What judgment (we think) ought to be formed of the Irvingite movement is not doubtful to anyone who has followed the notices now drawing to an end.
It is not meant that they have not much truth of an important kind, and of truth neglected if not wholly ignored by Protestants (of Romanists we need not speak now). They have a vivid notion, not the reality, of the church of God, and consequently make a great deal of its unity as a principle and fact to he made good on earth before the Lord comes to receive us to Himself and present us in the Father's house. They accordingly and justly insist on His coming to receive us as the one and divinely given object of hope, and discard as false the vain dream of Christendom in general that all the earth is to be gradually brought to His feet by Christian measures, still less by human mixture of a more palatable kind, or even by the operations of God's providential hand. They duly recognize that it is an honor reserved not for a fallen church, but for Christ, yet not in this or in aught else without the work of the Holy Spirit also, but Himself personally present in manifested power to establish the kingdom under the whole heaven, while the risen saints reign over the whole earth with Him; though in this last, as was pointed out, not even their apostles were clear.
Again, they are not blind to the prevalent unbelief that thwarts the effectual working of the Holy Spirit, while owning that grace has not failed to work, spite of the multiplying hindrances from man's self-sufficiency, in an age characterized more and more by that self-exalting spirit in the fatal error of progress and the growing license of self-will, the revolutionism often peaceful, always onward, of today. They confess that all that is for good and God's glory in man must be of the Spirit sent down from heaven to glorify Christ Jesus, the Second Man.
Further, the revived hope of the church, and the new interest in prophetic inquiry, drew attention not only to the church's future glory, but to the splendid prospects of Israel and the out-spreading of blessedness for all nations under the reign of the Son of Man. And the earth at any rate was seen to be the destined theater of the magnificent dealings of God, beyond whatever has been, for the exaltation of His Son and the holy peace, joy, and righteousness of the race, to God's glory.
This could not be without bringing into just prominence the King as well as the kingdom; and the humanity of the Lord was recovered from the neglect which had shrouded it, in the minds of even the most pious, for centuries. It is not that true believers questioned that He was perfect Man as well as God the Word made flesh, or would have in general failed to reject and resent any doubt cast by the enemy on the Incarnation. Still the discussion, kindled by the really earnest study of prophecy long neglected, made it plain that men of reputed orthodoxy were false to the plenary inspiration of scripture on the one hand, and on the other to the real humanity of the Lord Jesus. The Irvingites took an active part in opposing the unbelief of many Protestants, and even leaders of religious thought and action in Great Britain, as elsewhere.
But soon, immediately one might say, their accredited organ began to betray fundamental unsoundness in the very vital point which they said, not without reason, to be growingly compromised by others that seemed to be Pillars.
If the Evangelicals left in the shade the grand truth of the Lord as Man in all the moral glory of His humiliation, and were absorbed in the efficacy which His work acquires from the Deity of His Person, Mr. Irving and his associates fell rapidly into sentiments, first unguarded and daring in their speculations and inferences, and full soon irreverent, heterodox, and deadly. It was well to recall saints from the dry bones of systematic divinity; but Satan availed himself of many hearts returning to Christ as a really living One with Whom we have to do in the fullness of grace, and of the Father's love incomparably better known in consequence, to dishonor, lose, and in effect deny Him come in the flesh, when they flattered themselves that they most of all were true to His Incarnation. By the flesh in which He came, they taught contrary to scripture and even the ordinary confession of Christendom in its most degraded state, “that the Son of God by birth of His mother was in the condition of a sinner,” and this in contrast with the truth that God made Him sin for us on the cross; that He was “conscious of the motions of the flesh and of the fleshly mind, in so far as any regenerate man is conscious of them when under the operation of the Holy Ghost,” and that even “He could say until His resurrection, Not I, but sin that tempteth me in the flesh.” This is not the faith of Jesus, but antichristian blasphemy. Yet the author of it was their most honored and cherished teacher, beyond all ever known among them, and, till his death, angel or bishop of their most influential church.
As Christ is the truth, falsehood to His Person, whether on the divine nature or the human, is fatal. The Lord knoweth them that are His, and may discern in the depths those whose hearts are true when their lives are steeped in error. But we can only judge, and are bound to judge, by the confession made. And it is true charity to gloss over no evil imputed to Christ, any more than falsification of His work, if peradventure those ensnared may be recovered, and others may be warned and kept from the delusions of the enemy, to say nothing of what is and ought to be our prime call, the vindication of His honor to Whom we owe everything precious both now and for eternity.
