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Title: The New Theology
Author: R. J. Campbell
Release Date: December 11, 2008 [EBook #27500]
Language: English
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THE NEW THEOLOGY
BY
R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A.
MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1907.
Reprinted April, 1907.
INTRODUCTION
This book has been undertaken at the request of a number of my friends
who feel that recent criticisms of what has come to be called the New
Theology ought to be dealt with in some comprehensive and systematic
way. With this suggestion my own judgment concurs, but only so far as
my own pulpit teaching is concerned. I cannot pretend to speak for
anyone else, and therefore this monograph must not be understood as an
authoritative exposition of the views held and expounded by other
preachers who may be in sympathy with the New Theology. From its very
nature, as I hope the following pages will show, the New Theology
cannot be a creed, but its adherents have a common standpoint. My only
reason for calling this book by that title is that a considerable
section of the public at present persists in regarding me as in a
special way the exponent of it; indeed from the correspondence which
has been proceeding in the press it is evident that many people credit
me with having invented both the name and the thing. It is of little
use objecting to the name, for to all appearance it has come to stay
and is gradually acquiring a marked and definite content. So long as
it is clearly understood that this book is but an outline statement of
my own personal views, the title will do no harm. The controversy
which is not yet over has been fruitful in misunderstandings of all
kinds, and a great many of the criticisms passed upon my teaching have
been wholly due to a mistaken notion of what it really is. In so far
as any of those criticisms have been directed against me personally, I
have nothing to say; I hope I can leave my vindication to the judgment
of whatever public may feel an interest in my work. The best rejoinder
that could be made to the various criticisms of the teaching itself
would be to publish them side by side, for they neutralise one another
most effectually. But a better and more useful thing to do is to let
the public know just what the teaching is and leave it to the test of
time. I do not greatly object to having it described as "new." The
fundamental principle of the New Theology is as old as religion, but I
am quite willing to admit that in its all-round application to the
conditions of modern life it is new. I do not see why a man should be
ashamed of confessing that he does his own thinking instead of letting
other people do it for him.
This book, then, is not the author's _Apologia pro Vita Sua_. It is
intended as a concise statement of the outlines of the teaching given
from the City Temple pulpit. It is neither a reply to separate
criticisms nor an _ex cathedra_ utterance. I think I am usually able
to say what I mean, and in the following pages my object is to say what
I mean in such a way that everyone can understand.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE NAME AND THE SITUATION
II. GOD AND THE UNIVERSE
III. MAN IN RELATION TO GOD
IV. THE NATURE OF EVIL
VI. THE ETERNAL CHRIST
VII. THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD
VIII. THE ATONEMENT.--I. ASSOCIATION OF THE DOCTRINE WITH JESUS
IX. THE ATONEMENT.--II. SEMITIC IDEAS OF ATONEMENT
X. THE ATONEMENT.--III. THE DOCTRINE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY
AND EXPERIENCE
XI. THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE
XII. SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME
XIII. THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
XIV. CONCLUSION
THE NEW THEOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE NAME AND THE SITUATION
+Religion and Theology.+--Religion is one thing and theology another,
but religion is never found apart from a theology of some kind, for
theology is the intellectual articulation of religious experience.
Every man who has anything worthy to be called a religious experience
has also a theology; he cannot help it. No sooner does he attempt to
understand or express his experience of the relations of God and the
soul than he finds himself in possession of a theology. The religious
experience may be a very good one and the theology a very bad one, but
still religion and theology are necessary to each other, and it is a
man's duty to try to make his theology as nearly as possible an
adequate and worthy expression of his religion. He will never succeed
in doing this in a permanent fashion, for the content of religious
experience is, or should be, greater than any form of statement. But
theology is everyone's business. We cannot afford to leave it to
experts or refrain from forming our own judgment upon the
pronouncements of experts. To speak of theology as though it had an
esoteric and an exoteric side, one for the man in the study and the
other for the man in the world, is a practical heresy of a most
dangerous kind. Neither should theology be confounded with
ecclesiasticism. It is my conviction that the battle with
ecclesiasticism has long since been decided, and civilisation has
nothing to fear from the official priest. Those who spend their time
in protesting against sacerdotal pretensions are only beating the
air--"We shall never go to Canossa," as Bismarck said. No, the real
danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to the immediate future of
mankind in every department of thought and action, arises from
practical materialism on the one hand and an antiquated dogmatic
theology on the other. I hope it will be understood by readers of
these pages that in any references I may make to dogmatic theology I am
passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian whose work is
being done in the field of historical criticism or archaeology or any
of the departments of scientific research into the subject-matter of
religion. Most of my readers will understand quite well what I mean.
Everyone knows that, broadly speaking, certain ways of stating
Christian truth are taken for granted both in pulpit and pew; the
popular or generally accepted theology of all the churches of
Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is fundamentally the same,
and somehow the modern mind has come to distrust it. There is a
curious want of harmony between our ordinary views of life and our
conventional religious beliefs. We live our lives upon one set of
assumptions during six days of the week and a quite different set on
Sunday and in church. The average man feels this without perhaps quite
realising what is the matter. All he knows is that the propositions he
has been taught to regard as a full and perfect statement of
Christianity have little or nothing to do with his everyday experience;
they seem to belong to a different world. He does not know how
comparatively modern this popular presentation of Christianity is.
What is wanted therefore is a restatement of the essential truth of the
Christian religion in terms of the modern mind.
_The New Theology and the Immanence of God._--Where or when the name
New Theology arose I do not know, but it has been in existence for at
least one generation. It is neither of my invention nor of my choice.
It has long been in use both in this country and in America to indicate
the attitude of those who believe that the fundamentals of the
Christian faith need to be rearticulated in terms of the immanence of
God. Those who take this view do not hold that there is any need for a
new religion, but that the forms in which the religion of Jesus is
commonly presented are inadequate and misleading. What is wanted is
freshness and simplicity of statement. The New Theology is not new
except in the sense that it seeks to substitute simplicity for
complexity and to get down to moral values in its use of religious
terms. Our objection is not so much to the venerable creeds of
Christendom as to the ordinary interpretations of those creeds. And,
creeds or no creeds, we hold that the religious experience which came
to the world in Jesus of Nazareth is enough for all our needs, and only
requires to be freed from limiting statements in order to lay firm hold
once more upon the civilised world.
The New Theology is an untrammelled return to the Christian sources in
the light of modern thought. Its starting point is a re-emphasis of
the Christian belief in the divine immanence in the universe and in
mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but it requires to be
placed effectively in the foreground of Christian preaching. In the
immediate past the doctrine of the divine transcendence--that is, the
obvious truth that the infinite being of God must transcend the
infinite universe--has been presented in such a way as to amount to a
practical dualism, and to lead men to think of God as above and apart
from His world instead of expressing Himself through His world. I
repeat that this dualism is practical, not theoretical, but that it
exists is plain enough from such statements as that of the present-day
theologian who speaks of God's "eternal eminence, and His descent on a
created world." This kind of theologising leads straight to the
conclusion that God is to all intents and purposes quite distinct from
His creation, although He possesses a full and accurate knowledge of
all that goes on in it and reserves to Himself the right to interfere.
In what sense language like this leaves room for the divine immanence
it is difficult to see. The New Theology holds that we know nothing
and can know nothing of the Infinite Cause whence all things proceed
except as we read Him in His universe and in our own souls. It is the
immanent God with whom we have to do, and if this obvious fact is once
firmly grasped it will simplify all our religious conceptions and give
us a working faith.
+The decline of organised Christianity.+--For a generation or more in
every part of Christendom there has been a steady drift away from
organised religion as represented by the churches, and the question is
being seriously asked whether Christianity can much longer hold its
own. Protestant controversialists frequently draw attention to the
decline of church-going in Latin countries as evidence of the decay of
sacerdotalism, particularly in the church of Rome. But outside Latin
countries it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of Rome than
in any other church. The masses of the people on the one hand and the
cultured classes on the other are becoming increasingly alienated from
the religion of the churches. A London daily paper made a religious
census some years ago and demonstrated that about one-fifth of the
population of the metropolis attended public worship, and this was a
generous estimate. Women, who are more emotional, more reverent, and
more amenable to external authority than men, usually form the majority
of the worshippers at an ordinary service. Mr. Charles Booth in his
great work on the "Life and Labour of the People in London" asserts
that the churches are practically without influence of any kind on the
communal life. This I believe to be an exaggeration, but it will
hardly be denied that the average working, business, or professional
man looks upon the churches almost with indifference. In many cases
this indifference passes into hostility or contempt. Intelligent men
take little notice of preachers and sermons, and the
theologically-minded layman is such a rarity as to be noteworthy. Most
significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that much of the moral
earnestness of the nation and of social redemptive effort exists
outside the churches altogether. I am well aware that there is a great
deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs from selfish
materialism, and I gladly recognise that in almost any ordinary church
to-day brave and self-denying work is being done for the common good,
but this does not invalidate my general statement. The plain, bald
fact remains that the churches as such are counting for less and less
in civilisation in general and our own nation in particular. One of
the ablest of our rising young members of Parliament, a man of strong
religious convictions and social sympathies, recently declared that we
were witnessing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation
breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. To be sure, the
same thing has been said before and has proved to be wrong. It was
said in the eighteenth century when men with something of the prophet's
fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights of Man, declaring at the
same time that institutional religion was at an end, utterly
discredited, and impossible of acceptance by any intelligent being. In
France during the Revolution the populace turned frantically upon the
established faith, tore it to shreds, burlesqued it, and set up the
worship of the Goddess of Reason, as they called it, typified by a
Parisian harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its chilly hand
not only upon the world of scholars and men of letters, but even upon
the church. An English king is reported to have said that half his
bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion reasserted itself
all over the civilised world. Napoleon with shrewd insight realised
that the people could not do without it, and so effected the Concordat
with Rome which has now been dissolved; Wesley began the movement in
England which has since created the largest Protestant denomination in
the world; Germany produced a succession of great preachers and
scholars the like of whom had hardly ever been known in Europe before.
+Will religious faith regain its power?+--Will this happen again? For
assuredly Christianity has for the moment lost its hold. Can it
recover it? I am sure it can, if only because the moral movements of
the age, such as the great labour movement, are in reality the
expression of the Christian spirit, and only need to recognise
themselves as such in order to become irresistible. The waggon of
socialism needs to be hitched to the star of religious faith. But have
the churches spiritual energy enough to recover their lost position?
That depends upon themselves. If they consent to be bound by dogmatic
statements inherited from the past, they are doomed. The world is not
listening to theologians to-day. They have no message for it. They
are on the periphery, not at the centre of things. The great rolling
river of thought and action is passing them by. Scientific scholarship
applied to the study of Christian origins is extremely valuable, but
the defender of systems of belief couched in the language of a by-gone
age is an anachronism and the sooner we shake ourselves free of him the
better. The greatest of all the causes of the drift from the churches
is the fact that Christian truth has become associated in the popular
mind with certain forms of statement which thoughtful men find it
impossible to accept not only on intellectual but even on moral
grounds. Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the Fall, the
scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of
salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only
misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these
notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do
with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much
less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the
scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned,
is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The
consequence is that religion has come to be thought of as something
apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and
Bible readings, instead of what it really is,--the coördinating
principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a
nutshell,--popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological
college Christianity) does _not_ interpret life. Consequently the
great world of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about it.
+Theologians and preachers rarely realise the situation.+--One would
think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would
see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see
it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in
a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the
need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The
professional theologian rarely does even as much as this. He takes
himself very seriously; sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of
deviation from the accepted standards; mounts some denominational chair
or other and thunders forth his view of the urgent necessity for
rehabilitating truth in the grave-clothes of long-buried formulas. I
mean that the language he habitually uses implies some kind of belief
in formulas he no longer holds. He hardly dares to disinter the
formulas themselves,--that would not be convenient even for him,--but
he goes on flapping the shroud as energetically as ever, and the world
does not even take the trouble to laugh. Wherever and whenever
religious agencies succeed it is rarely because of the driving power of
what is preached, but because the preacher's gospel is glossed over or
put in the background. We have popular services by the million in
which devices are used to attract the public which ought not to be
necessary if their framers had any real message to declare. But they
have not. Popular pulpit addresses rarely or never deal with the
fundamental problems of life. The last thing one ever expects to hear
in such addresses is a real living representation of the beliefs the
preacher professes to hold. He makes passing allusions to them, of
course, such as appeals to come to the cross, and such like, but they
generally sound unreal, and the pill has to be sweetly sugared. The
ordinary way of preaching the gospel is to avoid saying much about what
the preacher believes the gospel to be.
To be sure there are many social activities in connection with
Christian churches. If it were not for these the churches would have
to be shut up. They are quite admirable in their way, and often
produce excellent results, but they imply another gospel than the one
supposed to be preached from the pulpits. They ignore dogmatic
beliefs, and assume the salvability of the whole race and the
possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth. Wherever the
churches are alive to-day, and not merely struggling to keep their
heads above water, it is not their doctrine but their non-theological
human sympathy that is doing it.
This, then, is the situation. The main stream of modern life is
passing organised religion by. Where is the remedy to be found?
+We seek to save religion rather than the Churches.+--Let me say
plainly that I do not think our object should be to find a remedy which
will save the churches. That would be putting the cart before the
horse. What is wanted is a driving force which will enable the
churches to fulfil their true mission of saving the world, or, to put
it better still, will serve to bring mankind back to real living faith
in God and the spiritual meaning of life. Hardly anyone would
seriously deny that the world is waiting for this. Men are not
irreligious. On the contrary there is no subject of such general
interest as religion; it takes precedence of all other subjects just
because all other subjects are implied in it. Religion is man's
response to the call of the universe; it is the soul turning towards
its source and goal. How could it fail to be of absorbing interest?
What is wanted is a message charged with spiritual power, "Where there
is no vision the people perish." Mere dogmatic assertions will not do.
The word of God is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life
and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of man. That message
is here now. It is being preached, not by one man only, but the wide
world over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches if they will
not hear. Religion is necessary to mankind, but churches are not.
From every quarter of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence
is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human is the evidence
of God, and that Jesus held the key to the riddle of existence.
Although this comes to us as with the freshness of a new revelation, it
is not really new. It is the spirit which has been the inspiration of
every great religious awakening since the world began. In this country
and in other parts of the English-speaking world that spirit is
becoming associated with the name the New Theology. To associate it
with any one personality is to belittle the subject and to obscure its
real significance. There are many brave and good men in the churches
and outside the churches to-day, men of true prophetic spirit, who
would reject utterly the name New Theology, but who are thoroughly
imbued with this new-old spirit and are leading mankind toward the
light. In the church of Rome the movement is typified by men like
Father Tyrrell, whose teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit
order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The present condition of
the church of Rome is not unhopeful to those who believe as I do that
that venerable church has been used of God to great ends in the past
and that her spiritual vitality is by no means exhausted. Father
Tyrrell and such as he are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men
than are the latter to those Protestants who pin their faith to
external standards of belief. It is a curious but indisputable fact
that the most extreme anti-Romanist Protestants are themselves in the
same boat with Rome: they insist on the absolute necessity for external
authority in matters of belief and are unwilling to trust the
individual soul to recognise truth as it comes. In all the churches
those who believe in the religion of the Spirit should recognise one
another as brothers. In the church of England a large and increasing
band of men are looking in this direction and are making their
influence felt. Of these perhaps the most outstanding is Archdeacon
Wilberforce, but he is by no means alone. A movement has begun in the
Lutheran church. It has existed for a long time in French
Protestantism as represented by the late Auguste Sabatier and his
friend Réville. In the congregational and other evangelical churches
of England and America the same attitude is being taken by many who are
not even aware that the name New Theology is being applied to it. In
this country the movement in the free churches is typified by men like
the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams of Bradford. There are many Unitarians
who are preaching it; indeed, there are some who would assert that the
New Theology is only Unitarianism under another name. But, as I shall
hope to show, this is very far from being the case. It may or may not
be professed by exponents of Unitarianism, but it is not a surrender to
Unitarianism.
+The New Theology is spiritual socialism.+--The great social movement
which is now taking place in every country of the civilised world
toward universal peace and brotherhood and a better and fairer
distribution of wealth is really the same movement as that which in the
more distinctively religious sphere is coming to be called the New
Theology. This fact needs to be realised and brought out. The New
Theology is the gospel of the kingdom of God. Neither socialism nor
any other economic system will permanently save and lift mankind
without definitely recognised spiritual sanctions, that is, it must be
a religion. The New Theology is but the religious articulation of the
social movement. The word "theology" is almost a misnomer; it is
essentially a moral and spiritual movement, the recognition that we are
at the beginning of a great religious and ethical awakening, the
ultimate results of which no man can completely foresee.
+And also the religion of science.+--Again, the New Theology is the
religion of science. It is the denial that there is, or ever has been,
or ever can be, any dissonance between science and religion; it is the
recognition that upon the foundations laid by modern science a vaster
and nobler fabric of faith is rising than that world has ever before
known. Science is supplying the facts which the New Theology is
weaving into the texture of religious experience.
CHAPTER II
GOD AND THE UNIVERSE
+What religion is.+--All religion begins in cosmic emotion. It is the
recognition of an essential relationship between the human soul and the
great whole of things of which it is the outcome and expression. The
mysterious universe is always calling, and, in some form or other, we
are always answering. The artist answers by trying to express his
feeling of its beauty; the scientist answers by recognising its laws
and unfolding its wonders; the social reformer answers by his
self-denying labours for the common good. In each and every case there
is in the background of experience a conviction that the unit is the
instrument of the All; religion is implied in these as in all other
activities in which man aims at a higher-than-self. But religion,
properly so-called, begins when the soul consciously enters upon
communion with this higher-than-self as with an all-comprehending
intelligence; it is the soul instinctively turning toward its source
and goal. Religion may assume a great many different and even
repellent forms, but at bottom this is what it always is: it is the
soul reaching forth to the great mysterious whole of things, the
higher-than-self, and seeking for closer and ever closer communion
therewith. The savage with his totem and the Christian saint before
the altar have this in common: they are reaching through the things
that are seen to the reality beyond.
+What the word "God" means.+--But what name are we to give to this
higher-than-self whose presence is so unescapable? The name matters
comparatively little, but it includes all that the ordinary Christian
means by God. The word "God" stands for many things, but to
present-day thought it must stand for the un-caused Cause of all
existence, the unitary principle implied in all multiplicity. Everyone
of necessity believes in this. It is impossible to define the term
completely, for to define is necessarily to limit, and we are thinking
of the illimitable. But we ought to understand clearly that to
disbelieve in God is an impossibility; everyone believes in God if he
believes in his own existence. The blankest materialist that ever
lived, whoever he may have been, must have affirmed God even in the act
of denying Him. Professor Haeckel declares his belief in God on every
page of his "Riddle of the Universe," the famous book in which he says
that God, Freedom, and Immortality are the three great buttresses of
superstition, which science must make it her business to destroy. So
far science has only succeeded in giving us a vaster, grander
conception of God by giving us a vaster, grander conception of the
universe in which we live. When I say God, I mean the mysterious Power
which is finding expression in the universe, and which is present in
every tiniest atom of the wondrous whole. I find that this Power is
the one reality I cannot get away from, for, whatever else it may be,
it is myself. Theologians will tell me that I have taken a prodigious
leap in saying this, but I cannot help it. How can there be anything
in the universe outside of God? Whatever distinctions of being there
may be within the universe it is surely clear that they must all be
transcended and comprehended within infinity. There cannot be two
infinities, nor can there be an infinite and also a finite beyond it.
What infinity may be we have no means of knowing. Here the most devout
Christian is just as much of an agnostic as Professor Huxley; we can
predicate nothing with confidence concerning the all-comprehending
unity wherein we live and move and have our being, save and except as
we see it manifested in that part of our universe which lies open to
us. One would think that this were so obvious as to need no
demonstration. But how do ordinary church-going Christians talk about
God? They talk as though He were (practically) a finite being
stationed somewhere above and beyond the universe, watching and
worrying over other and lesser finite beings, to wit, ourselves.
