernacle (σκηνώσει) as an abiding presence (Shekinah, fr. שָׁכַן ‘abide’). And when the brotherhood is perfected, there will be no need of a Temple (Revelation 21:3; Revelation 21:22-27). The revelation of God immanent in a redeemed humanity is the ideal towards which Christianity points (Ephesians 1-3, Colossians 1:9-20, cf. 2 Peter 3:13, John 17:20-23), and to which it is slowly moving, but only by outgrowing many misconceptions and leaving them behind. See, further, Schultz, OT Theol. i. 353 f., ii. 7–11; artt. ‘Ark of the Covenant,’ ‘Shekinah’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible ; Beyschlag, NT Theol. i. 95 ff.; Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, § 3, ch. 2; Westcott on John 14-17).
4. Christian history has been a long series of endeavours to realize the full meaning of the Divine presence. First it was caught into Jewish preconceptions, and projected into the doctrine of the Parousia. This had its effect on the inmost circle of Christian writers with the exception of St. John, and on most of the early Fathers except for the school of Alexandria. With all its inspiration of hope, it must have tended to obscure the truth that God is present through the working of His Spirit in the individual and in society, in the unfolding of truth and the employments of love.
Under the influence of Greek thought in the Gentile world, the Divine presence has been treated as a metaphysical substance, and at last identified with the elements of the Lord’s Supper (see Art. ii.), after consecration. This sacerdotal view was virtually accepted by the time of Cyprian, who wrote (Ep. lxiii. 17): ‘The passion of the Lord is the sacrifice we offer.’ The doctrine of Transubstantiation became the keystone of the ecclesiastical edifice, and was maintained as a theory, by means of the prevalent philosophy of Realism, whose greatest exponent was Thomas Aquinas. As far as English thought is concerned, it crumbled under the dialectic of John Wyclif (Lechler, Life of Wycliffe, p. 351), and by the discovery made by simple men, during the next two centuries, of the spiritual presence mediated through the NT in their own experience.
The Docetic views of Christ’s Person, however, which throughout the Middle Ages invested Him with apocalyptic splendours at the cost of all human sympathies, called for still other means of allaying the hunger of the religious imagination. ‘The remedy was found in the reverence of the image, in the substitution of the symbol for reality. Gradually that Church, which had tried to centre its affections on an absent Lord, found that its affections must be rekindled by the mediation of some earthly form. It had dismissed from its thoughts the idea of a spiritual presence; it must regain that presence through the intervention of material agencies. It must find it in the water of Baptism, in the bread and wine of Communion, in the act of ordination, in the relies of saints, in the tombs of the martyrs, in the heart of monasteries, and in the walls of consecrated cathedrals. It must see it in the figure of a visible cross, in the monuments raised to a celestial hierarchy, in the observance of festivals in memory of the sainted dead,’ above all in apotheosis of the Virgin Mother (Matheson, op. cit. i. 322). In the meantime, as applied to the working of the Holy Spirit, the doctrine of the presence stamped infallibility upon the Councils, and finally upon the Pope. While with J. H. Newman it signified the validity of ecclesiastical development throughout the centuries, ‘being the germination, growth, and perfection of some living or apparent truth in the minds of men during a sufficient period’ (Development of Doctrine, p. 37).
But while the popular religion found the presence in the images and relies, and ecclesiastical speculations discovered it in the Conciliar assemblies and the Sacrament of the Supper, there was a parallel movement known as Mysticism, which found the real presence in the soul. To the French mystics, greatest of whom was St. Bernard of the 12th century, the presence of God was the obverse side of their own absence from the world. The Germans Eckhart and Tauler, the Dutch Thomas à Kempis, and others took up the theme, and wove it into a kind of new Stoicism, by way of purification, illumination, and union. ‘They taught (following Thomas Aquinas) that the soul can even here upon earth so receive God within itself as to enjoy in the fullest sense the vision of His being, and dwell in heaven itself’ (Harnack, Outlines of the Hist. of Dogma, p. 440). This ‘practice of the presence of God’ (Brother Lawrence) was the religious side of the preparation for Luther and his gospel for the people. He taught that Christianity was not a matter of consent to doctrine, as with the scholastics; or a method of losing oneself in the eternal, as with the mystics; but realizing the Divine presence as found through faith in Christ in ‘the freedom of a Christian man.’ Luther, commenting in his pointed way on Galatians 2:16, says: ‘Faith is, if I may use the expression, creative of Divinity, not, of course, in the substance of God, but in ourselves.’ And again: ‘When we truly say that He is Christ, we mean that He was given for us, without any works of ours, has won for us the Spirit of God, and has made us children of God … so that we might become lords of all things in heaven and earth—that is faith’ (Erl. ed. 13, 251; Herrmann, Communion with God, p. 125). The primary authority of the inward witness thus established by Luther has been most fully apprehended for practical purposes by George Fox and his followers. A bright example was John Woolman (b. 1720), who, in taking his stand against prevailing customs sanctioned by the Church, records in his diary (ch. 4): ‘The fear of the Lord so covered me at times that my way was made easier than I expected.’ And this independent standpoint, for the sake of humanity, has found poetical expression in Lowell, Whittier, and, in a fashion, Whitman. John Wesley, too, coming from his earlier devotion to Mysticism to his doctrine of assurance, repeated the experience of Luther, and, by means of an evangelical theology, helped men to see that humanity is the proper organ of the Divine presence. This has been the inspiration of modern reformers and philanthropists, but the full bearings of this truth have not yet been realized by the churches. A new vindication of the soul’s authority in matters of faith has been undertaken by A. Ritschl and his disciples-Harnack, Herrmann, and the rest. With them the Divine Man Jesus, separated from every ceremony, doctrine, or dream, vouches for the inward presence of God to the soul that believes. By their theory of value-judgments they throw the whole proof of the presence of God upon the faculties of the soul.
Literature.—Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, or Outlines; Matheson, Growth of the Spirit of Christianity; Fairbairn, Christ in Mod. Theol., bk. i.; Herrmann, Communion with God; Imitation of Christ; John Woolman’s Journal; J. Campbell Whittier, Poems; Stopford Brooke, Christ in Mod. Life; Watson, Inspiration of our Faith, 274; Moore, From Advent to Advent, 63, 98; D. Young, Crimson Book, 237; Phillips Brooks, Mystery of Iniquity, 277.
A. Norman Rowland.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Presence (2)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/presence-2.html. 1906-1918.