It is a matter of course, therefore, that having allowed this foul aspersion on Christ's humanity, and consequently asserting another than the true Christ of God, every other part of the truth is dragged down into the mire of fallen humanity. They thus exhibit the sad spectacle of combining the acknowledgment of a great deal of truth, rarely found in Christendom and of course nowhere else, with the effects of that error at the core which vitiates the body right through to every extremity.
Hence the church, though nominally a heavenly institution, becomes in their hands the most worldly of societies claiming to represent the Lord here below: an affair of as fine buildings as they can erect, and as near the Jewish model as is possible on any pretense of Christianity, with costly array in most hues of the rainbow, beyond the garments of Babylon itself, with all the pomp of official degree, with incense, lights, and holy water, with priests, altar, and sacrifice, as if we were not Christians but Jews. And along with this system of meretricious show, so dear and reverent to the natural man, the pretension to prophetic utterances and other displays of assumed power in the Holy Ghost, which they declare is not man, and we are sure is not God; from what source therefore?
For those who have eyes of faith to discern, it is evidently a going back from the unseen objects on which the Christian and the church are taught to look habitually; and as the apostle told the Galatians when adopting not the hundredth part of the weak and beggarly elements embraced by Irvingites, it is a turning again to that idolatrous religion of the world, from which the faith of Christ is meant to deliver once and forever, as the Holy Spirit is our power acting by the written word. For a religion of form and symbol, which was employed by God's authority as a test of Israel before Christ and His redemption, has another character now that man, Israel in particular, and the world are proved enemies of God in the cross. For a Christian to take up Jewish elements (and nowhere is this so patent as in Irvingism, along with the confessed and utterly incompatible presence of the Spirit), is like a Gentile who had given up his idols returning again to that evil bondage.
Irvingism therefore stands before us to an extravagant degree guilty of a deliberate and elaborate effort to unite the elements or principles of the world with the claims of church privileges and Christian truth. This is essentially and altogether inconsistent, the very principle of that Babylon (the confusion of light and darkness) against which in earlier days there was no end of declamation. No wonder therefore that even truths they teach degenerate, very often losing their true and heavenly character for a Jewish measure and mold. Thus the coming kingdom they set forth simply on its earthly side. They have no real grasp of our intimate associations with Christ on high. They abound with denunciations of judgment; and if they hold out a hope, it is not the proper translation of the whole church of God (and of the O. T. saints also) to meet the Lord on high, and so be ever with Him, but a perverted use of Zoar in Genesis, and of the sealed in Rev. 7, and of those that follow the Lamb on Zion, as an inducement to accept their spurious apostolate and join their party. Alas! what is this but self-deception? It is neither grace nor truth in Christ, but a snare for souls by a false and mischievous abuse of God's word. What kind of unity or catholicity or apostolicity is this? Certainly not of the Holy Spirit.
If these charges are well founded, there is no need of repeating smaller though abundant proof of departure from the truth God has revealed to us. The church, the assembly of the living God, is the basis of the truth. If that which the base sustains, and the pillar proclaims, is not the truth, neither does God acknowledge as His. Christ is the truth; but the church is the responsible witness of it before the world; and what claims to be the church, but is a. false witness, God disowns, as we ought also. It is an instrument for deceiving souls, the more dangerous in proportion to its pretensions. If false in the main, the more truth it presents along with deadly error, the greater the snare. Unmixed error in fact could not attract the God-fearing; but lofty claims of the church, of apostles and prophets, of pastors and teachers, &c., might be ensnaring to souls weary of vain talk and modern inventions, especially when such claims follow testimony to the evident truth of a speedily coming Savior, which acts on the conscience and makes souls anxious to do the will of God. In this way many a soul has been attracted from the emptiness of Nationalism and Dissent, ashamed afterward to leave what was found out little answering to its promise.
Irvingism did not, more than the other sects of Christendom, take its stand on obedience, the only true, humble, and holy principle for such as find themselves in the midst of rain and departure from God, as scripture predicted was to be. The revealed safeguard then is the written word. They like others yearned after power, in unbelief that we have power in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. Hence the cry of unbelief was answered by evil operations of the enemy, which endorsed and sealed antichrist as the truth. Humiliation was and is the due place, self-judgment, but withal confidence in the grace of our God, and absolute subjection to the truth; not pretending to more than He gives us, with deep thankfulness for all that abides. Thus should we as saints, ceasing to do evil, learn to do well, as we await in peace the coming.; of our Lord. We have indeed little strength: but may we keep His word and not deny His Name.
May grace use the present warning to convince the children of God within, or looking to, it, that the Catholic Apostolic body is to be shunned and abhorred for its anti-Christian error, whatever else of truth may be found there.