According to the received phraseology this God is greatly bothered and
thwarted by what men have been doing throughout the few millenniums of
human existence. He takes the whole thing very seriously, and thinks
about little else than getting wayward humanity into line again. To
this end He has adopted various expedients, the chief of which was the
sending of His only begotten Son to suffer and die in order that He
might be free to forgive the trouble we had caused Him. I hope no
reader of these words will think I am making light of a sacred subject;
I never was more serious in my life. What I am trying to show is that,
reduced to its simplest terms, the accepted theology of the churches
to-day is pitiably inadequate as an explanation of our relationship to
this great and mysterious universe. There is a beautiful spiritual
truth underneath every venerable article of the Christian faith, but as
popularly presented this truth has become so distorted as to be
falsehood. It narrows religion and belittles God. It is dishonouring
to human nature, and is absolutely ludicrous as an interpretation of
the cosmic process. Of course, the dogmatic theologian will maintain
that this is a caricature of the way in which the relationship of God
to the world is set forth in religious treatises and from the Christian
pulpit. But is it? I think I can appeal with confidence to the
thoughtful man who has given up going to church as to whether it is or
not. The God of the ordinary church-goer, and of the man who is
supposed to teach him from study and pulpit, is an antiquated
Theologian who made His universe so badly that it went wrong in spite
of Him and has remained wrong ever since. Why He should ever have
created it is not clear. Why He should be the injured party in all the
miseries that have ensued is still less clear. The poor crippled child
who has been maimed by a falling rock, and the white-faced match-box
maker who works eighteen hours out of the twenty-four to keep body and
soul together have surely some sort of a claim upon God apart from
being miserable sinners who must account themselves fortunate to be
forgiven for Christ's sake. Faugh! it is all so unreal and so stupid.
This kind of God is no God at all. The theologian may call Him
infinite, but in practice He is finite. He may call Him a God of love,
but in practice He is spiteful and silly. I shall have something to
say presently about the twin problems of pain and evil; but what
so-called orthodoxy has to say is not only no solution of them, it is
demonstrably false to the religion of Jesus.
+Every man believes in God.+--For the moment what I want to make clear
is this. No man should refuse to assert his belief in God because he
cannot bring himself to believe in the God of the typical theologian.
Remember that the real God is the God expressed in the universe and in
yourself. The question is not whether you _shall_ believe in God, but
how much you _can_ believe about Him. You may think with Haeckel that
the universe is the outcome of the fortuitous interaction of material
forces without consciousness and definite purpose behind them, or you
may believe that the cosmos is the product of intelligence and "means
intensely and means good," but you cannot help believing in God, the
Power revealed in it. As I write these words I am seated before a
window overlooking the heaving waste of waters on a rock-bound Cornish
coast. It is a stormy day. The sky is overcast toward the western
horizon; on the east shafts of blue and saffron have pierced the pall
of darkness and flung their radiance over the spreading sea. The total
effect is strangely solemnising. The suggestion of titanic forces
conveyed in the rush of wind and wave upon the unyielding cliffs,
conjoined to the majestic march of the storm-clouds across the heaven
from the west, is somehow elevated and composed by the mystic light
that streams from the east. I have never seen anything quite like it
before. It tells me of a beneficent stillness, an eternal strength,
far above and beyond these finite tossings. It whispers the word
impossible to utter, the word that explains everything, the deep that
calleth unto deep. So my God calls always to my deeper soul, and tells
me I must read Him by mine own highest and best, and by the highest and
best that the universe has yet produced. Thus the last word about God
becomes the last word about man: it is Jesus. Materialists may tell me
that the universe does not know what it is doing, that it goes on
clanking and banging, age after age, without end or aim, but I shall
continue to feel compelled to believe that the Power which produced
Jesus must at least be equal to Jesus. So Jesus becomes my gateway to
the innermost of God. When I look at Him I say to myself, God is
_that_, and, if I can only get down to the truth about myself, I shall
find I am that too.
+What does the universe mean?+--But why is there a universe at all?
Why has the unlimited become limited? What was the need for the long
cosmic struggle, the ignorance and pain, the apparently prodigal waste
of life and beauty? Why does a perfect form appear only to be
shattered and superseded by another? What can it all mean, if indeed
it has a meaning? This is what thinkers have been asking themselves
since thought began, and I have really nothing new to say about it.
What I have to say leads back through Hegelianism to the old Greek
thinkers, and beyond them again to the wise men who lived and taught in
the East ages before Jesus was born. It is that this finite universe
of ours is one means to the self-realisation of the infinite.
Supposing God to be the infinite consciousness, there are still
possibilities to that consciousness which it can only know as it
becomes limited. Any of my readers to whom this thought is unfamiliar
have only to look at their own experience in order to see how
reasonable it is. You may know yourself to be a brave man, but you
will know it in a higher way if you are a soldier facing the cannon's
mouth; you will know it in a still different way if you have to face
the hostility and prejudice of a whole community for standing by
something which you believe to be right. Perhaps you have a manly
little son; he, like you, may believe in his sterling good qualities.
But wait till he has gone out to fight his way in life; then you will
realise what he is worth, and so will he. It is one thing to know that
you are a lover of truth; it is another thing to realise it when your
immediate interest and your immediate safety would bid you hedge and
lie. Do not these facts of human nature and experience tell us
something about God? To all eternity God is what He is and never can
be other, but it will take Him to all eternity to live out all that He
is. In order to manifest even to Himself the possibilities of His
being God must limit that being. There is no other way in which the
fullest self-realisation can be attained. Thus we get two modes of
God,--the infinite, perfect, unconditioned, primordial being; and the
finite, imperfect, conditioned, and limited being of which we are
ourselves expressions. And yet these two are one, and the former is
the guarantee that the latter shall not fail in the purpose for which
it became limited. Thus to the question, Why a finite universe? I
should answer, Because God wants to express what He is. His
achievement here is only one of an infinite number of possibilities.
"God is the perfect poet
Who in creation acts His own conceptions."
This is an end worthy alike of God and man. The act of creation is
eternal, although the cosmos is changing every moment, for God is
ceaselessly uttering Himself through higher and ever higher forms of
existence. We are helping Him to do it when we are true to ourselves;
or rather, which is the same thing, He is doing it in us: "The Father
abiding in me doeth His works." No part of the universe has value in
and for itself alone; it has value only as it expresses God. To see
one form break up and another take its place is no calamity, however
terrible it may seem, for it only means that the life contained in that
form has gone back to the universal life, and will express itself again
in some higher and better form. To think of God in this way is an
inspiration and a help in the doing of the humblest tasks. It redeems
life from the dominion of the sordid and commonplace. It supplies an
incentive to endeavour, and fills the heart with hope and confidence.
To put it in homely, everyday phraseology, God is getting at something
and we must help Him. We must be His eyes and hands and feet; we must
be labourers together with Him. This fits in with what science has to
say about the very constitution of the universe; it is all of a piece;
there are no gaps anywhere. It is a divine experiment without risk of
failure, and we must interpret it in terms of our own highest.
CHAPTER III
MAN IN RELATION TO GOD
+What is man?+--So far we have seen that the universe, including
ourselves, is one instrument or vehicle of the self-expression of God.
God is All; He is the universe and infinitely more, but it is only as
we read Him in the universe that we can know anything about Him. We
have seen, too, that it is by means of the universe and His
self-limitation therein that He expresses Himself to Himself. Now what
is our relation to this process? What are we to think about ourselves?
Who or what are we?
A witty Frenchman once sardonically remarked, "In the beginning God
created man in His own image, and man has ever since been returning the
compliment by creating God in his." But what else can we do? It
follows from what has already been said that we know nothing and can
know nothing of God except as we read Him in the universe, and we can
only interpret the universe in terms of our own consciousness. In
other words, man is a microcosm of the universe. What the universe may
be in reality we do not know,--though I am not so sure as some people
seem to be that appearance and reality do not correspond,--we can only
know it in so far as it produces sense images on our brain and enters
into our individual consciousness. The limits of my subject forbid
that I should enter into a discussion of philosophic idealism, but I
think I ought to confess at once that I can only think of existence in
terms of consciousness: nothing exists except in and for mind. The
mind that thinks the universe must be immeasurably greater than my own,
but in so far as I too am able to think the universe, mine is one with
it. All thinking starts with a paradox, even the famous saying of
Descartes, "I think, therefore I am"; and my paradox seems at least as
reasonable as any other, and has fewer difficulties to encounter than
most. I start then with the assumption that the universe is God's
thought about Himself, and that in so far as I am able to think it
along with Him, "I and my Father (even metaphysically speaking) are
one." It cannot be demonstrated beyond dispute that any two human
beings think the same universe. Strictly speaking, it is certain that
they do not in every detail. But the common dominator of our
experience, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, is the assumption that
in the main the universe is pretty much the same for one man as it is
for another. When I speak of the rolling sea, my neighbour does not
understand me to mean the waving trees, but I cannot prove that he does
not. If he is consistent in seeing water as trees and trees as water,
his mind must be constituted differently from mine and yet I may never
know it. So, by an almost unperceived act of faith, we have to take
for granted that our separate individualities meet and become one to
some extent in our common experience of this great universe, which is
at that same time the expression of God. The real universe must be
infinitely greater and more complex than the one which is apparent to
our physical senses. This becomes probable, even on material grounds,
the moment we begin to examine into the nature of sense perception.
The ear is constituted to hear just so many sounds; beyond that limit
at either end of the scale we can hear nothing, but that does not prove
that there are no more sounds to hear. Similarly the eye can
distinguish five or seven primary colours and their various
combinations; beyond that limit we are colour-blind. But suppose we
were endowed to hear and see sounds and colours a million times greater
in number than those of which we have at present any cognizance! What
kind of a universe would it be then? But that universe exists now; it
is around and within us; it is God's thought about Himself, infinite
and eternal. It is only finite to a finite mind, and it is more than
probable that spiritual beings exist with a range of consciousness far
greater than our own, to whom the universe of which we form a part must
seem far more beautiful and fuller of meaning than it seems to us.
Imagine a man who could only see grey hues and could only hear the note
A on the keyboard. His experience would be quite as real as ours, and
indeed the same up to a point, but how little he would know of the
world as we know it. The glory of the sunset sky would be hidden from
him; for him the melting power of the human voice, or of a grand
cathedral organ, would not exist. So, no doubt, it is in a different
degree with us all. The so-called material world is our consciousness
of reality exercising itself along a strictly limited plane. We can
know just as much as we are constituted to know, and no more. But it
is all a question of consciousness. The larger and fuller a
consciousness becomes, the more it can grasp and hold of the
consciousness of God, the fundamental reality of our being as of
everything else.
+The subconscious mind.+--Of late years the comparatively new science
of psychology has begun to throw an amount of valuable light upon the
mystery of human personality. As the result of numerous experiments
and investigations into the normal and abnormal working of the human
mind, psychologists have discovered that a great deal of our ordinary
mental action goes on without our being aware of it. This unconscious
cerebration, as it is called, can hardly be seriously disputed, for
every new addition to our psychological knowledge goes to confirm it.
Hence we are hearing a great deal about the subconscious mind, or
subliminal consciousness as some prefer to call it. Now that our
attention has been directed to it, we are coming to see, as is usual
with every new discovery, that after a fashion we knew it all along.
The subconscious mind seems to be the seat of inspiration and
intuition. Genius, according to the late F. W. H. Myers, is "an
up-rush of subliminal faculty." We have all heard of the distinguished
lady novelist who declares that when she has chosen her theme she is in
the habit of committing it to her subconscious mind and letting it
alone for a while. She is not aware of any mental process which goes
on, but sooner or later she finds that the theme is ripe for treatment;
she knows what she thinks about it, and the work of stating it can
profitably begin. Poets, preachers, and musicians can bear testimony
of a somewhat similar kind. The thoughts which are most valuable are
those which come unbidden, rising to the surface of consciousness from
unknown depths. The best scientific discoveries are made in much the
same way; the investigator has an intuition and forthwith sets to work
to justify it. Reason, by which we ordinarily mean the conscious
exercise of the mental faculties, plods along as if on four feet;
intuition soars on wings. Truly astonishing things are frequently done
by the subconscious mind superseding and controlling the conscious mind
in exceptional states of emotion, especially in the case of people who
are not quite normal; but there is no one, however stolid and
commonplace, who does not owe far more to his subliminal consciousness
than he does to what he calls his reason; indeed reason has
comparatively little to do with the way in which people ordinarily
conduct themselves, although we may like to think otherwise.
Now what is this subconscious mind whose importance is so great and of
whose nature we know so little? That is a question upon which
psychology has not yet pronounced, but there are not a few who regard
it as the real personality. Evidently it is not only deeper but larger
than the surface mind which we call reason. Our discovery of its
existence has taught us that our ordinary consciousness is but a tiny
corner of our personality. It has been well described as an
illuminated disc on a vast ocean of being; it is like an island in the
Pacific which is really the summit of a mountain whose base is miles
below the surface. Summit and base are one, and yet no one realises
when standing on the little island that he is perched at the very top
of a mountain peak. So it is with our everyday consciousness of
ourselves; we find it rather difficult to realise that this
consciousness is not all there is of us. And yet, when we come to
examine into the facts, the conclusion seems irresistible, that of our
truer, deeper being we are quite unconscious.
+The higher self.+--Several important inferences follow from this
position. The first is that our surface consciousness is somewhat
illusory and does not possess the sharpness and definiteness of outline
which we are accustomed to take for granted when thinking of ourselves.
To ordinary common sense nothing seems more obvious than that we know
most that is to be known about our friend John Smith, with whom we used
to go to school and who has since developed into a stolid British man
of business with few ideas and a tendency toward conservatism. John is
a stalwart, honest, commonplace kind of person, of whom brilliant
things were never prophesied and who has never been guilty of any. His
wife and children go to church on Sundays. John seldom goes himself
because it bores him, but he likes to know that religion is being
attended to, and he does not want to hear that his clergyman is
attempting any daring flights. He has a good-natured contempt for
clergymen in general because he feels somehow that, like women, they
have to be treated with half-fictitious reverence, but that they do not
count for much in the ordinary affairs of life; they are a sort of
third sex. But, according to the newer psychology, this matter-of-fact
Englishman is not what he seems even to himself. His true being is
vastly greater than he knows, and vastly greater than the world will
ever know. It belongs not to the material plane of existence but to
the plane of eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability a
perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the being of God. His
surface self, his Philistine self, is the incarnation of some portion
of that true eternal self which is one with God. The dividing line
between the surface self and the other self is not the definite
demarcation it appears to be. To the higher self it does not exist.
To us it must seem that to all intents and purposes the two selves in a
man are two separate beings, but that is not so; they are one, although
the lower, owing to its limitations, cannot realise the fact. If my
readers want to know whether I think that the higher self is conscious
of the lower, I can only answer, Yes, I do, but I cannot prove it;
probabilities point that way. What I want to insist upon here is that
we are greater than we seem, that we have a higher self, and that our
limited consciousness does not involve a separate individuality.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
The great poets are the best theologians after all, for they see the
farthest. The true being is consciousness; the universe, visible and
invisible, is consciousness. The higher self of the individual man
infolds more of the consciousness of God than the lower, but lower and
higher are the same thing. This may be a difficult thought to grasp,
but the time is rapidly approaching when it will be more generally
accepted than it is now.
+The unity of humanity.+--Another inference from the theory of the
subconscious mind is that of the fundamental unity of the whole human
race. Indeed all life is fundamentally one, but there is a kinship of
man with man which precedes that of man with any other order of being.
Here again the spiritual truth cuts across what seem to be the dictates
of common sense. Common sense assumes that I and Thou are eternally
distinct, and that by no possibility can the territories of our
respective beings ever become one. But even now, and on mere everyday
grounds, we are finding reason to think otherwise. You are about to
make an observation at table and some member of your family makes it
before you; you are thinking of a certain tune and someone begins to
hum it; you have a certain purpose in mind and, lo, the same thought
finds expression in someone else, despite all probabilities. Oh, you
may remark, This is only thought transference. Precisely, but what are
you except your thought? All being, remember, is conscious of being.
The infinite consciousness sees itself as a whole; the finite
consciousness sees the same whole in part. Ultimately your being and
mine are one and we shall come to know it. Individuality only has
meaning in relation to the whole, and individual consciousness can only
be fulfilled by expanding until it embraces the whole. Nothing that
exists in your consciousness now and constitutes your self-knowledge
will ever be obliterated or ever can be, but in a higher state of
existence you will realise it to be a part of the universal stock. I
shall not cease to be I, nor you to be you; but there must be a region
of experience where we shall find that you and I are one.
+The Self is God.+--A third inference, already hinted at and presumed
in all that has gone before, is that the highest of all selves, the
ultimate Self of the universe, is God. The New Testament speaks of man
as body, soul, and spirit. The body is the thought-form through which
the individuality finds expression on our present limited plane; the
soul is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from all the rest of
existence and even from God--it is the bay seeing itself as the bay and
not as the ocean; the spirit is the true being thus limited and
expressed--it is the deathless divine within us. The soul therefore is
what we make it; the spirit we can neither make nor mar, for it is at
once our being and God's. What we are here to do is to grow the soul,
that is to manifest the true nature of the spirit, to build up that
self-realisation which is God's objective with the universe as a whole
and with every self-conscious unit in particular.
Where, then, someone will say, is the dividing line between our being
and God's? There is no dividing line except from our side. The ocean
of consciousness knows that the bay has never been separate from
itself, although the bay is only conscious of the ocean on the outer
side of its own being. But, the reader may protest, This is Pantheism.
No, it is not. Pantheism is a technical term in philosophic parlance
and means something quite different from this. It stands for a
Fate-God, a God imprisoned in His universe, a God who cannot help
Himself and does not even know what He is about, a blind force which
here breaks out into a rock and there into Ruskin and is equally
indifferent to either. But that is not my God. My God is my deeper
Self and yours too; He is the Self of the universe and knows all about
it. He is never baffled and cannot be baffled; the whole cosmic
process is one long incarnation and uprising of the being of God from
itself to itself. With Tennyson you can call this doctrine the Higher
Pantheism if you like, but it is the very antithesis of the Pantheism
which has played such a part in the history of thought.
+Its relation to free will.+--But then, another will remonstrate, it
does away with the freedom of the will. Well, here is a slippery
subject sure enough, and one upon which more nonsense has been talked
probably than any other within the range of philosophical or
theological discussion. Have I anything new to say about it? Probably
not, but I think I can focus the issue and show what we must recognise
in order to have a rational grasp of the subject. Thinkers have talked
too much in the past about the separate faculties of human nature as
though they could be divided into Reason, Feeling, Action, and so on.
But they are beginning to talk differently now. They are coming to see
that a human being cannot be cut up like that. The Reason is the whole
man thinking, judging, comparing. Feeling accompanies Reason and is
never found apart from it, for reason implies consciousness, and
without consciousness nothing that can properly be called Feeling
exists. The will is simply the whole man acting.
Now I will frankly confess that in strict logic I can find no place for
the freedom of the will. I will defy anyone to do so if he knows much
about the laws of thought. But, as the late Mr. Lecky said in his "Map
of Life," and Mr. Mallock has since pointed out in "The Reconstruction
of Belief," we are compelled to overleap logic when considering this
matter. No argument will convince us that we have not some power of
individual self-direction and self-control. The most thoroughgoing
determinist that ever lived forgets his determinism even while he
argues about it. It must be amusing even to himself to see how he
enjoys scoring off his opponent, thus taking for granted in the heat of
controversy the very freedom he sets out to deny. The assumption at
the bottom of every vigorous argument is that the other party might
have held other views, and ought to have held other views than those
assailed. The position of the determinist in effect is this: You must
believe you have no freedom to choose anything, otherwise you are to
blame for choosing wrongly. Of course the consistent determinist would
evade this _reductio ad absurdum_ by saying that he is as much
necessitated in blaming his opponent for holding wrong views as the
opponent is for refusing to give them up. He might also tell me that I
am arguing for free will in an obscurantist fashion by admitting at the
outset that in strict logic I can find no place for it. But I am not
arguing for free will at all. I am simply showing that by the very
constitution of our minds we cannot avoid taking some measure of free
will for granted. Even the determinist who scouts this view and calls
it absurd is by his own action a convincing demonstration of its truth.
+Only the Infinite has perfect freedom.+--But this contention is
something more than mere logic chopping. It points to a truth too high
for a finite mind to grasp, namely, that whatever our moral freedom may
be, it must consist with the all-directing universal will. There is no
such thing as perfect freedom in a finite being. Perfect freedom
belongs only to infinity; finiteness implies limitations. Popular
theology usually assumes, or appears to assume, that every individual
is a perfectly free agent able at all times to distinguish and to
choose between the higher and the lower, and as liable to choose the
one as the other. There is another kind of theologising, of course,
which speaks of the weakened or corrupted will due to our fallen
nature, that I must let alone for the present. What I want to point
out is that there is not, and never has been, an act of the will in
which a man, without bias in either direction, has deliberately chosen
evil in the presence of good. Under such circumstances no being in his
sober senses would ever choose evil; enlightened self-interest alone
would forbid the possibility of such a choice. Freedom of the will in
this sense has never existed. The truth is that we should not be
conscious of the possession of a will but for the conflict between
desire and duty, or the necessity of choosing between one impulse and
another. After all, the moral choices of life are but few in number.
The things we go on doing day by day are the things that for the most
part we know we must do, and we scarcely reflect upon the matter. When
some question emerges which demands a moral choice we know it at once
by the fact that we have to take our limitations into account.
