The Witnesses for the Glorified Son of Man

“Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”—Acts vii. 56.

The passage: Stephen says, “Look, I see heaven opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”

Are we to honour those who die as defenders of a false creed? The question is often asked, and I think we are not always careful enough in answering it.

I. The usual answer holds a deep truth, and if we search it to the bottom it may prove quite satisfactory. It says that the Martyr is not first of all the man who dies for a cause or opinion. He is a Witness. The worth of his sacrifice depends on the worth of his witness. If that is good for nothing, we cannot say his suffering is good for much. We may respect courage or constancy even in a criminal, but it is a gross confusion of terms to call that martyrdom.

This is the plea Romanists have urged against calling those who died under Mary Martyrs. It is the plea by which Protestants refuse honour to those who suffered for Transubstantiation or the Papal Supremacy. It leads English Churchmen to withhold admiration from the Puritans and Quakers they deprived of livelihood, if not of life. It lets the vehement champions of conscience spare only the slightest pity for the Episcopalians under the Commonwealth, and make every excuse for those who punished them as Malignants. And it satisfies all these groups that Jews, Mahometans, Heathens and Sceptics, however much they sacrificed for their convictions, are to be seen wholly or chiefly as victims of a frightful delusion.

I think the maxim behind these conclusions is right and valuable. The more we clear our minds of the idea that falsehood deserves sympathy or can lead to good, and the more we throw away the sentimental tolerance that is only indifference to truth, the better for our sincerity. That indifference produces no act of courage or devotion, and naturally breeds contempt for them. So let us hold firmly that the Martyr is a witness, and is good himself and useful to mankind only so far as he witnesses for the true God against the Spirit of Lies.

1. Yet I can imagine no exception to this doctrine, and still I cannot set it against the strong instinct that makes us revere any man who accepts loss of mind, body or estate rather than profess what he does not believe or let go of what he does. Such a man is, I think, a witness against falsehood and for truth, against the Devil and for God. What he refuses to acknowledge may be a precious, divine principle, but his accepting it at my bidding might be neither precious nor divine. The opinion he clings to may be poor, but if he drops it because force or fashion is against it, he gives up more than an opinion. He gives up the veracity of his character, cuts himself off from fellowship with what is high and worthy, and disqualifies himself from ever seeing facts clearly and fully. On this ground alone I dare not quarrel with anyone who calls our opponents who suffered for their opposition Martyrs. No amount of suffering, however cruelly inflicted or patiently borne, justifies the name. A testimony for moral honesty does.

2. Further, we need such a witness and cannot do without one. Men in the ascendant, with things settled their own way, soon cease to believe what they hold most strongly. They have voted certain propositions true or false; the Ayes or the Noes have carried it. Then the true thing comes to mean little more than what the majority thinks true. Some in the majority can give plausible, perhaps sound, reasons, and others memorise those reasons and produce them when their cause is attacked. But even the most intense opinion about the likelihood of certain conclusions has little in common with the faith that grasps a fact or principle as a rock, the only refuge from drowning. In easy times faith and opinion are quickly confused. Those who assail the opinions are God’s witnesses to the difference between them, and His instruments for putting the question to each of us: “Is thine an opinion, or a belief?” They will not be decided by a show of hands or bound by public opinion; they say truth is not the same as that, and cannot be measured by it. Do you differ from them here? Do you reckon truth and general opinion the same? If you have no sense of how they differ, and often are radically opposed, you renounce the New Testament and treat the story of the Gospel’s first proclamation as a fable. Nothing shows us the difference between Truth and our opinion about it like the rage we feel when a doctrine of ours is assailed and the eagerness to crush the assailant. Would I feel that rage if I thought, “This is not mine at all; it is an eternal truth which the eternal God will justify, against me and against the universe”? Is it not fear that makes me want to stifle the contradiction? I am not sure how it will turn out; I may be maintaining a lie after all, and it might be exposed. Brethren, that is not faith. The Bible would call it unbelief.

