* The above is a letter written by the famous American surgeon, Professor Howard A. Kelly, in reply to an invitation to co-operate with a large religious organisation whose doctrinal views were of a very hazy kind. The letter appeared in the “S.S. Times” (Philadelphia) and was reprinted in this country in “The Christian.”—Editor.
I WRITE, thanking you for the courtesy intended in asking me to join the ——, to explain the impossibility of any such intimate joint work as such an association would demand. Our positions, as I understand them, on the great basic truths of our faith are as far apart as nadir from zenith. It is my profound and unalterable conviction from the experience of a lifetime, and from its observed effects upon the spiritual life and well-being of others, that the Bible throughout, in the most profound sense in which it is possible to conceive it, is the Word of God to man.
While I see in the Old Testament record the gradual unfolding of God’s great purpose in preparing men for the coming of His Son, I find no evolution there in any other than a figurative sense. I find the Old Testament a picture gallery crowded with wonderful prefigurations or types of Him who was to come—Christ Jesus our Lord.
I believe when God created light that it was specifically the most perfect and wonderful figure in the whole realm of nature He could give His intelligent creatures whom He wished to bring closer to the Godhead of Jesus Christ, soon to appear as the Light of the World. And so in type do I find Him written in large letters on all the pages of the Word; in Noah’s salvation in the ark, in the lives of patriarchs, remarkably in Joseph’s life, in Moses as a figure of that Prophet who was to come, and, above all, in the sacrifices of Leviticus, and so on throughout, including all the prophecies, Psalms, and other writings made sacred by this holy content of the Lord Jesus, who was in the bosom of the Father.
I believe that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, thus uniting His Deity to our humanity for ever—the Lord God Most High become one with the lowliest of His creatures. My faith not only accepts but rejoices in the miracles manifesting His power and His glory and His compassion for our lost and suffering humanity.
I find in the Gospels fathomless wellsprings, ever new and refreshing, daily revealing to us the purposes of God. I see clearly that Christ’s one great regnant purpose in coming was to go to the cross to bear the sins of the world, to offer Himself a propitiation for sin, our Substitute. Without His sacrificial death as an expiation of our sins and for sinners, the whole Word of God, including the Old Testament, so abundantly honoured in its fulfilment in the New Testament, becomes utterly meaningless and futile. It is the most profound conviction of my life, now not distant from its close, upon which all my hopes rest, that I shall see our God and Father and His Christ and my loved ones who have gone on ahead of me; it is, I say, my unalterable conviction that all these assurances and blessings come to me and to all Christians by the way of the Cross, which is ever before me.
Need I add, then, my assurance that this mortal body will rise again, having put on immortality, and seeing my Lord Jesus Christ I shall finally reach my goal in being transformed into His image, and my body being made like unto His glorious body.
I rejoice, therefore, in His Resurrection, the substantial ground of my hope, His gift of His Holy Spirit—my Mentor, my Guide, my Teacher, and the Spirit of love who broods over my naturally cantankerous, rebellious, lustful human nature and by His divine alchemy, wrought by the way of the Cross, ever draws me to the foot of that Cross as the one great effective source of all blessings now and through the ages to come. The longer I live, the more increasingly wonderful becomes the Cross, that via crucis, as our only way of salvation. . . . . . .
Holding all these settled and unalterable convictions, these precious doctrines or dogmas, if you will, I rejoice in them daily and ever seek grace to live as one who has put off the things of the flesh and has put on Christ. How imperfectly, alas, I succeed in representing Him only those who know me in the intimacies of our daily lives can testify. Nevertheless, as He has enjoined forgiveness of our fellows until seventy times seven, so the resources of infinite grace to the penitent suppliant are inexhaustible for the home-journeying pilgrim who strains his longing gaze ever towards the Celestial City and its King and all the saints who dwell there.
I write in that spirit of love which unites me to all for whom Christ died, to all who are also called to this great life in Him, imparted by His Holy Spirit. The love of Christ seems to draw me especially to those who differ, as I believe we do on these vital questions, hoping that our Father will give us grace to see these profound truths alike, when we shall place our whole confidence in Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Root and Offspring of David, God’s sacrificial Passover Lamb.