Something has to be overcome if the higher is chosen, and, without that
overcoming, there is no real assertion of the will. It is no heroism
in me to avoid getting drunk, but it may mean a tremendous assertion of
the moral reserves in some poor fellow who knows the power of the drink
craving. The same observation holds good of all human life. My weak
points are not my neighbour's, and his are not mine. Neither of us is
in a position to estimate the other's strength of will, but we both
know that in our own case an absolutely unfettered moral choice has
never been made. But for our limitations and imperfections we should
know nothing whatever of the choice between right and wrong. Free
will, in the sense of unlimited freedom of choice, does not exist. The
only freedom we possess is like that of a bird in a cage; we can choose
between the higher and the lower standing ground, a choice called for
by the very fact that we are in prison, but we cannot choose where the
cage shall go.
No doubt these considerations will meet with the disapproval of some
people who think themselves orthodox. They will object to being told
that every man has a higher self than that of which he is immediately
conscious; that fundamentally the individual is one with the whole race
and with God; that no one possesses absolute free will. To them it may
seem an absurdity to maintain these positions. But if they say so,
they will convict themselves of absurdity, for, with the exception of
the last, Christian doctrine already affirms them all of Jesus.
According to the received theology, Jesus was God, and yet He did not
possess the all-controlling consciousness of the universe. He was also
man, and yet He was before all ages. All creation proceeds from and
centres in Him, and yet He was able to limit Himself in such a degree
as to be ignorant of much that was going on in His own universe. If
so-called orthodoxy finds it no difficulty to assert these things as
being true of Jesus, it will not find it easy to show good reason why
the same should not be true of all humanity. For the moment I neither
assert nor deny the uniqueness of Jesus. All I am concerned to show is
that if it is not intellectually _impossible_ to affirm certain things
about the consciousness of Jesus and the limitation of His true being
in His earthly life, it is not impossible to affirm them of mankind.
Some of my critics have contended that this view of the relationship of
man to God hails not from Palestine but from Oxford and is an outcome
of the philosophy of T. H. Green. But I think it can be shown that its
pedigree is considerably longer than that. Whether it hails from
Palestine or not, it is explicitly stated in the fourth gospel: "He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew
us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the
Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself:
but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. Believe me
that I am in the Father, and the Father in me." Those who object to my
statement of the fundamental identity of God and man will have to
explain away such passages as this, and there are plenty of them. But,
it may be urged, this is meant to apply only to Jesus. That I do not
believe; I think the exceedingly able writer of the fourth gospel knew
better; but for the moment I will not contest the point. Granted that
it does apply only to Jesus, what then? The very things which the
critics declare to be impossible of personality in general in relation
to God, they are affirming already of at least one personality, that of
Jesus. If Jesus was God and yet prayed to God, if His consciousness
was finite and yet one with the infinite, it is clear that in this one
instance the seemingly impossible was not impossible. Those who insist
upon the fundamental distinction between human personality and the
being of God are thus on the horns of a dilemma. Present-day orthodoxy
cannot consistently attack this position. The only telling criticism
that can be directed against it is that which proceeds from the side of
scientific monism. A thoroughgoing monist might reasonably contend
that up to a certain point I have been arguing for a monistic view of
the universe, in company with practically the whole scientific world,
and have then given the case away by admitting a certain amount of
individual freedom. I confess it looks like it; I have had to face the
antinomy. I see that there is no escape from the assertion of the
fundamental unity of all existence, and yet by the very constitution of
the human mind we are compelled to take for granted a certain amount of
individual initiative and self-direction. I think of the human will
much as I do about the mariner's compass. It is well known that the
needle does not always point steadily and consistently to the pole; its
tiny aberrations have to be taken into account. But these are no real
hindrance to the sailing of the ship, and the compass itself cannot run
away.
Again, some of my friends have been pointing out that, while the New
Theology regards all mankind as "Being of one substance with the
Father," our consciousness of that being is our own. I freely admit
this while maintaining that there is no substance but consciousness.
What other kind of substance can there be? Therefore I hold that when
our finite consciousness ceases to be finite there will be no
distinction whatever between ours and God's. The distinction between
finite and infinite is not eternal. The being of God is a complex
unity, containing within itself and harmonising every form of
self-consciousness that can possibly exist. No one need be afraid that
in believing this he is assenting to the final obliteration of his own
personality; if such obliteration were possible, our present
personality could possess no permanent value even for God. No form of
self-consciousness can ever perish. It completes itself in becoming
infinite, but it cannot be destroyed.
CHAPTER IV
THE NATURE OF EVIL
+The problem not insoluble.+--Before going on to say more about human
personality, especially the personality of Jesus, it is requisite that
we should determine our attitude toward a great question which in
manifold forms has beset the human intellect ever since the dawn of
history, namely, the problem of evil. It is still the fashion to
declare this problem insoluble, but I have the audacity to believe that
it is not so; mystery there may be, but it is not chiefly mystery. I
will even go so far as to assert that the problem had been solved in
human thought before Christianity began. What I have to say about it
now is ancient thinking confirmed by present-day experience.
Evil is a negative, not a positive term. It denotes the absence rather
than the presence of something. It is the perceived privation of good,
the shadow where the light ought to be. "The devil is a vacuum," as a
friend of mine once remarked to the no small bewilderment of a group of
listeners in whose imagination the devil was anything but a vacuum.
Evil is not an intruder in an otherwise perfect universe; finiteness
presumes it. A thing is only seen to be evil when the capacity for
good is present and unsatisfied. Evil is not a principle at war with
good. Good is being and evil is not-being. When consciousness of
being seeks further expression and finds itself hindered by its
limitations, it becomes aware of evil.
A little reflection ought to convince anyone that this is the true way
to look at the question of evil. Instead of asking how evil came to be
in the universe, we should recognise that nothing finite can exist
without it. Infinity alone can know nothing of evil because its
resources are illimitable and--if I may be permitted the
expression--every need is supplied before it can be felt. Evil and
good are not like two armies in deadly conflict with each other for the
possession of the city of God. We ought not to say that when one is in
the other is out, but rather when one _is_ the other is _not_. The
very word "good" implies evil. One is positive and the other negative.
Good only emerges in our experience in contrast with evil, and the
ideal existence must be that in which good and evil are both
transcended in the life eternal, when struggle and conflict are no
more. In our present state of existence evil is necessary in order
that we may know that there is such a thing as good, and therefore that
we may realise the true nature of the life eternal. Look at that
shadow on the pavement cast by the row of houses between your vision
and the rising sun. Until the sun made his presence felt, you did not
even know there was a shadow. Presently as the light giver climbs
beyond and above this temporary barrier you will watch the shadow
shrink and disappear. Where has it gone? If it were an entity in
itself, it would have moved off somewhere else, but you are well aware
that it has not done so, for it never had any real existence; real as
it seemed, so real that you were able to give it a name, it never did
more than show the place that needed to be filled with light. When the
light came the shadow was swallowed up. So it is with every kind of
evil, no matter what. Your perception of evil is the concomitant of
your expanding finite consciousness of good. The moment you see a
thing to be wrong you have affirmed that you know, however vaguely,
what is required to put it right. Even when evil comes in the form of
a calamity that lessens and diminishes your previous experience of
good, as in an earthquake or a pestilence, this statement as to its
true nature is in no way invalidated. It is not a thing in itself, it
is only the perceived privation of what you know to be good, and which
you know to be good because of the very presence of limitation,
hindrance, and imperfection.
+The relation of evil and pain.+--But to most minds evil is almost
synonymous with pain, at any rate in our experience it is associated
with pain. When men begin questioning the goodness of God because of
the evil of the world, they usually mean the pain of the world.
Perhaps their thought about sin is to some extent an exception; sin and
pain are not necessarily immediately associated in the theological
mind. But what is pain? Properly speaking it is not in itself evil,
but rather the evidence of evil, and also in a different way the
evidence of good. Pain is life asserting itself against death, the
higher struggling with the lower, the true with the false, the real
with the unreal. When a baby cries for food he does so in unconscious
obedience to the law of life; a stone does not cry for food. When a
strong man suffers in the grip of a fell disease, the life within him
is fighting for expression against something that seems to be
extinguishing it. The suffering is caused by the effort of the life to
retain its hold on the form, and yet if the disease succeeds in
breaking the form it has only released the life to find expression in
some higher form. When a guilty man suffers the tortures of remorse,
it means that the truth within him is declaring itself against the
falsehood, although it does not follow that it will immediately
conquer. This is what pain is: it is life pressing upon death, and
death resisting life. If a traveller falls asleep in the snow, or a
sailor is nearly drowned, the process of recovery is always painful
because the returning life has to overcome death. Carry the same
principle through the whole range of human experience, physical,
mental, and moral, and it will indicate the real significance of all
the pain which has ever been endured or ever will be endured by mankind.
Still this would not satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic
suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story
than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he
has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of
attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the
past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence of pain
as well as more sympathetic than our fathers were, and this tendency
shows itself in a recognition of the solidarity of humanity with the
lower creation. Theology has had practically nothing to say about the
suffering or even about the significance of the myriad forms of life
which exist below the human scale. But why ought they to be ignored?
Indeed, how can they be ignored? The theology that has nothing to say
about my clever and loyal four-footed companion, with his magnanimity,
his sensitive spirit, and even his moral qualities, omits something of
considerable importance to a thorough and consistent world-view. "Not
a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father," said one who
spake as never man spake. I think it was Schopenhauer who once
remarked, "The more I see of human nature the more I respect my dog."
Now the New Theology finds no difficulty in recognising the importance
of the brute creation, for it believes in a practical recognition of
the solidarity of all existence. There is no life that is not of God,
and therefore no life can ever perish, whatever may become of the form.
If we can explain human suffering, the same explanation covers the
suffering of all sub-human life.
+The true extent of the problem of pain.+--But the problem is not so
large as it looks. When we hear of a terrible event like the Jamaica
disaster, we are apt to jump to the conclusion that the amount of
suffering in the world is specially and enormously greater because of
it. But that is not so. Our standard of measurement is a false one.
The amount of pain endured depends upon the consciousness enduring it
and upon its capacity for looking before and after. Besides we only
suffer individually, and therefore all the pain of the world is
comprised within the experience of the being who suffers most, whoever
that may be. We ought to estimate the actual amount of cosmic
suffering by the intensity of the suffering borne by any one individual
at any one time. We are not immediately conscious of all the woe of
the universe; we are each of us conscious of our own, even though it
may be caused by sympathy with others; and the world's woe taken as a
whole is not greater than the amount borne by him whose consciousness
of it is greatest. This is what we may call the intensive as
contrasted with the extensive observation of the problem of pain. It
is a kind of barometrical measurement. We do not gauge the weather by
adding together the figures of all the storm-glasses in the world; the
rise or fall of the mercury in any one of them, especially the best one
among them, comprehends the whole. Here is the problem of pain in a
nutshell. The whole appalling tale of cosmic suffering can be
compressed within the limits of the individual consciousness which has
endured the most.
+The purpose of pain.+--Nor is there the slightest need to be afraid of
it. Theologians may tell us that we should never have known anything
about it but for man's first disobedience, and humanists may maintain
that it is impossible to reconcile it with belief in the goodness of
God; but they are both wrong. There are some things impossible even to
omnipotence, and one of them is the realisation of a love which has
never known pain. If creation is the self-expression of God, pain was
inevitable from the first. For what is the nature of God? According
to the Christian religion it is love. And what is love? Here is
another slippery word which has had some contradictory connotations in
the course of its history. Some time ago Mr. G. Bernard Shaw delivered
a lecture at the City Temple on the "Religion of the British Empire,"
in the course of which he said that, if I knew as much about
stage-plays as he did, I should distrust the word "love," for it was
bound up with an amount of false and gusty sentiment. He himself
preferred the word "life" to express what I meant by the word "love."
But love is too good a word to be given over to the sentimentalists,
although Mr. Shaw was perfectly right as to the way in which it has
been misused. Love _is_ life, the life eternal, the life of God.
Jesus and His New Testament followers used both terms as expressive of
the innermost of God. The life of God is such that in the presence of
need it must give itself just as water will run down hill; this is the
law of its being. Where no need exists, that is, where life is
infinite, love finds no expression. To realise itself for what it is,
sacrifice, that is self-limitation, becomes necessary. Love is
essentially self-giving. It is the living of the individual life in
terms of the whole. In a finite world this cannot but mean pain, but
it is also self-fulfilment. "Whosoever shall save his life shall lose
it, but whosoever will lose his life shall find it." This profound
saying of Jesus is older even than Jesus; it is the law of God's own
being, the law of love, the means to the realisation of the life
eternal. It is so plain and simple, and withal so sublime, that we
cannot but see it to be true, and can do no other than bow before it.
The law of the universe is the law of sacrifice in order to
self-manifestation. In this age-long process all sentient life has its
part, for it is of the infinite, and to the infinite it will return.
When, therefore, you feel compassion for the rabbit which is being
killed by the weasel, or the stag that falls before the hounds, you can
remember at the same time that this is not meaningless cruelty, but the
operation of the same law that governs the highest activities of your
own soul. You are right to feel the compassion; you were meant to feel
it; and there is good reason why you should, for the suffering is real
enough to awaken it. But do not forget that the suffering is not quite
what it appears to you; it is only yours as it enters into your own
consciousness and you suffer along with the actual victim. Compassion
in such a case is the initial impulse toward self-offering, the desire
to take the victim's place. But the suffering of the rabbit or the
stag is to be measured by the consciousness of the rabbit or the stag,
not by yours. In the slaughter nothing perishes but the form, the life
returns to the Soul of the universe.
+The nature of sin.+--What, then, is sin? In the light of the
foregoing considerations that question should not be difficult to
answer. Some of my recent critics have been declaring that I deny the
existence of sin, and am teaching that as there is no sin there is no
need for Atonement. This looks like wilful misrepresentation, for my
words on the subject have been clear enough and I have nothing to
un-say, but perhaps it would be better to allow that the critics have
made the mistake of rushing into print without carefully examining the
utterances which they denounce. Let me say, then, that sin is the
opposite of love. All possible activities of the soul are between two
poles,--self on the one hand and the common life on the other.
Everything we can think or say or do is in one or other of these
directions; we are either living for the self at the expense of the
whole, or we are fulfilling the self by serving the whole. Sin is
therefore selfishness. If the true life is the life which is lived in
terms of the whole, then the sinful life is the life which is lived for
self alone. No man, however depraved, succeeds in living the selfish
life all the time; if he did he would sink below the level of the
brutes. Sin makes for death; love makes for life. Sin is self-ward;
love is All-ward. Sin is always a blunder; in the long run it becomes
its own punishment, for it is the soul imposing fetters upon itself,
which fetters must be broken by the reassertion of the universal life.
Sin is actually a quest for life, but a quest which is pursued in the
wrong way. The man who is living a selfish life must think, if he
thinks about it at all, that he can gratify himself in that way, that
is, he can get more abundant life. But in this he is mistaken; he is
trying to cut himself off from the source of life. He is like a man
seated on the branch of a tree and sawing it off from the trunk. But
when theologians talk of the wrath of God against sin, and the wrong
which sin has inflicted upon God, they employ figures of speech which
are distinctly misleading. In fact, they do not seem to have a clear
idea as to what sin really is. They use vague language about it as
though it were some kind of corporate offence against God of which the
whole race has been guilty without being able to help it, and which no
individual can escape although he is as much to blame as if he could.
But sin has never injured God except through man. It is the God within
who is injured by it rather than the God without. It is time we had
done with the unreal language about the Judge on the great white
throne, whose justice must be satisfied before His mercy can operate.
The figure contains a truth which everyone knows well enough, but it is
not easy to recognise it under this form.
+The Fall.+--The theological muddle is largely caused by the inability
of many people to free themselves from archaic notions which have
really nothing to do with Christianity, although they have been
imported into it. The principal of these, in relation to the question
of sin, is the doctrine of the Fall. This doctrine has played a
mischievous part in Christian thought, more especially perhaps since
the Reformation. In broad outline it is as follows: Man was created
originally innocent and pure,--for what reason is not quite clear, but
it is said to be for the glory of God,--but by an act of disobedience
to a divine command he fell from his high estate and in his fall
dragged down the whole creation and blighted posterity. Things have
been wrong ever since, and God has been angry not only with the
original transgressor but with all his descendants. God is a God of
righteousness and therefore in a future world He will torture every
human being who dies without availing himself of a certain "plan of
salvation" designed to give him a chance of escape. This is a queer
sort of righteousness! The plan of salvation consists in sending His
own Son--a Son who has existed eternally, which the rest of us have
not--to live a few years on earth and go through a certain programme
ending with a violent death. In consideration of this death, God
undertakes to forgive His erring children, who could not help being
sinners, and yet are just as much to blame as if they could, but only
on consideration that they "believe" in time to flee from the wrath to
come. If they happen to die half a minute too late, repentance will be
of no avail.
Dogmatic theologians must really excuse me for paraphrasing their words
in this way. I know they do not put the case with such irritating
clearness, but this is what they mean. Their forefathers used to put
it plainly enough. Turn up John Knox's "Confession of Faith," for
instance, and it will be found that my statement of the case is
mildness itself compared to his; John saw no necessity for mincing
matters. It may be contended that no orthodox theologian of any repute
now believes in an actual historical fall of the race. Perhaps not,
but theological writers go on using language which implies it and so do
preachers of the gospel. I do not mean that they are dishonest, but
they cannot get their perspective right. They think that by giving up
belief in a historical fall of the race they would have to give up a
great deal more. Without the Fall they do not know what to say about
sin, salvation, the Atonement, etc. They are mistaken in this
supposition, as I trust I have already shown to some extent when
discussing the question of sin, and as I shall hope to show more
clearly still when we come to deal with the Atonement. What I now wish
to insist upon is that it is absolutely impossible for any intelligent
man to continue to believe in the Fall as it is literally understood
and taught.
+The Genesis account.+--It is popularly supposed that the doctrine is
derived from the book of Genesis, but that is hardly the case. No
doubt the Genesis myth about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden forms
the background of it, but it is not consonant with the doctrine itself.
The Genesis narrative says nothing about the ruined creation or the
curse upon posterity. There is no hint of individual immortality, much
less of heaven and hell; no Christ, no cross, no future judgment, no
vicarious Atonement. It is a composite primitive story. A careful
examination of its constituents will show that more than one account of
the event has been drawn upon to supply materials for the narrative as
it now stands. The legend was in existence as oral tradition ages
before it became literature. How old it may be we have no means of
knowing with certainty, but the parallel stories in other Semitic
religions are of great antiquity and had originally no ethical
significance whatever. The Genesis story of the Fall exercised no
influence upon Old Testament religion; it is scarcely alluded to in the
best Old Testament writings, some of them earlier probably than the
Genesis account itself. It was not until after the great captivity
that it showed any tendency toward becoming an article of faith. At
the time when Jesus was born it had passed into the popular Jewish
religion. There is a psychological reason for the gradual
transformation of a primitive legend into a religious dogma. The
Jewish nation has fallen upon evil days. For generations after the
great captivity they had been ground under the heel of a succession of
foreign masters. Under the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about
the middle of the second century B.C., their very religion seemed
likely to be crushed out by merciless persecution. It was no wonder
that the serious minds of the day became inclined to look upon the
present as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder of what
had once been an ideal world. This tendency showed itself in various
ways, the chief of which was a looking back to the great days of David
and Solomon as the period of Israel's brightest splendour and
prosperity. Of this I must say a little more presently when we come to
consider the genesis of the idea of the kingdom of God. Another way in
which the same tendency showed itself was that of taking the legend of
the Fall more or less literally. A suffering generation could hardly
help thinking of their woes as being the result of some primitive act
of transgression. This is the way in which the rabbis came to speak of
the Fall as being an actual fact of religious and ethical importance.
+The doctrine transferred to Christianity.+--A similar set of political
and social conditions carried the doctrine over into Christianity,
chiefly through the influence of the apostle Paul who had received a
rabbinical training. Not only Hebrews but Greeks had begun to feel
that the world was decaying and perhaps nearing the end. They
idealised the past and contrasted it with the present. All
civilisation lay under the dominion of Rome, and Rome herself was
subject to a military dictator. The heart of the world-wide empire was
a hotbed of corruption where every form of vice took root and
flourished. The Greek thinkers and scholars despised their masters,
but their own heroic days were gone and they were helpless to cast off
the yoke. They had no Pericles now, no Leonidas, no Miltiades. Gone
were the men of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis. These were lesser,
darker days. With a sure instinct men were ceasing to feel any
confidence in the future of this pagan civilisation. It had its great
elements, but the signs of disruption were already apparent and no one
could foresee what would take its place. The mood of the time is
reflected in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmosphere
came Christianity with its doctrine of the holy love of God and its
adoring faith in Jesus. But both Judaism and Hellenism had already the
tendency to look back toward a better and happier time and to think of
the present as a fall from it. Paul felt this like everyone else, and
forthwith took some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his
system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took the Genesis story
literally or not, and he certainly made Adam the type of the unideal or
earthly man who had become estranged from God. He was too great a man
to be pinned down to mere literalism in a question of this kind, so in
his use of the terms supplied by the rabbinical version of the legend
he glides easily into the statement of the obvious truth that the Adam,
or lower man, or earthly principle in every human being, needs to be
transformed by the uprising of the Christ or ideal man, within the
soul. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive." "The first man is of the earth earthy: the second man is the
Lord from heaven."