3. While a dominant party is in danger of losing faith in mere opinion, the man who suffers generally, perhaps always, finds that there is something beyond opinion. If he did not, he would hardly be foolish enough to bear death, or even a great loss of earthly comfort, since I naturally prefer a visible, tangible thing to a mere notion. Anyone who can throw away visible, tangible things has discovered, because God showed him, an invisible reality nearer and dearer to him than anything his senses report, which no notions of his own or of all men together can plunder or tear away. So the priests and laymen for whom Mary and Bonner lit the fires in Smithfield did not die for Protestant notions. They died because they would not exchange faith in a living Christ for notions the Romanists would impose. In the same way I am persuaded that Sir Thomas More did not lay his head on the block for a notion about the Papal Supremacy, but because he feared to give up faith in another Kingdom higher than Henry’s. We may be persuaded that asserting royal authority was necessary, both for the nation’s independence and to free that higher Kingdom from a system that was disguising and distorting it. We may also admit that More’s witness was especially demanded at that moment, and may have been indispensable to civil as well as ecclesiastical freedom afterwards. I would say the same of any Romanist who suffered for the other tenet that most scandalizes us. When that tenet comes clothed in anathemas, cutting men off from Christ’s Sacraments for the sake of an insolent logical conceit, all hail to those who swear to die rather than accept it. But when a man, instead of forcing it on another, says it is bound up in his mind with belief in Christ’s person and sacrifice, and so he will die rather than renounce it, he may deserve to be called a witness for that Person and Sacrifice. He may be doing homage in his own heart, and he may be telling us that our mere denial of his notion is worth as little as the notion itself, and that if we have nothing better to live or die on, we would do well to change places with him. So too with the Puritans and Quakers who bore imprisonment or banishment. I suspect we cheat ourselves of a Divine message, a solemn admonition and a great blessing, if we pretend they only exalted a private opinion and were sustained by confidence in it against State or Church. The glorification of private judgment comes later, in the day of ease or success. Their successors might say, “We have a right to think as we like.” They said nothing of the kind; they did not even maintain what is worthwhile in that claim as against civil rulers. They said, “We cannot think as we like. We must speak what is given us to speak. You are forgetting and wishing to stifle some truth that a higher power than yours compels us to declare.” I conceive they were uttering truths we did not care for, though they were involved in our professions and necessary to our spiritual life. They might also be denying truths we ought to have grasped with all our might; no opposition could hurt these, but we were doing what we could to hurt them by persecuting on their behalf. You may complain that by saying we I confuse our age, which does not persecute, with our forefathers’ age, which did. In saying so I think I am more unjust to them than to ourselves. In their circumstances we should have done as they did; the futility of their experiments, and the very testimonies they tried to silence, have taught us. Yet how poorly we have learnt God’s lesson, that if we try to promote His truth some way other than His, He will punish the disobedience!

There is an extreme case, which I will not pass over because its moral is so awful. May an utter unbeliever, through sufferings inflicted on him for that unbelief, be a witness in the sense I have been describing? I hold that he may, for this reason. Christian communities have at times so represented God’s character that He has been confused with the Spirit of Evil. Their vile acts have proved true of them what Stephen charged on the Jews: that they were offering sacrifice not to the God of our fathers but to Remphan or Moloch. If so, God might draw, and surely has drawn, a confession of Himself and a renunciation of His enemy from the lips and hearts of those who in words denied Him. I can take comfort in the thought that those who would not recant their Atheism to accept our Atheism may have been making a deeper recantation than we or they knew, to Him who reads the heart. “I will not confess that kingdom which Christ’s servants hold to be His” may be turned into the cry, “Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom.” The refusal to confess a Tyrant, even if joined with a wish for utter anarchy, may really have meant the resolve, “I will arise and go to my Father.”