Here, then, we have the origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right
through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world
as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will.
It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening
influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not
integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did
not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view of the nature and
dealings of God with men which is unethical and untrue. Surely, if God
knew beforehand that the world would go wrong, the blame for
catastrophe was not all man's. If He were so baffled and
horror-stricken by the results as the dogmatic theologian makes out, He
ought to have been more careful about the way He did His work at the
beginning; a world which went wrong so early and so easily was anything
but "very good," although He pronounced it to be so according to the
Genesis writer. Besides, why should a trivial act of transgression
have sent it all wrong? We take leave of our common sense when we talk
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree.
To be sure Milton did not believe it himself when he wrote that line,
but his Puritan associates and Catholic ancestors did, and orthodoxy
professes to do so still, though it does not know quite how to put it
without falling into absurdity. Again, why should God feel Himself so
much aggrieved by Adam's peccadillo? If it were not for the
theological atmosphere which surrounds the question, we should see at
once that it was ridiculous. Why should the consequences continue
through countless generations? Remember this was supposed to be the
very start of humanity's career. What a dreary, hopeless outlook was
left to it! The notion is incredible, and most of the clear-headed men
who hold it would scout it without discussion if they heard of it now
for the first time. As it is, however, they go on talking of the
"awful holiness" of God, the offence against the divine majesty, and so
on. But what is this divine holiness? I can well remember that as a
child I used to tremble at the thought of it, for somehow, like a good
many other people, I had been taught to think of the divine holiness as
synonymous with merciless inflexibility. But holiness, righteousness,
justice, mercy, love, are but different expressions of the same
spiritual reality. One might go on multiplying these considerations
for ever, but there is no need to do so. Sufficient has been said to
demonstrate the fact that the doctrine of the Fall is an absurdity from
the point of view both of ethical consistency and common sense.
+Science and the Fall.+--After this it is almost superfluous to point
out that modern science knows nothing of it and can find no trace of
such a cataclysm in human history. On the contrary, it asserts that
there has been a gradual and unmistakable rise; the law of evolution
governs human affairs just as it does every other part of the cosmic
process. This statement is quite consistent with the admission that
there have been periods of retrogression as well as of advance, and
that the advance itself has not been steady and uniform from first to
last; there have been long stretches of history during which humanity
has seemed to mark time and then a sudden outburst of intellectual
activity and moral achievement. It could hardly be maintained, for
instance, that the Athens of Socrates was not superior to the France of
Fulk the black of Anjou, or that the Assyria of Asshur-bani-pal was not
quite as civilised as the Germany of the ninth century A.D. Alfred
Russel Wallace has shown in his popular book, "The Wonderful Century,"
that the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater
advance in man's power over nature than the fifteen hundred years
preceding it. There are some people who maintain that while the
material advance is unquestionable, the intellectual advance is on the
whole more doubtful, and that, morally speaking, human nature is no
different from what it ever was. But I do not think any serious
historian would say this. Intellectually, the average man may still be
inferior to Plato,--though even Plato did not understand the need for
exact thought as modern philosophers do,--but civilisation as a whole
has produced a higher level of intellectual attainment than had been
reached by Plato's world. A civilisation in which four-fifths of the
people were helots kept in ignorance in order that an aristocratic few
might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and
glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too
sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous
selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be
denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally
deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its
well-being and seeks to get rid of them. Thank God, as Anthony
Trollope said, that bad as men are to-day they are not as men were in
the days of the Caesars.
If the New Theology controversy had arisen a few hundred years ago,
theological disputants would not have wasted time in writing newspaper
articles; they would have met in solemn conclave and condemned the
heretic to be flayed alive or hung over a slow fire or treated in some
similarly convincing manner. Of course it is remotely possible that
some of them would like to do it now, but public opinion would not let
them; things have changed, and the change is in the direction of a
higher general morality. If any man feels pessimistic about the
present, let him study the past and he will feel reassured. Those who
maintain that society is not morally better but only more sentimental,
beg the question. What they call sentimentalism is greater
sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What is the
moral ideal but love? Every advance in the direction of universal love
and brotherhood is a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or
Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The grandeur and impressiveness
of it were due to the fact that Stoics and Puritans for the most part
took their ideal seriously; they aimed at something high and dedicated
their lives to it. This dedication of the life to something higher
than self-interest is of the very essence of true morality, and its
highest reach is perfect love. We are a long way from that yet,
although the ideal was manifested two thousand years ago. The average
man to-day is certainly not nobler than the apostle Paul, nor does he
see more deeply into the true meaning of life than did John the divine,
but the general level is higher. Slowly, very slowly, with every now
and then a depressing set-back, the race is climbing the steep ascent
toward the ideal of universal brotherhood.
It is sometimes maintained by thinkers who account themselves
progressive that the law of evolution holds good of mankind so far as
our physical constitution is concerned, but that a special act of
creation took place as soon as the physical frame was sufficiently
developed to become the receptacle of a higher principle, and that
then, and not till then, "man became a living soul." But it is
impossible to square the circle in this way, and to contrive to get the
doctrine of the Fall in by the back door, so to speak. The idea in the
minds of those who hold this view appears to be that the tenant of the
body which had been so long in preparation was a simple but intelligent
and morally innocent personality who forthwith proceeded to do all that
Adam is credited with and therefore spoiled what would otherwise have
been a harmonious and orderly development; what we now see is not
evolution as God meant it, but evolution perverted by human
wrong-headedness. But this theory contains more difficulties than the
older one it aims to replace. It makes God even more incompetent then
the traditional view does. For untold ages, apparently, He has been
preparing the world for the advent of humanity, only to find that the
moment humanity enters it the whole scheme is spoiled. But we need not
seriously consider this view; the facts are overwhelmingly against it.
The history, even of the most recent civilisations, is, comparatively
speaking, only as old as yesterday, whereas the presence of human life
on this planet is traceable into the almost illimitable past. But the
farther we go back in our investigation of human origins the less
possible does it appear that the primitive man of theological tradition
has ever existed. The Adam of the dogmatic theologian is like the
economic man of the older school of writers on political science, the
man who always wants to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the
dearest, and whose one consistent endeavour is to seek pleasure and
avoid pain; he has never existed.
+Divine immanence and its Fall.+--Besides, we do not want him to exist.
The Fall theory is not only impossible in face of the findings of
modern science; it is a real hindrance to religion. So far from having
to give it up because science would have nothing to say to it, the
difficulty would be to retain it and yet have anything like a rational
view of the relation of God and the world. It has already been stated
that the starting-point of the New Theology is a recognition of the
truth that God is expressing Himself through His world. This truth
occupied a place in religious thought ages before modern science was
thought of; science has confirmed it, but has not compelled us to think
it; if science had never existed, it would still remain the only
reasonable ground for an adequate explanation of the relation of man to
the universe. It simplifies all our questionings and coördinates all
our activities. There is not a single one in the whole vast range of
human interests which it does not cover. There is nothing which
humanity can do or seek to do which is not immediately dependent upon
it. The grandest task and the lowliest are both implied in it. It
declares the common basis of religion and morality. Religion is the
response of human nature to the whole of things considered as an order;
morality is the living of the individual life in such a way as to be
and do the most for humanity as a whole; it is making the most of one's
self for the sake of the whole. Morality is not self-immolation. To
jump off London Bridge would be self-immolation, but it would not be an
act conducive to the welfare of the community; it might indeed be a
very selfish and cowardly act. True morality involves the duty of
self-formation and the exercise of judgment and self-discipline in
order that the individual life may become as great a gift as possible
to the common life. It will therefore be seen at once that there is a
vital relation between morality and religion; the one implies the other
even though the fact may not always be recognised, and both are based
upon the immanence of God.
+The truth beneath the doctrine of the Fall.+--But never yet has a
particular doctrine or mode of stating truth held its own for any
length of time in human history unless there was some genuine truth
beneath it, and the doctrine of the Fall is no exception. It does
contain a truth, a truth which can be stated in a few words, and which
might be inferred from what has already been said about the
relationship of man and God. The coming of a finite creation into
being is itself of the nature of a fall, a coming down from perfection
to imperfection. We have seen the reason for that coming down; it is
that the universal life may realise its own nature by attenuating or
limiting its perfection. If I want to understand the composition of
the ordinary pure white ray, I take a prism and break it up into its
constituents. This is just what God has been doing in creation. Our
present consciousness of ourselves and of the world can reasonably be
accounted a fall, for we came from the infinite and unto the infinite
perfection we shall in the end return. I do not mean that our present
consciousness of ourselves is eternal; I only assert that our true
being is eternally one with the being of God and that to be separated
from a full knowledge of that truth is to have undergone a fall. But
this fall has no sinister antecedents; its purpose is good, and there
is nothing to mourn over except our own slowness at getting into line
with the cosmic purpose. Another way of describing it would be to call
it the incarnation of God in nature and man, a subject about which I
must say more in another chapter. This view of the meaning and
significance of the Fall can be traced in all great religious
literature. Perhaps one of the best statements of it that has ever
been made is the one set forth by Paul of Tarsus in the eighth chapter
of his letter to the Romans: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this
present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall
be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth
for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made
subject to vanity, not willingly, but by the reason of him who hath
subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of
the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now." Passages like this make it
impossible to believe that Paul was ever really tied down to the
literal rabbinical view of Adam's transgression and its consequences;
and these words are a clear statement of the truth that the
imperfection of the finite Creation is not man's fault but God's will,
and is a means toward a great end.
CHAPTER V
JESUS THE DIVINE MAN
+The centrality of Jesus.+--All that has been said hitherto is but a
preparation for the discussion of the greatest subject that at present
occupies the field of faith and morals, that of the personality of
Jesus and His significance for mankind. It has been repeatedly pointed
out both by friends and foes of the New Theology that the ultimate
question for the Christian religion is that of the place occupied by
its Founder. Who or what was Jesus? How much can we really know about
Him? What value does He possess for the religious consciousness
to-day? All other questions about the Christian religion are of minor
importance compared with these, and if we are prepared with an answer
to these we have by implication answered all the rest. Christianity is
in a special sense immediately dependent upon its Founder. No other
religion has ever regarded its founder as Christians regard their
Master. Christianity draws its sustenance from the belief that Jesus
is still alive and impacting Himself upon the world through His
followers. Other great religions trace their origin to the teaching
and example of some exceptional person; Christianity does the same, but
with the added conviction that Jesus is as much in the world as ever
and that His presence is realised in the mystic union between Himself
and those who know and love Him. If this be true, it is a fact of the
very highest importance and one which can neither be passed over nor
relegated to a subordinate position. Christianity without Jesus is the
world without the sun. If, as I readily admit, the great question for
religion in the immediate future is that of the person of Jesus, the
sooner we address ourselves to it the better.
Before discussing what theology has to say of Him let us note in
general terms what the civilised world is saying, theology or no
theology. I suppose the most out-and-out materialist would admit that
in the western world the name of Jesus exercises an influence to which
no other is even remotely comparable. Perhaps he would even go so far
as to admit that there is no name anywhere which means so much to those
who hear it. It is not merely that the strongest civilisation on earth
reverences that name, but that there is no other civilisation which can
produce a parallel to it. The nearest approach to it is that of
Gautama, and I think it would be generally admitted that the influence
even of this mighty and beautiful spirit has never possessed the
immediacy, intensity, and personal value which distinguish that of
Jesus. It might be maintained with some show of reason that the
civilisation of Christendom, although it is now being copied by
non-Christian communities such as Japan, is not necessarily the highest
because it happens to be the strongest, and that it is even regarded
with contempt by the best representatives of some more ancient faiths.
Still that is not quite the point. The point is that the name of
Jesus, which stands for a moral ideal which is the very negation of
materialism, commands a reverence, and indeed a worship, the like of
which no other has ever received in the history of mankind. It is no
use trying to place Jesus in a row along with other religious masters.
He is first and the rest nowhere; we have no category for Him. I am
not trying to prove the impossible, namely, that Christianity is the
only true religion and the rest are all false. We shall get on better
when that kind of nonsense ceases to be spoken. All I am concerned to
emphasise is that somehow Jesus seems to sum up and focus the religious
ideal for mankind. His influence for good is greater than that of all
the masters of men put together, and still goes on increasing. It is a
notable fact that although churches and creeds are losing their hold
upon the modern mind, the name of Jesus is held in greater regard than
ever. We have heard of a meeting of workmen cheering Jesus and hissing
the churches. In our day most people are agreed that in Jesus we have
the most perfect life ever exhibited to humanity. It is not only
Christians who take this view; everyone, or nearly everyone, does so.
Some years ago a book was published which bore on the title-page the
question, "What would Jesus do?" The book was not very well written,
and I do not think the writer would have claimed that it contained
anything original, but it had an enormous sale simply because of its
attempt to answer the question on the covers. The most unlikely people
bought and read it, people who never went to church and would not dream
of doing so. From indications such as these one is justified in
asserting that our western civilisation has accepted as true that, no
matter who Jesus was, His character represents the highest standard for
human attainment. In seeking moral excellence the individual and the
race are thus moving toward an ideal already manifested in history.
The most effective taunt that can be levelled at inconsistent
Christians is that they are unlike their Master. Criticisms of the
character of Jesus are now few in number, and usually take the form of
declaring that it is impracticable or impossible, not that it is
undesirable or imperfect. Some, no doubt, would maintain that perhaps
the real Jesus did not answer to the ideal which Christians have formed
of Him, but that is another question. Here we are now face to face
with the unescapable fact that the greatest moral and religious force
in the world is embodied in the name of Jesus, and this by general
consent.
+The Jesus of traditional theology.+--But what has traditional
Christian theology to say about Jesus? Here we enter a region in which
the ordinary man of the world does not live and is never likely to
live, but we cannot afford to ignore it. According to the received
theology, Jesus was and is God and man in a sense in which no one else
ever has been or ever will be. As the shorter catechism has it,
following the language of the ancient creeds, "There are three persons
in one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory," and Jesus
is the second of the three. This kind of statement cannot but be
confusing to the ordinary mind of to-day if only because the word
"person" does not mean to us quite the same thing that it meant to the
framers of the ancient creeds. Strange as it may seem to some of my
readers, I believe what the creeds say about the person of Jesus, but I
believe it in a way that puts no gulf between Him and the rest of the
human race. This, I trust, will become clearer as we proceed; it seems
to me to be implied in any real belief concerning the immanence of God.
I think even the Athanasian creed is a magnificent piece of work if
only the churches would consent to understand it in terms of the oldest
theology of all! But, according to conventional theology, the second
person in the Trinity, who was coequal and coeternal with God the
Father, laid aside His glory, became incarnate for our salvation, was
born of a virgin, lived a brief suffering life, wrought many miracles,
died a shameful death, rose again from the tomb on the second morning
after He had been laid in it, and ascended into heaven in full view of
His wondering disciples. In fulfilment of a promise made by Him
shortly before the crucifixion, and repeated before the ascension, He
and the Father conjointly sent the third person in the Trinity to endue
with power from on high the simple men whose duty it now became to
proclaim the gospel of salvation to the world. Jesus is now on the
throne of His glory, but sooner or later He will come again to wind up
the present dispensation and to be the Judge of the quick and the dead
at a grand assize.
There is a sense in which all this is true, but it is commonly
expressed in such a way that the truth is lost sight of. Literally
understood it is incredible. The only way to get at the truth in every
one of these venerable articles of the Christian faith will be to shed
the husk, and that we must do without hesitation or compromise. A more
accurate historic perspective would save us from the crudities so often
preached from the pulpits in the name of Christian truth, crudities
which repel so many intelligent men from the benefits of public
worship. There never has been the slightest need for any man of
thoughtful mind and reverent spirit to recoil from the fundamentals of
the Christian creed. Rightly understood they are the fundamentals of
human nature itself.
+Godhead and manhood.+--The first in order of thought is that of the
Godhead of Jesus. As regards this tenet I think it should be easily
possible to show that the most convinced adherent of the traditional
theology does not believe and never has believed what he professes to
hold. The terms with which we have to deal are Deity, divinity, and
humanity. A good deal of confusion exists concerning the interrelation
of these three. It is supposed that humanity and divinity are mutually
exclusive, and that divinity and Deity must necessarily mean exactly
the same thing. But this is not so. It follows from the first
principle of the New Theology that all the three are fundamentally and
essentially one, but in scope and extent they are different. By the
Deity we mean--and I suppose everyone means--the all-controlling
consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, unfathomable,
and unknowable abyss of being beyond. By divinity we mean the essence
of the nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all-determining
quality of that nature; we have already seen that according to the
Christian religion the innermost quality of the divine nature is
perfect love. Show us perfect love and you have shown us the divinest
thing the universe can produce, whether it knows itself to be
immediately directed and controlled by the infinite consciousness of
Deity or whether it does not. It is clear, then, that although Deity
and divinity are essentially one, the latter is the lesser term and is
dependent for its validity upon the former. Humanity is a lesser term
still. It stands for that expression of the divine nature which we
associate with our limited human consciousness. Strictly speaking, the
human and divine are two categories which shade into and imply each
other; humanity is divinity viewed from below, divinity is humanity
viewed from above. If any human being could succeed in living a life
of perfect love, that is a life whose energies were directed toward
impersonal ends, and which was lived in such a way as to be and do the
utmost for the whole, he would show himself divine, for he would have
revealed the innermost of God.
Now let us apply these definitions to the personality of Jesus.
Granted that the devotion of Christians has been right in recognising
in Him the one perfect human life, that is, the one life which
consistently and from first to last was lived in terms of the whole,
what are we to call it except divine? In a sense, of course,
everything that exists is divine, because the whole universe is an
expression of the being of God. But it can hardly be seriously
contended that a crocodile is as much an expression of God as General
Booth. It is wise and right, therefore, to restrict the word "divine"
to the kind of consciousness which knows itself to be, and rejoices to
be, the expression of a love which is a consistent self-giving to the
universal life. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in
God and God in him." General Booth is divine in so far as this is the
governing principle of his life. Jesus was divine simply and solely
because His life was never governed by any other principle. We do not
need to talk of two natures in Him, or to think of a mysterious
dividing line on one side of which He was human and on the other
divine. In Him humanity was divinity and divinity, humanity. Does
anyone think that this brings Jesus down to our level? Assuredly it
does not; we are far too prone to be ruled by names. To the ordinary
Christian this explanation of the divinity of Jesus may seem equivalent
to the denial of His uniqueness, but it is nothing of the kind. I have
already devoted some little space to emphasising the obvious fact that
it is impossible to deny the uniqueness of Jesus; history has settled
that question for us. If all the theologians and materialists put
together were to set to work to-morrow to try to show that Jesus was
just like other people, they would not succeed, for the civilised world
has already made up its mind on that point, and by a right instinct
recognises Jesus as the unique standard of human excellence. But this
is not to say that we shall never reach that standard too; quite the
contrary. We must reach it in order to fulfil our destiny and to crown
and complete His work. To stop short of manifesting the perfect love
of God would be to fail of the object for which we are here and to
render the advent of Jesus useless. Christendom already knows this
perfectly well, although it has not always succeeded in expressing it
with perfect clearness. "Beloved, now are we sons of God, and it doth
not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He (or rather
it) shall appear, we shall be like Him." In our practical religion we
all, even the most reactionary of us, regard the divinity of Jesus just
in this way. It has no other value. We talk of imitating Him,
conforming to His likeness, showing His spirit, and so on. When we
want a model for courage, fidelity, gentleness, humility,
unselfishness, we promptly turn to Jesus. Even in our relations with
God we try to follow His lead; instinctively we range ourselves with
Him when we address the universal Father; until we come to creed-making
we never think of putting Him on the God side of things and ourselves
on another. Catholic or Protestant, orthodox or unorthodox, Unitarian
or Trinitarian, we all accept in practice the identity of the divine
and human in Jesus and potentially in ourselves. But you make Him only
a man! No, reader, I do not. I make Him the only Man--and there is a
difference. We have only seen perfect manhood once and that was the
manhood of Jesus. The rest of us have got to get there.
+Jesus and Deity.+--This brings us to the further question of the Deity
of Jesus. As a matter of fact, as I have already indicated, this
question, too, has long been settled in practice. If by the Deity of
Jesus is meant that He possessed the all-controlling consciousness of
the universe, then assuredly He was not the Deity for He did not
possess that consciousness. He prayed to His Father, sometimes with
agony and dread; He wondered, suffered, wept, and grew weary. He
confessed His ignorance of some things and declared Himself to have no
concern with others; it is even doubtful how far He was prepared to
receive the homage of those about Him. If there be one thing which
becomes indisputable from the reading of the gospel narratives it is
that Jesus possessed a true human consciousness, limited like our own,
and, like our own, subject to the ordinary ills of life. Once again
everybody knows this after a fashion. The most determined of so-called
orthodox controversialists would hardly try to maintain that the
consciousness of Jesus was at once limited and unlimited. To do so
would be an impossible feat; if Jesus was the Deity, He certainly was
not the _whole_ of the Deity during His residence on earth, whatever He
may be now. But, it may be objected, in His earthly life He was the
Deity self-limited: "He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant,"
etc. Quite so, but see where this statement leads. The New Theology
can consistently make it, but it is difficult to see how that newer
theology which calls itself orthodoxy manages to do so. Does the
self-limitation of Jesus mean that the Deity was lessened in any way
during the incarnation? Why, of course not, we should all say; the
Deity continued with infinite fulness unimpaired above and beyond the
consciousness of Jesus. Then are we to understand that this
self-limitation of Jesus meant that the eternal Son, or second person
in the Trinity, the Word by whom the worlds were made, quitted the
throne of His glory and lived for thirty-three years as a Jewish
peasant? I think the dogmatic theologian would have some hesitation in
giving an unqualified affirmative to this question, for the
difficulties implied in it are practically insurmountable. Was the
full consciousness of the eternal Word present in the babe of
Bethlehem, for instance? If not, where was it? Questions like these
cannot be answered on the lines of the conventional Christology. The
plain and simple answer to all of them is to admit that the Jesus of
history did not possess the consciousness of Deity during His life on
earth. His consciousness was as purely human as our own. Any special
insight which He possessed into the true relations of God and man was
due to the moral perfection of His nature and not to His metaphysical
status. He was God manifest in the flesh because His life was a
consistent expression of divine love and not otherwise. But He was not
God manifest in the flesh in any way which would cut Him off from the
rest of human kind. According to the received theology, Jesus and
Jesus only, out of all the beings who have ever trodden the road which
humanity has to travel, existed before all ages. We live our
threescore years and ten and then pass on into eternity; He was eternal
to begin with. He comes to earth with a hoary antiquity behind Him, a
timeless life to look back upon; we have just fluttered into existence.
Surely any ordinary intelligence can see that this kind of theologising
puts an impassable gulf at once between Jesus and every other person
who has ever been born of an earthly mother. Certainly it does, the
theologian may declare, and rightly so, for that gulf exists; He
assumed human nature, but He was eternally divine before He did so, and
we are not. I do not need to refute this argument; the trend of modern
thought is already doing so most effectually. It is a gratuitous
assumption without a shred of evidence to support it. Besides,
unfortunately for this kind of statement, the scientific investigation
of Christian origins, and the application of the scientific method to
the history of Christian doctrine have shown us how the dogma of the
Deity of Jesus grew up. It was a comparatively late development in
Christianity, and its practical implications never have been accepted,
although at one time there was a danger that the winsome figure of
Jesus would be removed altogether from the field of human interest and
regard. The Jesus of Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" is a terrifying
figure without a trace of the lowly Nazarene about Him, and yet this
was the Jesus of the conventional Christianity of the time. It was
through this dehumanising of Jesus in Christian thought and experience
that Mariolatry arose in the Roman church. Could anything be more
grotesque than the suggestion that the mother of Jesus should need to
plead with her son to be merciful with frail humanity? And yet this is
what it came to; the figure of Mary was introduced in order to preserve
a real humanity in our relations with the Godhead. All honour to those
who have called us back to the real Jesus, the Jesus of Galilee and
Jerusalem, the Jesus with the prophet's fire, the Jesus who was so
gentle with little children and erring women, and yet before whom
canting hypocrites and truculent ecclesiastics slunk away abashed.
Upon this recovered Jesus the world has now fixed its adoring gaze, and
it will not readily let Him go again.
+Divine manhood and Unitarianism.+--But then, someone will protest,
this is sheer Unitarianism after all; you do not believe in the Jesus
who is the object of the faith of Christendom, but in one who was only
a man among men; you do not think of Him as very God of very God. Not
so fast; we are busy with names again. Most of us have a tendency to
think that if we can get a doctrine labelled and pigeonholed, we know
all about it, but we are generally mistaken. This is not Unitarianism,
and I do believe that Jesus was very God, as I have already shown. We
have to get rid of the dualism which will insist on putting humanity
and Deity into two separate categories. I say it is not Unitarianism,
for historic Unitarianism has been just as prone to this dualism as the
extremest Trinitarianism has ever been. Like Trinitarianism it has
often tended to regard humanity as on one side of a gulf and Deity as
on the other; it has emphasised too much the transcendence of God. The
sentence quoted above from an orthodox Trinitarian divine about "God's
eternal eminence and His descent on a created world" might just as well
have been employed by an out-and-out Unitarian. Modern Unitarianism is
in part the descendant of eighteenth-century Deism which insisted upon
the transcendence of God almost to the exclusion of His immanence; it
thought of God as away somewhere above the universe, watching it but
leaving the machine pretty much to itself. Unitarianism in the course
of its history from the first century downward has passed through a
good many phases. Present-day Unitarianism is preaching with fervour
and clearness the foundation truth of the New Theology, the fundamental
unity of God and man. But it does not belong to it exclusively, and I
decline to be labelled Unitarian because I preach it too. The New
Theology is not a victory for Unitarianism. If ever the
English-speaking communities of the world should come to be united
under a single flag, would it be just and wise to call them all
Americans? No doubt some of our American cousins would like to think
so, but there is enough of virility and solid worth on the British side
of the question to make that description impossible. The title would
be a misnomer, and in fact an absurdity. The case in regard to the
connection of the New Theology with Unitarianism is not dissimilar. It
is only sectarian Unitarians who would try to claim it for their own
denomination; the best and most outstanding exponents of Unitarianism
would not wish to do anything of the kind, for they know well enough
that historically speaking they have not consistently stood for it any
more than any other denomination. The New Theology does not belong to
any one church but to all. For my own part I would not even take the
trouble to try to turn a Roman Catholic into a Protestant. Let every
man stay in the church whose spiritual atmosphere and modes of worship
best accord with his temperament, but let him recognise the deeper
unity that lies below the formal creeds. The old issue between
Unitarianism and Trinitarianism vanishes in the New Theology; the
bottom is knocked out of the controversy. Unitarianism used to declare
that Jesus was man _not_ God; Trinitarianism maintained that He was God
_and_ man; the oldest Christian thought, as well as the youngest,
regards Him as God _in_ man--God manifest in the flesh. But here
emerges a great point of difference between the New Theology on the one
hand and traditional orthodoxy on the other. The latter would restrict
the description "God manifest in the flesh" to Jesus alone; the New
Theology would extend it in a lesser degree to all humanity, and would
maintain that in the end it will be as true of every individual soul as
ever it was of Jesus. Indeed, it is this belief that gives value and
significance to the earthly mission of Jesus; He came to show us what
we potentially are. This is a great and important issue, which
requires to be treated in a separate chapter.
CHAPTER VI
THE ETERNAL CHRIST
In the course of Christian history a good deal of time has been
occupied in the discussion of the metaphysical question of the complex
unity of the divine nature; and the result has been the doctrine of the
Trinity, a conception which, it has been claimed, at once satisfies and
transcends the operations of the human intellect. Most non-theological
modern minds are, however, somewhat suspicious of the doctrine of the
Trinity; it seems rather too speculative and too remote from ordinary
ways of thinking to possess much real value. But this is quite a
mistake. We cannot dispense with the doctrine of the Trinity, for it,
or something like it, is implied in the very structure of the mind. It
belongs to philosophy even more than to religion, and to the sphere of
ethics not less. I daresay even the man in the street knows, quite as
certainly as the man in the schools, that a metaphysical proposition
underlies the doing of every moral act, even though it may never be
expressed. All thinking starts with an assumption of some kind, and
without an assumption thought is impossible. This is just as true of
the strictest scientific processes as it is of deductive reasoning, and
indeed it is interesting to watch the way in which within recent years
idealistic philosophy and empirical science have joined hands. Does
physical science, then, imply the doctrine of the Trinity? Yes,
unquestionably it does, after a fashion, for it starts with an
assumption which takes it for granted. Perhaps this would be news to
Professor Ray Lankester, and such as he, but I think I could convince
them that I am right if I had them face to face. To use the mind at
all we have to assume this doctrine even though we may not actually
formulate it. Christianity did not invent it; it clarified and defined
it, but in principle it is as old as the exercise of human reason.
+The basal assumption of thought.+--After making a comprehensive
assertion of this kind I suppose I am bound to justify it, and I do not
shrink from the task. I say that all thinking starts with an
assumption of some kind, and exact thought requires that that
assumption shall be the simplest possible, the irreducible minimum
beneath which we cannot get. Now when we start thinking about
existence as a whole and ourselves in particular, we are compelled to
assume the infinite, the finite, and the activity of the former within
the latter. In other words we have to postulate God, the universe, and
God's operation within the universe. Look at these three conceptions
for a moment and it will be seen that every one of them implies the
rest; they are a Trinity in unity. The primordial being must be
infinite, for there cannot be a finite without something still beyond
it. We know, too, that to our experience the universe is finite; we
can measure, weigh, and analyse it--an impossible thing to do with an
infinite substance. And yet if we think of infinite and finite as two
entirely distinct and unrelated modes of existence, we find ourselves
in an impossible position, for the infinite must be that outside of
which nothing exists or can exist; so of course we are compelled to
think of the infinite as ever active within the finite, the source of
change and motion, the exhaustless power which makes possible the very
idea of development from simplicity to complexity. If the universe
were complete in itself, change would not occur, and a cosmic process,
evolutionary or otherwise, would be inconceivable. Here, then, we have
the basal factors of any true theology, philosophy, or science.
Readers of Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe" will note that that
eminent materialist, who professes to do away with the very idea of
God, takes these factors for granted; and yet I suppose he would object
to being told that he believes in the doctrine of the Trinity. But he
does, for he begins by assuming infinite space filled to the farthest
with matter ponderable and imponderable, and forthwith proceeds to
weigh, measure, and divide the latter as though it were finite! Here
are two terms of the doctrine of the Trinity at once. We get the third
as soon as Professor Haeckel sets to work to explain the cosmic
process, for as he does so he is all the while taking for granted that
the infinite is pressing in and up through the finite, evolving beauty
and order, light and life.
+The moral basis of the doctrine.+--But it may be contended that these
bare bones of the doctrine of the Trinity are not the doctrine as it
enters into spiritual experience. I admit the fact while asserting
strongly that but for this framework of intellectual necessity the
doctrine would be unknown to faith and morals. It is sometimes stated
that the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated in order to account for
Jesus, but that is only incidentally true. Its framers took the
materials for it over from Greek thought, and even Greek thought
probably inherited it from an older civilisation still, if indeed there
were any necessity to inherit it. I contend that if we had never heard
of the doctrine in connection with Jesus, we should have to invent it
now in order to account for ourselves and the wondrous universe in
which we live.
Unquestionably, however, it is from the point of view of religion and
morals that the doctrine has most significance, and therefore has
become indissolubly associated with the personality of Jesus; and it is
easy to see how this has come about. Thinkers have always been
compelled to construe the universe in terms of the highest known to
man, namely, his own moral nature. It was natural, therefore, that
while they thought of the universe as an expression of God, they should
think of it as the expression of that side of His being which can only
be described as the ideal or archetypal manhood. The infinite being of
God is utterly incomprehensible to a finite mind, and in regard to it
the most devout saint is as much an agnostic as the most convinced
materialist. But we are justified in holding that whatever else He may
be God is essentially man, that is, He is the fount of humanity. There
must be one side, so to speak, of the infinitely complex being of God
in which humanity is eternally contained and which finds expression in
the finite universe. Humanity is not a vague term; we have already
seen something of what it is. We ought not to interpret it in terms of
the primeval savage, or even of average human nature to-day, but in
terms of what we have come to feel is its highest expression, and that
is Jesus. If we think therefore of the archetypal eternal divine Man,
the source and sustenance of the universe, and yet transcending the
universe, we cannot do better than think of Him in terms of Jesus;
Jesus is the fullest expression of that eternal divine Man on the field
of human history. Here, then, we have the first and second factors in
the doctrine of the Trinity morally and spiritually construed.
+The divine Man.+--The idea of a divine Man, the emanation of the
infinite, the soul of the universe, the source and goal of all
humanity, is ages older than Christian theology. It can be traced in
Babylonian religious literature, for instance, at a period older even
than the Old Testament. It played a not unimportant part in Greek
thought, and Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, works it out
in some detail in his religio-philosophic system, which aimed to
combine the wide outlook of Greek culture with the high seriousness of
Hebrew religion. It is a true, indeed an inevitable, conception, if we
hold anything like a consistent view of the immanence of God in His
universe. With what God have we to do except the God who is eternally
man? This aspect of the nature of God has been variously described in
the course of its history. It has been called the Word, the Son, and,
as we have seen, the second person in the Trinity. For various reasons
I prefer to call it--or rather Him--the eternal Christ. I do this
because, for one thing, the word "Christ" is a living word with a
clearly marked ethical content and a great religious value.
Originally, of course, it was but the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew
Messiah, and meant the "anointed one," the person chosen for a special
divine work. But in the New Testament, especially the writings of St.
Paul, as well as all Christian history through, it is associated on the
one hand with the personality of Jesus, and, on the other, with the
fontal or ideal Man who contains and is expressed in all human kind.
According to the New Testament writers, Jesus was and is the Christ,
but in His earthly life His consciousness of the fact was limited.
But, as we have come forth from this fontal manhood, we too must be to
some extent expressions of this eternal Christ; and it is in virtue of
that fact that we stand related to Jesus, and that the personality of
Jesus has anything to do with us. Here is where the value of our
belief in the interaction of the higher and the lower self comes in.
Fundamentally our being is already one with that of the eternal Christ,
and faith in Jesus is faith in Him. Jesus is not one being and the
Christ another; the two are one, and Jesus seems to have known it
during His earthly ministry. He lived His life in such a way as to
reveal the very essence of the Christ nature. He is therefore central
for us, and we are complete in Him. Here is the goal of all moral
effort--Christ. Here, too, is the highest reach of the religious
ideal--Christ. "For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and
bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the
Father, and was manifested unto us."
+The Christ of St. Paul.+--I am persuaded that we have here the key to
the Christology of that great thinker and preacher, the apostle Paul.
It is this ideal or eternal Christ who is the object of his faith and
devotion. He even goes so far as to warn his readers not to dwell too
much upon the limited earthly Jesus, but upon His true being in the
eternal reality: "Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh;
yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth
know we Him no more." He does not say, "To me to live is Jesus," but,
"To me to live is _Christ_." If ever there was a Christian who really
loved Jesus with passionate and whole-hearted devotion, it was the
apostle Paul, but he says almost nothing about the earthly ministry of
his Lord. He seems to have had a vivid impression as to what the
character of Jesus was really like, and he gave himself up to the
worship of this with all his heart; but he does not draw for us any of
the beautiful gospel pictures of the Jesus in the peasant's dress who
taught on the hillsides of Galilee, went about doing good, was a
welcome guest in the home at Bethany, lived a true human life, and died
a shameful death. Paul always thought of Him, and truly, as the Lord
who came down from heaven, but he does _not_ draw a sharp line of
distinction between Him and the rest of humanity. He calls Jesus "the
first-born among many brethren." He speaks of the summing up of all
things in Christ, and of the final consummation when God shall be all
in all. Here is the New Theology with a vengeance. Paul requires to
be rescued from the inadequate and distorting interpretations his
thought has received in the course of its history. He brought this
conception of the eternal Christ into Christianity from pre-Christian
thought, saw it ideally revealed in Jesus, and then bade mankind
respond to it and realise it to be the true explanation of our own
being. Sometimes he appears to deviate from this view, and to say
things inconsistent with it, but that we need not mind; he saw it, and
that is enough. It forms the foundation of his gospel.
CHAPTER VII
THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD
+Jesus all that Christian devotion has believed Him to be.+--So far we
have seen that the personality of Jesus is central for Christian faith.
We deny nothing about Him that Christian devotion has ever affirmed,
but we affirm the same things of humanity as a whole in a differing
degree. The practical dualism which regards Jesus as coming into
humanity from something that beforehand was not humanity we declare to
be misleading. Our view of the subject does not belittle Jesus but it
exalts human nature. Let this be clearly understood and most of the
objections to it will vanish. Briefly summed up, the position is as
follows: Jesus was God, but so are we. He was God because His life was
the expression of divine love; we too are one with God in so far as our
lives express the same thing. Jesus was not God in the sense that He
possessed an infinite consciousness; no more are we. Jesus expressed
fully and completely, in so far as a finite consciousness ever could,
that aspect of the nature of God which we have called the eternal Son,
or Christ, or ideal Man who is the Soul of the universe, and "the light
that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;" we are expressions
of the same primordial being. Fundamentally we are all one in this
eternal Christ. This is the most difficult statement of all to make
clear, for the average westerner cannot grasp it; it is different from
his ordinary way of looking at things. The best way of demonstrating
it, as I have already shown, is to draw attention to the fact that
Christian orthodoxy has all along been affirming the mystic union
between Christ and the soul, and that the limited earthly consciousness
of Jesus did not prevent Him from being really and truly God. Why
should we not speak in a similar way about any other human
consciousness? If we could only get men to do so habitually and
sincerely, it would be the greatest gain to religion that could
possibly be imagined. In the third chapter I have pointed out that
psychological science is doing much to help us toward this realisation.
We are beginning to see, however hard it may be to understand it, that
our limited individual consciousness is no barrier to the true
identification of the lesser with the larger self. What Christian
doctrine, therefore, has been affirming of Jesus for hundreds of years
past is receiving impressive confirmation from modern science and is
being seen to be true of every human being--that is, the lesser and the
larger are one, however little the earthly consciousness may be able to
grasp the fact. To me this is a most helpful and inspiring truth, one
of the most important that has ever found a place in Christian thought;
it elucidates much that would otherwise be obscure. It enables us to
see how the human and divine were blended in Jesus without making Him
essentially different from the rest of the human race; it enables us to
realise our own true origin and to believe in the salvability of every
soul that has ever come to moral consciousness. If this truth will not
lift a man toward the higher life, I do not know one that will. It is
the truth implied in all redemptive effort that has ever been made, and
in every message that has ever gripped conscience and heart; it is, as
the Nicene creed has it, "the taking of the manhood into God."
+The preëminence of Jesus.+--Lest anyone should think that this
position involves in the slightest degree the diminution of the
religious value and the moral preëminence of Jesus, let me say that it
does the very opposite. Nothing can be higher than the highest, and
the life of Jesus was the undimmed revelation of the highest. Faith to
be effective must centre on a living person, and the highest objective
it has ever found is Jesus. He is no abstraction but a spiritual
reality, an ever-present friend and guide, our brother and our Lord.
No one will ever compete with Jesus for this position in human hearts.
When I speak of the eternal Christ, I do not mean someone different
from Jesus, although I certainly do mean the basal principle of all
human goodness; Jesus was and is that Christ, and we can only
understand what the Christ is because we have seen Him. Whole-hearted
faith in Him has proved itself to be the most effective means to the
manifestation of our own Christhood.
+Jesus and the incarnation.+--This thought at once opens up another
great question to which we have already alluded, that of the
incarnation of this eternal Christ or Son of God in the finite
universe. According to the received theology the incarnation of God in
human life was limited to the life of Jesus only, and through Him to
mankind. I purposely say popular theology because the best Christian
thought has always known better. Popular theology has it that Jesus,
the only-begotten eternal Son of God, took human flesh and a human
nature, was conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of a virgin, and
was born into the world in a wholly miraculous way--a way which stamps
Him as different from all that were ever born of woman before or since.
It seems strange that belief in the virgin birth of Jesus should ever
have been held to be a cardinal article of the Christian faith, but it
is so even to-day. There is not much need to combat it, for most
reputable theologians have now given it up, but it is still a
stumbling-block to many minds. Perhaps, therefore, a brief examination
of the subject may not be altogether out of place.