II. I think, brethren, we would understand this whole subject better, and be relieved of many perplexities, if we examined it by the light of the passage that has occupied us today. We all feel Stephen to be the Church Martyr, the martyr of the New Testament. Of no other who died for the faith have we so distinct a picture. We know exactly what he was accused of, how he defended himself, what provocation he gave his judges, and what his last words were. No one more forces us to remember the meaning of his title, for his stoning cannot be separated from his testimony.

That testimony is in the words of my text. We might say it was a special privilege of a saint of the Apostolic age, and by treating his position as singular we might cut ourselves off from the truth he proclaimed. But the Church forbids this. By joining St. Stephen’s day to the festival of the Nativity she makes the vision of the Son of Man a common blessing. By praying in the Collect that it may console all who suffer for the truth, she signifies that nothing else will support any of us in this day. And so she illustrates Stephen’s argument from Jewish history, and shows why that argument, addressed to a Jewish Sanhedrim or mob, could only end in their stopping their ears, gnashing their teeth and taking up stones.

Why did Stephen refer to Abraham and the patriarchs, to Moses and the prophets, to Solomon and the temple? It was to declare that the living God had been revealing Himself to men and through men. Every event of their history, every word of their holy book, every institution they boasted of implied a relation between God and man, and contained a promise that it would be fully manifested in a Son of Man. It was to bring home to his hearers that they were not believing in the God of Abraham, Moses and the prophets, the God whose glory filled the temple. They were not believing in a living God, but worshipping a mere notion, or quickening that dead notion into a dark, cruel hater of mankind who favoured only their tribes. So it was inevitable that He who came as the Man, who called Himself the Son of Man and entered into the inmost fellowship and sympathy with men, should be treated as an enemy of their race. When He called Himself the Son of God and said that whoever had seen Him had seen the Father, they denounced Him as a blasphemer and handed Him to the Romans as a rebel. There was no escaping the evidence; it went straight to their consciences. They had denied and killed the Just One because He was the Just One; they had hated the Son of Man because He loved men. So what they accused Stephen of prophesying would certainly be fulfilled. The customs Moses delivered, having lost their significance and no longer being tokens of a people in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed, must change. The temple, deserted by the Divine Presence, must become a heap of stones with not one left upon another.

When Stephen said, “Behold, I see heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God,” the truth he had proclaimed in all his discourse, and had seen to be the subject and climax of all Revelation, presented itself to him as actually as any visible thing meets the eye. It was not a doctrine of the Incarnation that he acknowledged in that hour; a mere doctrine would have stood him in little stead. It was a Person before him, whom he could call upon and trust, and he was sure he was in contact with life and substance, not hard forms of the understanding. It was a Son of Man on the right hand of God, an actual Mediator between man and God, in whom God could look well pleased on man and men could look up to God and be at peace. He was the fellow-worker and fellow-sufferer with every man and the whole race. On earth He had broken down the distinction between Publican and Pharisee, and He would break down the older and more sacred distinction between Jew and Gentile. Did not an opening of heaven that disclosed such a union of manhood with Godhead foretell a shaking of all religions and polities on earth that stood on any other foundation, whether they severed man from God or tried to fashion a God out of men’s notions?

Yes! This was the witness, the distinctive Christian witness: what was worth dying for, and what it was possible to die for. An immense majority might vote it ridiculous, but its truth or falsehood depended on no majority. Stephen could cast it out on the earth to perish if it was only an opinion of his, or of any man or age. If it was part of the constitution of things, lay at the foundation of man’s being, and was involved in the Will and Nature of God, it would establish itself, whatever the opinions of any man or age.

Would it, then, have surprised him to hear that this truth might have to be vindicated in later days, as in his, against consistories of religious doctors? They would maintain their own exclusive rights against the great human rights, put their dead systems in place of a living Creator and Father, and deny that God had really made Himself known to men or that there is a way from man to God. Would he have wondered that even those who had only a glimpse of one side of his truth might count that glimpse more precious than all the world’s honours? Or that, if they did, they would become some of God’s instruments to keep the whole belief in a Divine humanity from perishing in the hands of those meant to guard it? Would he not count it inevitable that any society which came to regard truth as a mere dominant opinion, enforced as other opinions are, would lose its connection with Him who is the Truth? It would become hard-hearted and inhuman, therefore un-Christian, and need to be reminded, even by those who do not bear Christ’s name, what He is and what He came to do.