+The virgin birth not demonstrable from Scripture.+--The virgin birth
of Jesus was apparently unknown to the primitive church, for the
earliest New Testament writings make no mention of it. Paul's letters
do not allude to it, neither does the gospel of St. Mark. "In the
fulness of time," says the great apostle, "God sent forth His Son born
of a woman." He was "of the seed of David according to the flesh," but
nowhere does Paul give us so much as a hint of anything supernatural
attending the mode of His entry into the world. Mark does not even
tell us anything about the childhood of the Master; his account begins
with the baptism of Jesus in Jordan. The fourth gospel, although
written much later, ignores the belief in the virgin birth, and even
seems to do so of set purpose as belittling and materialising the
truth. The supposed Old Testament prophecies of the event have nothing
whatever to do with it. The famous passage, "Behold a virgin shall
conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel," is a
reference to contemporary events, and the word translated "virgin"
simply means a young woman. It is a prophecy of the birth of a prince
whose work it should be to put right for Judah what the reigning king
Ahaz had been putting wrong. The story in the seventh of Isaiah is as
follows: Ahaz, a rather weak ruler, was greatly concerned by the news
that Rezin, king of Syria and Pekah, king of northern Israel, had
formed an alliance against him and were marching on Jerusalem. In his
extremity this monarch of a petty state turned toward the mighty ruler
of Assyria, the greatest military power in the world, and asked his
help against the combination. Isaiah, statesman as well as prophet,
saw that this was a wrong move. Assyria was aspiring to universal
dominion, and to form an alliance with the military master of that
mighty state would be to supply him with an excuse for further
interference. The policy of Ahaz was therefore as suicidal as that of
John Balliol when he called in Edward the First to adjudicate on his
claim to the crown of Scotland, or the policy of Spain when she called
in Napoleon. Sargon, king of Assyria, was overturning thrones in all
directions, profiting by the divisions and jealousies of his foes. The
great empires of Egypt and Babylonia went down before him as well as
the smaller states. The condition of things in this ancient world was
just like that of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century
when the star of Napoleon was in the ascendant. For Ahaz to turn for
help to Sargon was to court disaster in the end. Isaiah saw this and
went out to meet Ahaz one day "at the end of the conduit of the upper
pool in the highway of the fuller's field"--a vivid descriptive touch.
The king was apparently preparing to stand a siege in his capital and
was making sure of the water supply. Isaiah's remonstrance was in
substance: You need not take so much trouble with your preparations;
Syria and Israel will have more than enough to do presently to defend
their own borders from Sargon. Besides, men like Rezin and Pekah are
not men to be afraid of in any case; they have neither strength nor
skill. But do not for heaven's sake call in Sargon; if you do you will
supply him with an excuse for meddling and we shall never get rid of
him. This was good counsel, but Ahaz was too short-sighted and
panic-stricken to take much notice of it, so in oriental fashion Isaiah
goes on to paint a picture of future disaster. The land, he says, will
soon be laid waste, and future generations will rue the policy now
being determined upon. In the end, of course, things will come all
right, for God will not abandon His people. A better and wiser prince
shall arise who shall restore prosperity to Judah. That prince is not
yet born, but when he is, his name shall be called Immanuel,--God with
us. In another place he describes him as Wonderful Counsellor, Divine
Hero, Father Everlasting, Prince of Peace. "Butter and honey shall he
eat," because there will be nothing else left after Assyria has swept
over the country, but the discipline may have good results in the end,
and will serve to bring Judah to her senses.
There is something strikingly modern about all this, and it is a good
example of the way in which the same conditions arise over and over
again in the course of human history. It is plain to be seen that the
prophecy here indicated was only the shrewd common sense of a wise and
patriotic man who loved his country and believed in God. But what on
earth have his words to do with the birth of Jesus? It is only by a
very long stretch of the pious imagination that they can be held to
apply to Christianity at all. They have an interest of their own, and
a very considerable interest, too, even from the point of view of
religion; but Isaiah would have been considerably astonished to be told
that they would have to wait seven hundred years for fulfilment. To a
certain extent they were fulfilled soon afterward in the advent of the
well-meaning but not very brilliant king Hezekiah. I have dwelt upon
this passage at some length because it is a fair example of the way in
which Old Testament literature has been pressed into the service of
Christian dogma. What I am now saying, as I need hardly point out, is
not my _ipse dixit_; expert biblical scholarship has been saying it for
a long time, but somehow or other its bearing upon generally accepted
dogmas is not popularly realised. It can hardly be maintained that
Christian preachers who know the truth about these matters and refrain
from stating it plainly are doing their duty to their congregations.
No Old Testament passage whatever is directly or indirectly a prophecy
of the virgin birth of Jesus. To insist upon this may seem to many
like beating a man of straw, but if so the man of straw still retains a
good deal of vitality.
+The virgin birth in the gospels.+--The only two gospels in which the
virgin birth is alluded to are Matthew and Luke, and the nativity
stories contained in these are very beautiful, especially those
peculiar to Luke. But the two gospels are mutually contradictory in
their account of the circumstances attending the miraculous birth.
Each contains a genealogy which professes to be that of Joseph, not of
Mary, and these are inconsistent with each other. What has the
genealogy of Joseph got to do with the birth of Jesus if Jesus were not
his own son? The conclusion seems probable that in the earlier
versions of these gospels the miraculous conception did not find a
place, or else that two inconsistent sources have been drawn upon
without sufficient care being taken to reconcile them. But this is not
the only discrepancy. Matthew gives Bethlehem as the native place of
Joseph and Mary, Luke says Nazareth. Matthew says not a word about the
census of Cyrenius as the motive for the journey to Bethlehem, but
leads us to suppose that the holy family were already in residence
there. Then again he tells us of the coming of the wise men from the
East, their public inquiry as to the whereabouts of the holy child, the
jealousy of Herod, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into
Egypt. Luke says nothing about these things, but gives us an entirely
different set of wonders, including the attendance of an angelic host
and the annunciation to the shepherds. So far from recording any
massacre, or any hasty flight, he tells us that some time after His
birth the babe was taken to the Temple at Jerusalem to be presented to
the Lord, and that afterwards He and His parents "returned into Galilee
to their own city Nazareth." According to Matthew Nazareth was an
afterthought and only became the residence of the holy family after the
return from Egypt. These accounts do not tally, and no ingenuity can
reconcile them. The nativity stories belong to the poetry of religion,
not to history. To regard them as narrations of actual fact is to
misunderstand them. They are better than that; they take us into the
region of exalted feeling and give us a vision of truth too great for
prosaic statement. Christianity would be poorer by the loss of them,
but they are not indigenous to Christianity. They have their parallels
in other religions, some of them much older than the advent of Jesus.
The beautiful legends surrounding the infancy of Gautama, for example,
are startlingly similar to those contained in the first and third
gospels. Like Jesus, the Buddhist messiah is stated to have been of
royal descent and was born of a virgin mother. At his birth a
supernatural radiance illuminated the whole district, and a troop of
heavenly beings sang the praises of the holy child. Later on a wise
man, guided by special portents, recognised him as the long-expected
and divinely appointed light-bringer and life-giver of mankind. When
but a youth he was lost for a time and was found by his father in the
midst of a circle of holy men, sunk in rapt contemplation of the great
mystery of existence. The parallel between these legends and the
Christian version of the marvels attending the birth of Jesus is so
close as to preclude the possibility of its being altogether
accidental. There must have been a connection somewhere, and indeed
there is no need to think otherwise, for nothing is to be gained or
lost by admitting it.
+Christianity not dependent on a virgin birth.+--But why hesitate about
the question? The greatness of Jesus and the value of His revelation
to mankind are in no way either assisted or diminished by the manner of
His entry into the world. Every birth is just as wonderful as a virgin
birth could possibly be, and just as much a direct act of God. A
supernatural conception bears no relation whatever to the moral and
spiritual worth of the person who is supposed to enter the world in
this abnormal way. The credibility and significance of Christianity
are in no way affected by the doctrine of the virgin birth otherwise
than that the belief tends to put a barrier between Jesus and the race
and to make Him something which cannot properly be called human. Those
who insist on the doctrine will find themselves in danger of proving
too much, for, pressed to its logical conclusion, it removes Jesus
altogether from the category of humanity in any real sense. Like many
others, I used to take the position that acceptance or non-acceptance
of the doctrine of the virgin birth was immaterial because Christianity
was quite independent of it, but later reflection has convinced me that
in point of fact it operates as a hindrance to spiritual religion and a
real living faith in Jesus. The simple and natural conclusion is that
Jesus was the child of Joseph and Mary and had an uneventful childhood.
+The truth in the doctrine of the virgin birth.+--And yet, as with
every tenet which has held a place in human thought for any
considerable length of time, there is a great truth contained in the
idea of a virgin birth. It is the truth that the emergence of anything
great and beautiful in human character and achievement is the work of
the divine spirit operating within human limitations. This idea is
very ancient, and there is no great religion which does not contain it
in some form or other. One form of it, for example, can be discerned
in the Babylonian creation myth with its parallel in the book of
Genesis. The home of the primitive Chaldeans, the stock whence
Israelites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic communities
sprang, was in the low-lying territory surrounding the Persian gulf.
During the rainy seasons these lands were flooded by the overflow of
the great rivers. The sun of springtime, rising upon this mass of
waters which stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see,
drew forth from their bosom the life and beauty of summer flowers and
fruit. From observation of this regularly recurring phenomenon the
primitive Semites constructed their creation myth, one version of which
appeared in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, a version much
later than the Babylonian, but an outgrowth of the same idea. They
thought of a primeval waste of water covering everything. As the
writer of the Genesis account has it: "The earth was without form and
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." In the Babylonian
version this primeval water was personified as a woman--Tiamat. They
thought of the sun of heaven as impregnating this virgin matrix with
the seeds of cosmic life--quite an accurate conception from the modern
point of view. Later on this idea became spiritualised in a much
higher degree. The religious mind came to regard the physical,
mundane, or distinctively human principle as the matrix upon which the
spirit of God brooded, bringing to the birth a divine idea. And this
is perfectly true too, as anyone can see. Nothing great and noble in
human experience can be accounted for merely in terms of atoms and
molecules. That is where materialism always comes to grief, for on its
own premises it cannot account for the emergence of intelligence and
all the higher qualities of human nature. A divine element, a
spiritual quickening, is required for the evolution of anything Godlike
in our mundane sphere; it is a virgin birth. Lower acting upon lower
can never produce a higher. It is the downpouring and incoming of the
higher to the lower which produces through the lower the divine manhood
which leaves the brute behind. This is the sense in which it is true
that Jesus was of divine as well as human parentage. We do not account
for Him merely by saying that He was the son of Joseph and Mary and the
descendant of a long line of prophets, priests, and kings; we have to
recognise that His true greatness came from above.
+True of all higher human experience.+--The same thing holds good in a
lesser degree of everything worthy of Jesus in human experience. We do
not account for any man's goodness or greatness by pointing to his
ancestry. Heredity may account for a great deal, but it is inadequate
as an explanation of genius or high moral achievement. If we go back
far enough, we shall find that our ancestry was barbarous, and, judging
from its tendencies, not at all likely to produce the Christ-man of
future ages. Wherever the Christ-man appears, we have to acknowledge
that the principal factor in his evolution is the incoming of the
divine spirit. It is only another way of stating what has already been
stated above, that the true man or higher self is divine and eternal,
integral to the being of God, and that this divine manhood is gradually
but surely manifesting on the physical plane. The lower cannot produce
the higher, but the higher is shaping and transforming the lower; every
moral and spiritual advance is therefore of the nature of a virgin
birth--a quickening from above. The spiritual birth described in the
conversation between our Lord and Nicodemus as given in the third of
John is, properly speaking, a virgin birth. "That which is born of the
flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Ye
must be born anew," or, literally, "quickened from above." Every man
who deliberately faces towards the highest, and feels himself
reënforced by the Spirit of God in so doing, is quickened from above;
the divinely human Christ is born in him, the Word has become flesh and
is manifested to the world.
+Human history one long incarnation.+--If now we can turn our thoughts
away for a moment from the individual to the race and think of humanity
as one being, or the expression of one being, we shall read this truth
on a larger scale. All human history represents the incarnation or
manifesting of the eternal Son or Christ of God. The incarnation
cannot be limited to one life only, however great that life may be. It
is quite a false idea to think of Jesus and no one else as the Son of
God incarnate. It is easy to understand the loving reverence for Jesus
which would lead men to regard Him as being and expressing something to
which none of the rest of us can ever attain, but in affirming this we
actually rob Him of a glory He ought to receive. We make Him unreal,
reduce His earthly life to a sort of drama, and effect a drastic
distinction in kind between Him and ourselves. If He came from the
farther side of the gulf and we only from the hither; if we are
humanity without divinity, and He divinity that has only assumed
humanity,--perfect fellowship between Him and ourselves is impossible.
But it is untrue to say that any such distinction exists. Let us go on
thinking of Jesus as Christ, the very Christ of glory, but let us
realise that that same Christ is seeking expression through every human
soul. He is incarnate in the race in order that by means of limitation
He may manifest the innermost of God, the life and love eternal. To
say this does not dethrone Jesus; it lends significance to His life and
work. He is on the throne and the sceptre is in His hand. We can rise
toward Him by trusting, loving, and serving Him; and by so doing we
shall demonstrate that we too are Christ the eternal Son.
To think of all human life as a manifestation of the eternal Son,
renders it sacred. Our very struggles and sufferings become full of
meaning. Sin is but the failure to realise it; it is being false to
ourselves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal tendency in
human nature just as love is the centripetal. There is no life,
however depraved, which does not occasionally emit some sign of its
kinship to Jesus and its eternal sonship to God. Wherever you see
self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of
the Christ incarnate. I find it everywhere, and it interprets life for
me as nothing else can. Take up any work of fiction, no matter what,
and you will find the author instinctively preaching this truth. Look
into any commonplace, everyday life, no matter whose, and you will find
it exemplified. Many a selfish bad man has one tender spot in his
nature, his affection for his child, and for the sake of that child he
will deny himself as he has never dreamed of doing for anything else;
so far as that one influence is concerned he actually reverses the
principle which governs the rest of his life. I have read of an
African negress who on one occasion was beaten nearly to death by the
brute to whom she was slave and paramour. Her murderer, for such he
was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in
accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with
the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the
tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him
free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found
lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular
story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true
a million times in human history. What was the spirit in this
benighted woman of the African wilds but the Christ spirit, the
self-giving spirit seen with such unique sublimity in the life of Jesus?
Look abroad all through the world, look back upon the slow, upward
progress of humanity to its home in God, and you will read the story of
the incarnation of the eternal Son. Never has there been an hour so
dark but that some gleams of this eternal light have pierced the murky
pall of human ignorance and sin; never have bitter hate and fiendish
cruelty gone altogether unrelieved by the human tenderness and
self-devotion that testify of God. Indeed without the limitation, the
struggle, and the pain, how would this Christ spirit ever have known
itself? Granted that self-surrender had never been called for by the
conditions of life, granted that our resources had always known
themselves infinite, and that which is worthiest and sublimest in the
nature of God and man alike could never have been revealed. This is
why the eternal Son has become incarnate; this is what we are here to
do, and upon the faithful doing of it depends our experience of the joy
that the world can neither give nor take away. The life and death of
Jesus are the central expression and ideal embodiment of this age-long
process, a process the consummation of which will be the glorious
return and triumphant ingathering of a redeemed and perfectly unified
humanity to God. "And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then
shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things
under him, that God may be all in all."
CHAPTER VIII
THE ATONEMENT
+I. Association of the Doctrine with Jesus+
+Importance of the subject.+--This brings us to a subject, which, more
than any other, with the exception of that of the person of Jesus, has
come under discussion at the present time. In the course of Christian
history it has created a more extensive literature than probably any
other doctrine. I mean the subject variously known as Salvation,
Redemption, Atonement, and with which the terms Forgiveness, Expiation,
Reconciliation, Ransom, Justification, Propitiation, Satisfaction,
Sanctification, and such like have been commonly associated. The
Christian doctrine of Atonement, as we may call it for convenience,
bulks so large in Christian thought that all others may be held to be
dependent upon it, even that of the person of Jesus; for, according to
the received theology, Jesus became incarnate for our redemption, and
that redemption can only be accomplished by one who is very God.
+The need for an adequate explanation.+--But there is no subject upon
which modern Christian thought is less coherent than this. We are
constantly hearing the statement that a rational theory of the
Atonement is badly wanted, or that it is our duty to preach the fact
without a theory, or that the Atonement is such a mystery that no
theory is possible and we must just accept it on faith. This
confession of helplessness shows that there is something seriously
wrong with the conventional presentation of the doctrine. But I do not
think the Atonement is such a very great mystery after all, and it
ought to be possible to get at the heart of it without stultifying the
intellect. Anyhow, let us try.
+The usual theological method of expounding it.+--As a rule treatises
on the Atonement begin with an examination of the Scripture passages
which are supposed to have a bearing upon it. Then follows a careful
examination and criticism of the various theories of it which have
successively held the field during its history; the author concludes by
giving us his own. I do not propose to follow that method, for it does
not possess a living interest for the mind of to-day; the psychological
should take precedence of the historical. I do not feel called upon to
take the doctrine of Atonement for granted and then proceed to try to
find a place for it in Christian experience. On the contrary, I prefer
to take human nature for granted and inquire whether it needs anything
like a doctrine of Atonement. If it does not, let the doctrine go; if
it does, let us see that the doctrine is presented in a reasonable
fashion. If it cannot be presented reasonably, it is not wanted. But
I think it is wanted, and more than wanted; it is already taken for
granted by everyone who thinks seriously about life, whether it is
called by its theological name or not.
+Outline of present-day accepted belief in regard to it.+--Before I
proceed to attempt to justify these statements let me ask my readers to
call to mind the outline of what they have been taught in reference to
this great fundamental of the Christian faith. Part of it has already
been indicated, for it was hardly possible to avoid it when considering
such a subject as that of the nature of evil or the divinity of Jesus.
Roughly stated it is as follows: Our fallen humanity is separated from
and under the displeasure of God. God longs to save us from our sin,
but justice demands that He must punish us. The world is already an
unhappy place because of sin, but what we endure here is nothing to
what we shall have to endure presently when we cross the river of
death; we shall all go to hell, a place of never-ending torment, unless
some means can be found of justifying us before God ere we pass over.
This means has been found in the self-devotion of the second person in
the Trinity. The sinless Son of God took upon Himself the likeness of
sinful humanity, was born into this world, lived here for a few years,
suffered a violent death, and then reascended to His Father to make
unceasing intercession for mankind. It was the dying of the death that
was the all-important thing. It was in consideration of this death
that God agreed to pardon sin. Jesus was put to death because God had
arranged that He should be put to death, and because Jesus was willing
to be put to death, in order that a satisfactory offering might be made
to divine justice for the sins of the world. God had to punish someone
before he could be free to forgive His erring children, and therefore
with the consent of Jesus He punished Him. The whole scheme was
prearranged in heaven, cross and all, and therefore Jesus was not taken
by surprise when the end came; He was, in fact, a party to it, and His
murderers were in a sense only the instruments of a beneficent,
foreordained plan. God accepts this sacrifice as a full and complete
equivalent for all that humanity deserves, but we must individually
appropriate it by faith or it will not avail for us; we shall go to
hell all the same. If on the other hand we do claim the benefit of
this finished work, the merits of the Redeemer are imputed to us; we
are held to be justified before God, and are gradually sanctified by
the Holy Spirit operating within our souls and fashioning us into the
moral likeness of our Lord.
+Conventional view both true and false.+--To say that these statements
are wholly untrue is impossible, for they everyone contain a truth of
considerable value, but as popularly stated they are misleading. This
view of the Atonement is unethical, and, in my judgment and that of
many others, has wrought a good deal of mischief in the past and
bewilderment in the present. Some readers of these pages will no doubt
find fault with me for stating it so baldly, and will maintain that no
front-rank theologian or preacher would enunciate it in these terms
to-day. Once again I can only repeat that they use language which
implies it, and it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that they
are driven to use the vaguer language because of their own feeling that
the balder statement, which their predecessors made without hesitation,
is intellectually and morally impossible, and yet they do not know what
to put in its place. They are reluctant to give up the belief that in
some way or other the death of Jesus on Calvary actually effected
something in the unseen by making God propitious toward us and removing
the barrier which prevented Him from freely forgiving human sin. Of
course they add other and valuable elements in their discussion of the
theme, but this is their central idea and they seldom get away from it.
The typical theologian never seems to think of looking at the death of
Jesus from the purely human point of view, and yet surely this is the
only legitimate thing to do when trying to get at the heart of the
subject. It is what we should do in any other case of a like kind; we
should never dream of doing anything else. We have no business to
begin speculating upon transcendental questions until we have examined
the purely human causes of such an event as the crucifixion of Jesus.