Here, then, is ample justification both for the maxim by which religious bodies deny martyrs to each other and for the rebellion in our consciences against their narrowness. St. Stephen’s witness is the witness the Church of God is to bear on earth. These bodies are right that the true martyr, who deserves honour and reverence, bears that witness and no other. They are wrong only in pretending to have been faithful stewards of this message. Their divisions, hatreds and persecutions have marred, broken and inverted it. Each has often been used by the Wisdom of God to bring out a witness of it that the other suppressed or mangled. And a cry has risen out of the depths of the human heart, often of bitter wailing and cursing against them all, which, interpreted by the teaching of Scripture, has the same significance.

But this conclusion would be unpractical if it did not lead each of us to ask, “How may I, in my place and calling, bear witness of this Son of Man, if I indeed believe that there is a Son of Man, that He has revealed God to man, and that He stands at the right hand of God?” No people can less escape that question than we, members of the English Church, and none have less right to say their circumstances do not favour understanding or proclaiming the testimony. By every act and service from Advent to Trinity, by our Confessions, Prayers and Thanksgivings, by our Creeds and Sacraments, we avouch Sunday after Sunday that there is verily a Son of Man, one in all things with men, who has justified and glorified our race at God’s right hand. If those Confessions and Prayers are taken from us or materially altered, I believe it will be because this witness offends the exclusiveness of some class or school, who cannot endure a Person set continually before them instead of notions, or a deliverance that is human and universal rather than something to boast of as ours. As long as Creeds were enforced by penalties or disabilities, their virtue as testimonies to the true Head of man and the real state of mankind was necessarily hidden. They were received as formulas of a certain religion, not as a Gospel to all nations and kindreds. Everything that has taken away their fictitious power has added to their actual power. The suffering spirit of man cries and sighs against the burden of its own dividing conceits and fantasies, as well as against the tyranny of sects, schools and doctors. In time it will learn to recognise the Creeds not as utterances of our beggarly opinions, mere heirlooms of the past, or inventions of schoolmen in their hour of triumph to keep men’s hearts and reason within fences. It will hear them as voices from brothers in other days, inviting it to break through every opinion, tradition and form that hinders it from seeing the Son of Man as its representative and advocate at God’s right hand. So I do not doubt that anyone raised up, in our day or another, to testify to the truth that let Stephen fall quietly asleep with a prayer for his country and his murderers will find these Creeds mighty aids and comforts, in public discourse and in solitude. Still less do I doubt that the Bible, in its plain history stripped of refinements, will be to them what its early part was to Stephen: the chief strengthener of faith and the great weapon against all artificial, notional, exclusive religion.

If there were such fighters, they would discover, by degrees if not at once, that this is their armoury. But where are they? Amid the clatter of opinions and the confusion of schools and parties, where shall we look for those who care only to testify of a Son of Man at the right hand of God? In a time of self-indulgence, how can we expect that testimony, if it did come forth, to be anything but feeble or inconsistent? By human calculation there never was a time when such men were more needed or less likely to appear. But we are not to judge by human calculation. This is God’s own cause, and He will take care of it. In places we know nothing of, by processes of education we cannot guess, He may have been preparing His witnesses. They may appear in the very year that is coming, in our land or in lands which in our vanity we suppose need reformation more. Wherever and whenever they arise, the old precedents will apply. The Christian religious world will regard them as the Jewish religious world regarded Stephen, and denounce them as wishing to overthrow institutions that are immeasurably dearer to them than to their accusers. But they will speak with power to the hearts of men who need a Son of Man. Even when their own vision is weakest, they will be sure that the heavens will one day be opened and the Son of Man revealed to the whole universe at His Father’s right hand.