When an adherent of the so-called orthodox view of the doctrine of the
Atonement is pressed to say just what he supposes the death of Jesus to
have effected in the mind of God so as to free humanity from its curse,
he usually takes refuge in phrases about the "mystery of the cross,"
and so on. He does not say in plain language exactly what he means,
for the truth is he does not know; he only believes what he has been
told, and has persuaded himself that it is of the utmost value to
Christian experience, which it is not and never was. The doctrine as
popularly held is not only not true but it ought not to be true; it is
a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why in the world should God
require such a sacrifice before feeling Himself free to forgive His
erring children? And why should it be regarded as in any real sense a
substitute for what is due from us or any equivalent for what we should
otherwise have to bear? Once more, perhaps, the dogmatic theologian
will pull me up sharply and say that I am misrepresenting him, but I
think I am on fairly safe ground in declaring that this is what the
ordinary man in the pew as well as the man in the street understands by
the saving work of Jesus, and he does so because of the language of the
pulpit backed by the theological college preceptor. If this is the
Atonement, there is little wonder that thoughtful minds will have
nothing to say to it and that so many good people are puzzled to know
what to think about it.
+The human causes of the crucifixion of Jesus.+--If the death of Jesus
took place under similar circumstances to-day, we should be in no doubt
as to what to call it. It was a barbarous and wicked murder instigated
by base and unscrupulous men who wanted to get rid of a dangerous
teacher. We do not need to search far in order to find reasons for the
tragedy. There were reasons enough in the antagonism which had long
existed between Jesus and the ecclesiastical rulers of Judea. Jesus
held and taught a certain ideal concerning human life and its relation
to God. At the beginning of His brief public ministry He seems to have
thought that His invitation to men to realise their divine sonship
would meet with a ready response, and that therefore the kingdom of God
would without great difficulty be established upon earth through the
working of the spirit of love in human hearts. At first He gained an
extensive hearing because the Jewish people were willing and ready to
listen to any teacher who would hold out to them some hope of a better
and happier day. Consequently He was for a time extremely popular, and
even the Pharisees deliberated as to whether He might prove to be the
long-expected leader who should restore the kingdom to Israel. But
this attitude soon changed. People and rulers alike became
disappointed with Jesus. They were looking for a kingdom which should
come by force, and Jesus for one which should come by love. They
wanted material benefits forthwith, while to Jesus these were
altogether a secondary matter. Then, too, He became an inconvenience.
His standard of rectitude was exacting. He saw through the hypocrisies
and villanies of many of those who posed as the guides and directors of
the nation, and He was not silent about them. He spoke out without
fear or hesitation. What other people had been thinking and dared not
say He said without pausing to consider what the consequences might be.
No wonder the ecclesiastics came to feel that He must be silenced at
any cost. It can hardly be supposed that people in general were
offended by His plain language concerning those in high places, but
then they wanted Him to do something besides talk. They wanted to see
Him drive out the Roman without delay and inaugurate the era of power
and plenty. Jesus saw well enough what the end of all this must be.
He must either temporise a little, or go away and hide, or go straight
on doing His work until the night came and He could work no more. He
decided for the last-named course, leaving the results to God. It was
in the line of His duty to go up to Jerusalem for the feast of the
Passover, so to Jerusalem He went. He could hardly have been under any
delusion as to what awaited Him there. The crowds in the capital were
very excited about Him; His name was on every lip, and there were many
who would have declared for Him at once if He had only offered Himself
as the national champion against the foreigner. But by this time
priests, Pharisees, and scribes understood that, in their sense of the
word, a national champion He would never be. The crisis was reached at
the cleansing of the Temple. The moral greatness, the tremendous
impressiveness, of the personality of Jesus were never more clearly
demonstrated than on this occasion. There was no earthly reason why
dove-sellers, money-changers, priests, and Temple officials should be
driven pell-mell out of precincts they had come to look upon as their
own, except that they were overawed by the stern majesty of this
wonderful Galilean. For a brief hour Jesus was master of the
situation; the next day He was arrested. The thing had to be done
secretly and quickly, but those who planned it calculated rightly. No
sooner was Jesus made a prisoner than the populace turned against Him
and clamoured for His destruction. Those who know something of mob
psychology will readily understand this. Human passion easily swings
from adoration to hate, as history has shown over and over again. If a
strong man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great public
excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly into oblivion; the mob
turns upon him with the savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day
driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his
suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his
subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would
cheer just as madly if I were going to the guillotine." He was right.
It was just the same with this Jerusalem crowd. The populace thought
that the Jesus who had seemed so strong was not so strong after all,
and therefore their base fury vented itself upon Him just as priests
and Pharisees had foreseen.
These were the immediate causes of the death of Jesus. His execution
was a judicial murder done to gratify sacerdotal spite and popular
passion, and the men who took part in it were guilty of what has proved
to be the blackest deed in history. The same type of man exists
to-day, as he has existed in every age, and if Jesus came again without
saying who He was, history would repeat itself. I do not suppose His
enemies would nail Him on a wooden cross,--public opinion would forbid
that now, thanks to nineteen centuries of His gospel,--but they would
find some means of making Him suffer, and they would invoke His own
name to justify them in doing it.
+The reason why there was no supernatural interference.+--But is this
all that can be said about the matter? Where does God come in? Why
was a crime of this sort ever permitted? Why has the memory of it
actually become a religious dogma? Other people have been put to death
quite as unjustly, and the results, though great, are not to be
compared with those which have followed from the death of Jesus. Why
is this? As we have already seen, the popular view of the doctrine of
Atonement presumes that this foul deed was in some way, as the
scripture has it, by "the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of
God." Was it really so? Was the whole dreadful drama merely a
programme to be gone through in all its appointed stages, ending with
the cry of the victim, "It is finished"?
There is one sense, and only one, in which such a deed can be said to
have been by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and that
is that God did not interfere to save Jesus from the last dread ordeal.
He allowed wickedness to do its worst, and thereby made the
disinterested nobleness of the character of Jesus all the clearer. In
such a time as that in which Jesus lived such a life as His was sure to
end on a Calvary of some kind, unless He ran away from it, or God
supernaturally intervened to save Him. Neither event happened. If
Jesus had shrunk from the full consequences of His actions; if He had
temporised, concealed Himself, tried to gain time, or adopted any other
subterfuge or expedient in order to save His life--that life would not
have the moral power it possesses or shine with such glorious lustre in
the world to-day. Supernatural interference would have dimmed the
moral beauty of the faith, courage, and perfect self-devotion of Jesus.
The moral worth of any act of self-sacrifice, no matter on what scale
it is performed, is dependent upon the fact that it is done without
regard to consequences. If we could see with absolute clearness the
sure and certain result of any action, if we could know, as
unquestionably as that two and two make four, that it would always pay
to do the right thing, the very soul of goodness would have gone out of
it. It is just because we do not know, save with the deeper knowledge
that contradicts appearances,--the knowledge that is rightly termed
faith,--that an unselfish action is in accord with the general
rightness of the universe, and therefore must prevail in the end, that
there is anything praiseworthy in it. The determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God were that this should be fully demonstrated in the
experience of Jesus, as it has been in the experience of many a one of
His followers since. Once more therefore we come to the last word of
the cosmos, manifestation by sacrifice; and the experience of Jesus is
the sum and centre of it all. The reason why the name of Jesus has
such power in the world to-day is because a perfectly noble and
unselfish life was crowned by a perfectly sacrificial death. Both were
needed; either without the other would have been incomplete. Many a
British soldier has died as brave a death as Jesus, but none have ever
lived the life of Jesus. The life and death together were a perfect
self-offering, the offering of the unit to the whole, the individual to
the race, the Son to the Father, and therefore the greatest
manifestation of the innermost of God that has ever been made to the
world. It makes the sacrifice unreal to speak of it as though Jesus
knew the end from the beginning and foresaw every stage in the
programme before He came to it. He did not; He shrank from the
shameful end just as we should have done, and prayed to God to save Him
from it. An immense amount of pious nonsense has been spoken and
written about our Lord's agony in Gethsemane. We have been told that
in this dreadful hour the sorrow of Jesus bore no relation to his
physical death, but was caused by His mysterious self-identification
with all the sins of mankind, past, present, and to come. To add to
the horror God the Father turned His face away from Him, treating Him
as though He were indeed the embodiment of all the guilt of mankind,
the scapegoat driven into the wilderness. I have never been able to
read this kind of thing without an inner protest against the unreality
of it; it precludes the possibility of understanding Jesus or entering
sympathetically into an experience in which to a greater or less degree
every noble soul has sooner or later to share with Him. The only way
to explain Gethsemane is to approach it from the purely human point of
view, as we have already done with the causes which led up to the
crucifixion. Let us try to put ourselves in the sufferer's place, a
perfectly legitimate and right thing to do. How would any of us have
felt in the circumstances of Jesus? Suppose that you had laboured
consistently and whole-heartedly, in season and out of season, to get
men to realise their divine sonship and live the life that is life
indeed. Suppose you had seen your hopes perish one by one, and that
materialism, selfishness, and hypocrisy seemed to have become all the
stronger for your protest. Suppose you saw evil gathering head against
you, that you found yourself left utterly alone, and that even God
seemed to be silent in this hour of tragic failure. Here are your
enemies triumphant at the gate, thirsting for your blood. Beyond that
gate, betrayal, torture, and public shame are waiting for you. In the
background of all stands the cruel gibbet to which your own countrymen,
the people you have loved with an all-absorbing love, shall presently
commit you. Tell me what you would pray in like circumstances. Your
agony would be just as great as that of Jesus, though perhaps your
prayer would lack His magnificent faith and ungrudging self-surrender.
Jesus went to His death having nothing to rely upon except His inner
conviction that God and the cause of truth were one, and that somehow
or other in the end that would be made plain to Himself and all the
world. It would have been the same no matter what had been the
particular death that Jesus died. His murderers might have taken His
life in any one of a thousand ways and the ultimate result would have
been just as we see it now. They might have hanged, drowned, or burnt
Him, in which case the stake or the hangman's rope would have become
the symbol of the world's redemption, but, after the fashion of their
time, they crucified Him; it was the worst they could do, and they
wanted to do the worst. At Calvary perfect love joined issue with
perfect hate, perfect goodness with perfect wickedness, and became
victorious by enduring the worst and remaining pure and unchanged to
the last.
+The moral outcome.+--But it was not the last after all; the world had
still to reckon with God. That life and death have become a moral
force, a spiritual dynamic greater than any before or since, just
because of the completeness of the self-offering that culminated on
Calvary's cross. I must not anticipate what I have to say about the
resurrection further than to remark that more came out of the tomb of
Jesus than ever went into it. When all seemed lost this buried life
arose in power in other lives that up till then had never fully known
its divine greatness and spiritual beauty.
This is the truth about the death of Jesus, and nothing needs to be
added to show how great an event in the dealings of God with men it
must have been. It was both simple and sublime. Theological
word-spinning only serves to obscure its true significance. Show to
the world the real Jesus; tell men how it came about that He had to
die, and they cannot help but love Him.
CHAPTER IX
THE ATONEMENT
+II. Semitic Ideas of Atonement+
+Atonement in history.+--What, then, has this death to do with the
Atonement? A great deal; but the best way to answer the question will
be to obtain a clear idea as to what the Atonement really means and
always has meant to Christian experience, notwithstanding the tortuous
ways in which the doctrine has been articulated. I am convinced that
underneath every genuine attempt to explain the Atonement which has
ever held the field for any length of time in Christian history the
same truth is always to be found. It is so even with the statement of
it which is supposed to be orthodox to-day, but which is quite modern
after all, and is practically discredited by all thoughtful minds. The
mental dialect changes from one generation to another, but truth does
not. As a matter of fact, statements of truth are but conventional
symbols at the best, and possess only the ethical and emotional value
associated with them in our minds. This is why venerable propositions
which seem obscurantist to us originally possessed vital significance
to their framers; the ethical and emotional content were greater than
the form of statement, as they always must be. Every one of my readers
is no doubt aware of the power possessed by some particular landscape
or piece of music to awaken certain emotions in the heart or bring back
the memory of certain events to the mind. The same scene or song might
not do this for anyone else because the associations are different. It
is much the same with the forms in which religious truth is stated from
age to age. The form is no more the truth than the landscape is the
emotion or recollection it excites; it is only a symbol for the truth.
To grasp this clearly should not only make us more tolerant of archaic
confessions of faith, but should help us to realise that truth is one
even under apparently contradictory forms of statement. It is our duty
in religion as in everything else to endeavour to express the content
of spiritual experience in the forms which best accord with the mental
dialect of our own day. I repeat, therefore, that underneath every one
of the principal forms of statement in which the doctrine of Atonement
has been presented in the past the same truth is to be found. It is an
interesting historical and psychological study to try to find out what
it is.
+Atonement in the Old Testament.+--As I have already said above, it is
usual for writers on the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for
granted and presenting an examination of the principal passages in
which the Atonement is thought to be presumed or declared. But if what
I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of
scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to
use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word
"atonement" is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term,
but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use
other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be
found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas
as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are
right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine
which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here
again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation.
Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung
from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the
most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically
speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty
empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The
excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the
territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are
bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that
the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now
scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan,
for example, had developed a complex political and commercial
organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact
the highway along which passed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty
nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are
bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting for us
the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient
world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew
religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples,
and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to
older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than
with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The
word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament
scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial
system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of
worship in general.
+The Day of Atonement.+--There was one great day in the Jewish
religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was
gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins
of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the
occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As
described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of
Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been
called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should
be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was
the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into
Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is
quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of
their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious
ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas
underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same.
Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have
been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in
hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods
sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,--the
fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and
herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the
children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions,
such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in
war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was
made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were
the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.
+Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with
God.+--In the first place there was the idea of community of life
between the worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far this can be
pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a
conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as
the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities,
the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh
of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably
the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in
general took for granted this community of life between any particular
people and their deity. In the offering of the best of their
possessions to the god the worshippers thought they were rendering to
him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life,
they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was
a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and
implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen
that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even
repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of
worship, it is the same truth all ages through--the truth that God and
man are essentially one.
+2. The solidarity of the individual with the community.+--A further
idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the
individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out
of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged.
Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the
earlier stages of Israel's existence as a people the whole nation was
repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and
families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of
Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as
such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life
of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any
communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was
made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole
was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held
to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here
again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and
a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening
of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of
individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is
written in the very constitution of the universe. Mankind is
fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in
God; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all
modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas
which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of
Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these
observances was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically as
possible the essential oneness of the community with God, and of every
individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate
between Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on this great
occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a
new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was
supposed that a man's good or evil fortune was appointed on new year's
day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day
after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of
Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure
of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will
be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes
precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think
exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement
which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history
have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement
is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion
of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be
accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very
marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and
man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will,
the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.
+Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement.+--It ought to be
recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not
originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian
consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly
afraid of offending God, but they do not seem to have thought of such a
transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin
which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the
Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive
Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They
thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and
liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to
offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without
protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing
away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were
offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not
necessarily mean that the worshipper thought he had done anything to be
ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating
his god as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or
potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done
to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating God
is to be found in close association with the worthier spiritual
instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet
disappeared from our thinking. Unbiassed readers of the Old Testament
will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told
repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against
Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community
had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert
plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not
only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once
protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of Israel in
contradistinction to the gods of other nations, one God out of many.
It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites
came to think of their God as the God of the whole earth and a being
who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in
possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession
of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called
prophets. The best of these--for no doubt the generality of them spoke
only the language of their time--earnestly protested against material
ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. They declared
that God and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve
the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they
maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about
in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of
the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual
worship:
Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not
in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A
broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference
to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were prone from time to
time, following the example of their neighbours:
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most
High God? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of
a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with
ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
And the answer of the prophet is:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?
Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal
and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the
worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea
that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without
knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.
+Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.+--We ought to recognise too
that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a
complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or
murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour
because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being
of the community and the community had to take measures to protect
itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is
where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and
anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide
of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical
assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil
their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man
had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being,
he had to suffer.
+The significance of the blood.+--Many people seem to think that some
actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the
blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never
was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came
to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the
intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the
offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The
Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus
in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have
given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it
is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)."
When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he
was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the
individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out
to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way
could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was
meaningless and valueless.
+The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.+--This helps us to
see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of
ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and
noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to
Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It
must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She
did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best
and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action
acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have
deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never
can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of
giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life,
and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the
blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the
intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is
one that can never perish.
To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all
existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with
God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself
to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is
the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of
placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has
been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it
has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and
essential to all religion and morality, and is the coördinating
principle to all between them.
CHAPTER X
THE ATONEMENT
+III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience+
+Antiquity of the essential truth.+--From what has now been said it
will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of
Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated
through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with
which the world can never dispense; it is both simple and sublime.
Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it
or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest
agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the
all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a
thing as a doctrine of Atonement.
+No consistent theory in the New Testament.+--But now we come to the
consideration of this truth as it has passed over into Christianity. I
do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis of the
principal things that have been said about it, from the writings of St.
Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to
no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the
psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it
will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in
relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to
show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same
theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of
sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and
Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the
Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent
with himself. The principal thing they have in common is their belief
that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin.
The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly
from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that
symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about
sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have
the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all
that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus
there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes
religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection
between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a
moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.
+The Fathers.+--From the beginning of the second century onwards the
Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a
variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved
potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when
one period of Christian thought closes and another begins; but, broadly
speaking, we can for convenience classify them into the period of the
Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the
eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may
be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene
writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not
writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further
analysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to
325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that
date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally
speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of
their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had
fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings
paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power.
Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without
attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas
that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to God,
but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on
Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that
the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.
+Anselm and after.+--The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its
first important expression in the illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker
and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan,
declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this
notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to God an infinite
satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the
majesty of God had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man
was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the
offence. Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order that He
might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate.
This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the
very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for
by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous
opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main
contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.
+Reformation theories.+--At the time of the Reformation the question of
the Atonement formed the subject of considerable controversy, and, on
the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is
the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of
Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant
statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable
section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine
of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that
Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held
that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these
views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Passion
of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by God in the presence of humanity
in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.
+The modern lack of a theory.+--Modern evangelical thought has done
very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it
has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place.
The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to
represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin;
salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the
post-mortem consequences of misdoing.
+More about sin.+--In all these theories it is evident that the death
of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the
forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to
understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been
said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have
already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that
that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin
that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All
possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand
and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple
explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the
confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is
the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived
for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with
the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which
is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for
gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common
life, is the root principle of sin. Sin against God is simply an
offence against the common life; it is attempting to draw away from
instead of ministering to the common good. The sinful man thinks it
will pay him to be selfish; his impulse is to suppose that he can gain
more happiness, can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it
at the expense of other people. We all do it more or less, and yet the
world might have learned by this time that selfishness does _not_ pay;
the thoroughly selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn upon
the source of abiding joy. Like love, selfishness is a guest for life,
but whereas love obtains more abundant life by freely giving itself,
sin loses hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every man is
seeking life and seeking it in one or other of these opposite ways; he
is either fulfilling the self by serving the whole, or he is trying to
feed the self by robbing the whole. But life is God, and there is no
life which is not God. God is the life all-abundant, the life infinite
and eternal, the life that never grows old, the life that is joy.
Every man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; he is
wanting it all the time. Why does the man of business spend so many
hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money
represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller."
Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his
family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his
work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would
otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will
be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or
all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death;
if the latter, it will expand the soul, it makes for life. This is a
spiritual law which knows no exception; in the long run the loving deed
brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed brings pain and darkness.
"Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall
he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap
eternal life."
It is evident from the foregoing that even the sinful life is a quest
for God, although it does not know itself to be such, for in seeking
life saint and sinner alike are seeking God, the all-embracing life.
And the sinner _must_ learn that to seek life selfishly is to lose it;
to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man
and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.
During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the _British
Weekly_, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number
of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that
teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was
carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a
misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts
was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple
on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely
circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the
context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the
paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for God, and yet he
must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its
setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.
Observe the sharp antithesis between the "thief or the robber" on the
one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for
two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human
life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting
tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever
will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled
with the fulness of the life of God. These two tendencies we may
describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are
not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the
lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks
like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward
tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward
struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the
expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this
principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest
gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as
possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd
tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the
struggle for the life of others. I do not pause at the moment to
account for these two antithetic tendencies, there they are; all
through the history of this sad old world of ours these two tendencies
have been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably resolvable
in that higher unity which is too mysterious for us to penetrate, but
to our minds they are in flagrant opposition to each other. The thief
cometh to steal and to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love,
that it may give life, and that more abundantly.
In human history the antithesis is even more plainly marked. From one
point of view, history is little else than the story of the crimes and
follies of mankind. If it were entirely that, the study would be too
saddening to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet
it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism of any man who
investigates human evolution as told in song and story. The principle
that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who
can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day.
It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is
founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is
saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how
to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the
parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the
identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval
times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of
a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to
rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful
financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such
like. The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I prefer the
crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all this we see at work in
history another tendency which we can recognise as plainly as the
former, but which fills us with great hope for the future of
humanity,--it is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ."
That word stands all the world over for the things that make for more
abundant life. Just as in the text the word "thief" stands for
everything that makes for separateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word
"Christ" stands for everything that makes for union, mutual
helpfulness, brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency to
grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give,
and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the
deathward--deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the
lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet--curious inversion of
earlier experience--the deathward tendency results in death to itself
in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to
him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to
take it again." I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in
humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the
Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life.
We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken;
have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward
tendency is what we call sin? Sin is selfishness; it is the attempt to
misuse the energies of God; it is the expansion of individuality at the
expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive at a much more
thorough explanation of the nature of sin than that. Men blunderingly
attempt to classify virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to
attain them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the
attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which is outside
self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to do so.
When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to Monte Carlo to see
what it was like, and went into the famous gambling saloon, and stood
for a while looking at the faces of the players. I could not see
anything very different from what I see now; the people who were
engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been in church, they
were so quiet, so orderly, and so apparently passionless. Yet I
felt--it may have been a preacher's prejudice--that the moral
atmosphere of that place was one in which I did not want to remain;
there was something bad there, and I think I could discern what it was.
The gambler is essentially a man who is trying to get something for
nothing; he is drawing to himself that which he supposes will give him
more satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is not his
concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is
willing that it should be so--that is the sin. Sin is always a
mistake,--a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual
region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the
survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. That law is
reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If
a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to
grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came
fresh from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his; he is
destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life
which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no
expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it
may seem, sin itself is a quest for God--a blundering quest, but a
quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so
because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his
limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life.
His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief
hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden
regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch
was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies
to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their
trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this
dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. The
_roué_ you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt
innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his
blundering quest for God. He is looking for Him along the line of the
wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be
more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth
death"--death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is
deepest and truest in the soul. Yet--I repeat it--all men are seeking
life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing,
seeking life by the deathward road.
"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller than I want."
On the following Sunday I preached a sermon entitled the "Nature of
Sin," in which the same point was reëmphasised with even greater
distinctness, as the following extract will show:--
I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to
remark that sin was, after all, a quest for God--a mistaken quest, but
none the less a quest for God, for all that. I want to explain to you
to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, because the more
clearly we can see the truth the more clearly we can perceive sin to be
a soul's blunder. There are two tendencies discernible throughout
nature and in human history. These two tendencies are essentially
opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the whole world
is subdued to Christ, and God is all in all. I called them last Sunday
morning from the pulpit the deathward and the lifeward respectively.
The terms are not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency
usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward often looks like
the deathward. That is why sin is ever possible. A man thinks to get
something by it, and though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he
supposes it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other hand, the
utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it were a deed that would
bring destruction upon the doer. Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to
the heart of things when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose
it, and he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it."
If you substitute for the words "for My sake," "for truth's sake," or
"for life's sake," you will get just the same meaning,--"he that keeps
back his life shall lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall
find it."
Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. Now observe their
operation in nature and in human experience. You are all aware of, and
frequently have been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the
cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose leaf, there is
unceasing conflict to the death going on in every hedgerow. Nature is
indeed cruel. I have often watched, during this winter which is now
drawing to a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my
breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, we put out a few
crumbs for these feathered friends who share the same garden with
ourselves, and I have always noticed that there is a battle royal
fought round those crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the
instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep all,
each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation appears to be
that a form can only preserve itself, and only expand and express
itself, at the expense of other forms. It is a stern and terrible law,
as you well know. Forms, by a slow, upward progress in the unfolding
of the purpose to which nature exists, have become what they are at the
expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a tendency to grasp and
hold, a tendency to kill and to destroy, and this, to some minds,
appears to be the strongest tendency in nature or in man. I question
it,--in fact, I deny it,--and I want that you and I should arrive at
the same conclusion respecting it. For there is another tendency
observable working from the very earliest throughout the processes of
nature, too. It is that which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle
for the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother-love. I
saw it illustrated only yesterday. A mother sheep, standing in her
place amongst the flock, was surprised with the rest at the incursion
of a mongrel dog. The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid
mother stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. There was a
little lamb cowering behind her, and she, overcoming her natural
instinct of self-preservation, turned her face to the dog to draw his
attention, if possible, to herself and deflect it from her young one.
Now, that instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the
antithetic tendency to the other already described. It is the stronger
of the two. It indicates the goal toward which nature herself is
moving. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together
until now," but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. It is
the forth-going instinct, the all-ward, lifeward tendency.
Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right
through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The
farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The
natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive
communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities.
A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic
virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his
wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute
force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crushing other
personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If
he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the
children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified
his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relationship grew out of
it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man
speaking loudly about "_my_ country," or "_my_ family," or "_my_
society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is
projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family
or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to
be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by
concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many.
The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of
that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If
people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might
be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive
history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the
career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a
paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism
to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island
of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack
it and kill all the inhabitants--men, women, and children. It seemed
to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they
boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men
who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet
that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that
inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is.
It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep
at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.
But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own,
another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two
have been so intertwined frequently--as I have indicated in showing
where patriotism comes from--that it has been difficult to dissociate
them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent
devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland
has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that
time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss
independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty
against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a
hopeless undertaking--this group of mountaineers against the chivalry
of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss,
armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all
day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors,
armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way.
They fell before them, but could not pass through them, till Winkelried
called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will
make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped
in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth.
A dozen spears passed through his body, but through the gap his
devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made
possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an
object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the
cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the
world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life
for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It
represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment.
In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland
was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who,
for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had--his life.
Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal?
I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing
which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that
has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this--He was
absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His
utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of
others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of
God, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed,
but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.
Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential
distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and
working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are antithetic, and
must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and God is
all in all, and love reigneth world without end.
We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is
the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that
tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at
the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can
increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying what is
another's good. Apply that explanation or definition of sin to what
you know about life, and you will soon see when a man is facing the
deathward road, and how differently he acts when he is choosing the
lifeward road. There are men in this congregation who do not realise,
as they should, that lifewardness is God-wardness; but so it is. The
soul and the source of all things is God, and, consciously or
unconsciously, all men are seeking God in that they are seeking
self-expression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is trying to
become rich is a man who is seeking to express himself, seeking power,
seeking life, seeking to thrust through the barriers that surround the
soul. They are all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is
seeking by his daily activities more abundant life. The young man here
who feels a burning ambition within his heart, a desire to exploit the
world and make a name for himself, to occupy a high station, is not
conscious of anything essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he
does with the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more
abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking God. Life is God.
"Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from
the Father of lights." And when the tendency goes round and works
havoc and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for God, although
a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine energy. The man who got
drunk last night and gratified his lower nature in that delirious hour
would be surprised if you were to tell him when you see the result that
he was really seeking God, but so it is. He wants life, and thinks he
can get it this way. This is the reason why morbid excitement and the
craving for amusement have such power in human lives to-day. Your
_roué_ in Piccadilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life
while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to say it, but he was
seeking God and thinking--O woful blunder!--that he would find Him by
destroying something that God has made beautiful and fair. So with all
acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable--they are the
turning of the current of divine energy the wrong way, and seeking
self-gratification at the expense of something else that God has made.
It is a failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. When
an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a rule, and the
greater the power that was driving the engine, the worse is the wreck
when it leaves the line. The lightning directed rightly becomes the
luminant by which we look on each other's faces to-night. That same
power might have brought havoc and destruction if it had not been
harnessed in the service of man. And so with the power that God has
given you; all desire for self-expression, all seeking of which you are
conscious for larger and better and richer life, is God-given; but it
may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it is yours, not that
you may draw inward, but that you may give outward, yours not to keep
and hold, but yours wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to
keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The wages of sin is
death," the death of soul. He who is guilty of sin is guilty of soul
murder. "All they that hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain
and ruin over other lives in the gratification of his own lower
instincts is using something which is God-given--yea, which is
essentially God's own life--in the wrong way. The only hope for him is
to realise that no act of sin was ever yet worth while, that it does
punish itself, must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the
soul. No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no cowardly
cry for relief will ever bring God's forgiveness into your soul, until
you have realised that sin and selfishness are one, and that what you
have failed to give forth of love and service represents the measure of
your soul poverty.
Even at the risk of prolixity and repetition I have thought it right to
insert these lengthy extracts from sermons which have been animadverted
upon. My readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the
criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove to make it appear
that my teaching denied the reality of sin. Here are the actual words
seen in their proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a good
illustration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps the controversial
methods of the editor of the _British Weekly_ might furnish it. This
kind of criticism is on a par with that of the gentleman who once
startled an audience by declaring, "The Bible says there is no God."
He was right, of course, if it be legitimate to suppress the former
part of the passage, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God."
It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder
spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a
murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a
liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he
love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the
man who first used it must have known what he was talking about.
Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and
contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether
in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel,
unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and
the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be
rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of
all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of
righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found
to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion
to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride
can ever interpret God to a needy world. There is something grimly
amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending
gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had
better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were
reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took
their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with
all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission
leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen.
Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have:
"Don't be selfish! it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you
unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as
much as you can for other people and you will know what God is." The
attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less
impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor
commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,--and it is
nothing else,--the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the
social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of
their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is
unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go
into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess
himself to be a miserable sinner, but if we were to address him in the
same way out of church he would sue us for libel--if he thought we
meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with the sham of it all
and face the truth. What mankind is suffering from is selfishness.
Get rid of that and there would be little left to trouble about.
+Atonement and sin.+--It should now be plain why the doctrine of
Atonement has been so closely associated with the doing away of sin; it
is because, as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the
assertion of the fundamental oneness of man with man and all with God.
Sin is the divisive separating thing in our relations with one another,
and with God the source of all, so the assertion of our oneness
involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to be done, the
answer is simple enough: the only way to get rid of selfishness is by
the ministry of love. What is it that is slowly winning the world from
its selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the higher, purer
atmosphere of universal love? There is but one thing that is doing it,
and that is the spirit of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you
see the true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt about the final
issue, for behind the spirit of love is infinity, whereas the spirit of
selfishness is essentially finite. On the field of human history the
death of Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this age-long
atoning process, whereby selfishness is being overcome and the whole
race lifted up to its home in God. Until Jesus came no self-offering
had been so consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could find
lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the ideal life by living it
Himself, the life which was perfectly at one with God and man. In a
selfish world that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, but
the very fact that it did so demonstrated the completeness of its
victory over all considerations of self-interest. Selfishness lost the
battle by seeming to gain it. God was behind the life of Jesus just
because it was the life of perfect love, the life which was a perfect
gift to the whole, therefore that life immediately arose in power in
other lives and has gone increasing its benevolent sway over human
hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is rightly associated
with the cross of Jesus in the minds of men, for the cross is the sum
and centre of it all.
+The increasing Atonement.+--But the Atonement to be effective has to
be repeated on the altar of human hearts, and so it is, to a far
greater extent than most people stop to think. The same spirit that
was in Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit of the true
humanity, "The light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world." The spirit of Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ideal or
divine manhood as it exists eternally in God. But that ideal or divine
manhood, that Christ nature, is also potentially present in every human
being. What needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought forth
into conscious activity. The immediate effect of the life and death of
Jesus upon His followers was to make them more or less like Him, and to
fill them with a similar desire to get men to live the life of love
which is the life of God. They felt themselves inspired by the same
spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth and love, and exalted above all fear
for their own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. They
loved their Lord so much that their lives became one with His in the
work of saving the world. They could see no difference between serving
their Master and serving mankind. This love force of theirs, this
intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the
life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement.
The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming
human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the
spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to
saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To
escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power
in the hand of God for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to
Himself; this is the Atonement.
Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other force for good is
there in the world to-day than the spirit which governed the whole life
of Jesus and rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil could do
in His desire to get men to realise the true life? There is no other.
If you want to see the Atonement at work, go wherever love is
ministering to human necessity and you see the very same spirit which
was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. Dogma is doing nothing
to save the world; the gospel of self-sacrifice is doing everything.
Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement
of Christ. Show me a noble deed and I will show you something worthy
of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in
human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumulative assertion that in
the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself
until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a
possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering willingly
accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a
transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. Many a noble wife has
saved her husband by remaining at his side and patiently accepting the
disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. It is even possible in such a
case for the saviour to bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner
to be relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; he would have to
suffer more if there were no loving helper to stand by him. But to
speak of one as bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a thing
cannot be. All that love can do is to share to the uttermost in the
painful consequences of sin and by so doing break their power What
other Atonement is needed than this? It requires no defence, and a
child could understand it. Everyone already believes in it, whether he
stops to think about it or not. While I am writing these words a
fierce storm is raging outside. This is the second day we have had of
it, and there seems likely to be some loss of life on the dangerous
rocks outside the bar which forms the entrance to the bay below. A
visitor has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this same bay
some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On
that previous occasion three ships were wrecked together within a few
yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring
scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be
dragged ashore with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing
hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from
St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the
work of rescue. According to my informant the scene was enough to stir
any heart, and even grown men were crying with excitement and
compassion as some of the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed
vessels were washed away before they could be got ashore. The few who
were actually snatched from the jaws of death found no lack of willing
helpers as one by one they were passed insensible into the kind keeping
of the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No
one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been
cheerfully placed at the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they
had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were
risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their
husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to
save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until
that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure!
Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed
into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a
flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless
burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the
violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology
of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former
who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church,
but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians
who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there
to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with
divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound,
earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in
the eternal damnation of the unregenerate. But what became of their
doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for
self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There
is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers
tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in
a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies from temporal water.
There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is
usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the
latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and
eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here
was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life
and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life
from the clutch of death.
+All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.+--This is the deepest
and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they
would only trust their better nature to tell them what God wants from
his children. Here is an explosion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every
mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to
snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago
one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers
will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took
place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to
the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his
imprisonment below without food or light. "No," was the reply, "for I
knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn
him back until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffragan
bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and
nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at
the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved
ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of
cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a
few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his
deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman,
with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: "He doesn't seem
like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves." That servant of God
has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life--by
getting together of man and man, and man and God, through the spirit of
self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the
succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who,
under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, "Who is weak
and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?"
Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to
do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the
Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to
her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up
the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and
you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons
and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the
Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering
son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently
pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own
hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family
name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so
much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from
it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the
declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and
activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for
ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole.
If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are
already part of the Atonement.
+Jesus and the Atonement.+--It is easy to see how much the world owes
to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been
if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial
life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human
affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here
for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is
life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered
into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own,
the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become
sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to
come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to shield and save
itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation
of God that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of
the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all
the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall
be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" cried Julian the
apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add--
"Jesus is worthy to receive
Honour and power divine;
And blessings more than we can give
Be, Lord, forever thine."
Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own
Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life,
within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His
Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him,
become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is
the same both in God and man; in the presence of need, no matter what
the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint
until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between
the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away.
But then, someone will say, what has the death of Jesus effected in the
unseen so as to make it possible for God to forgive us? Nothing
whatever, and nothing was ever needed. God is not a fiend but a
Father, the source and sustenance of our being and the goal of all our
aspirations. Why should we require to be saved from Him?
+Divine satisfaction in Atonement.+--But in what sense is the death of
Jesus a satisfaction to the Father? In no sense at all, except that
the sacrifice of Jesus is the highest expression of the innermost of
God that has ever been made. If it affords an artist satisfaction to
express himself in a beautiful picture, or a great thinker to express
his noble thought in a book, surely the highest satisfaction that God
can know must be his self-expression in the self-sacrifice of his
children. At its best, the intensest joy that can be known is the joy
of giving one's self for the good of the whole. In everything grand
and good in human thought and achievement God is doing just this. It
is the satisfaction he receives from the Atonement and the only one.
CHAPTER XI
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE
+Atonement and New Testament language.+--It will have been observed
that in my examination of the subject of the Atonement I have said
almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine.
This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed
by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my
whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced
that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the
language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of
most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the
religious mind. To an extent this is the same with the Old Testament,
but to a far less degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only
liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the New. In a previous
chapter I have endeavoured to show the imperishable truths which
underlie Old Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, and I
trust I have shown that these truths are as fresh and indispensable
to-day, and play as great a part in human affairs as they ever did.
But before I proceed to say anything about the New Testament symbolism,
which has been largely derived from the Old, let us consider the
question of the authority of scripture as a whole.
+Tendency to bow to external authority.+--There is always a tendency in
the ordinary mind to rely upon some form of external authority in
religious as in other matters. With one man it is the authority of an
infallible church; with another the authority of an infallible book;
with another the authority of some infallible statement of belief which
ought to hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, external
authority is only a crutch, and at the worst it may become a rigid
fetter upon the expanding soul. The true seat of authority is within,
not without, the human soul. We are so constituted as to be able to
recognise, little by little, the truth of God as it comes to us. It
may come from any one of a thousand different quarters, but to be
recognised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo within the
individual soul. If it does not awaken such a response, it is of no
effect so far as the growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in
this book will not be received as true by the readers merely because I
say it, but because they feel it to be true and cannot get away from
it. Why should we be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise
and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, and all earnest
truth-seekers are converging upon one goal. It is the divine self
within everyone of us which enables us to discern the truth best fitted
to our needs, and this divine self is, as has already been pointed out,
fundamentally one with the source of all truth, which is God.
If men could only come to see this more clearly and to trust their own
divine nature to enable them to follow and express the truth as well as
to receive it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered by
formal and literal statements of belief whether in the church, the
Bible, or anywhere else. But this is what they seldom do. Your devout
Anglican or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church teaches this
or the church teaches that: as though that fact ever permanently
settled anything. One cannot really begin to appreciate the value of
united continuous church testimony until one is able to stand apart
from it, so to speak, and ask whether it rings true to the reason and
the moral sense. Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted
rape and murder, would the devout Catholic believe and obey? "But it
is inconceivable that the church could ever do that," he might answer.
Yes, but suppose it did, would he obey? If not, why not? He would not
obey because he would know quite well that the higher law within his
heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is
all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round?
The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within
the soul.
+The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.+--Now
one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and
intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of
the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or
common-sense statement of truth,--for instance, that of universal
salvation,--he often replies in some such way as the following: "Yes, I
know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but
then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into
everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I
cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing together, passage
after passage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original
meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion;
as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, "The soul that
sinneth, it shall die." Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that
saying,--and it is well worth examination,--he was not thinking of a
modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man
of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way
until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of
scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart
another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent passage in
Psalm cxxxvii, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones." That passage does not breathe the spirit of
Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus
wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do
justice to a passage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and
moral sympathy with the man who wrote it. It was written by one of the
poor Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon by
Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before Jesus was born. Try and
picture the scene. Across eight hundred miles of desert that
melancholy procession winds its way, leaving the highland home behind
and going into slavery in the cruel city of the plain. One by one the
weakest fall and die; and where a baby is left without a mother, or the
mother cannot walk with the weight of the helpless child, the cruel
Babylonian ruffians riding at the side will snatch it from the
anguished bosom and dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we
be likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of such a
procession of prisoners of war? Hence when Psalm cxxxvii came to be
written by some poor suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and
child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most plaintive
patriotic songs ever sung:--
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down--yea, we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one
of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy
shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he
be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones!
One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet and his suffering
people without adopting the absurd view that this passage represents
God's word to our souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a
desire for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher declares
that he takes his stand and bases his gospel on the infallible Book, he
is either a fool or--a rhetorician.
+Belief in the infallible Book impossible.+--There are many good people
who maintain that they believe the Bible from cover to cover, and they
seem to think that this is something to be proud of. But they credit
themselves with an impossible feat; no one can believe contradictions,
in the sense of accepting them, whether intellectual or moral. The
very same people who will read with unction the most sanguinary
exhortations from scripture are usually people who themselves would not
hurt a fly. The Bible is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact
and literal statement of facts; it represents for the most part what
earnest men belonging to a particular nationality in a bygone age
thought about life in relation to God. Many good people talk as though
the Bible were written by the finger of God Himself and let down from
heaven; on the other hand there are those who think that when they have
shown the inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed its value.
But they are both mistaken. The Bible is not one book, but a
collection of books, a slow growth extending over centuries. It has
come to be reverenced not because of any supernormal attestations of
its authority, but because we have found it helps us more than any
other book. The fact that the best part of it was written by good and
serious men, men who were living for the highest they were able to see,
does not necessarily give binding authority to the opinions of these
men. I question whether we should ever have heard of the Old Testament
if it had not been for Jesus, and the New is only a statement of what
some good men thought about Jesus and his gospel at the beginning of
Christian history. Jesus knew and loved the Old Testament scriptures,
but whenever He found a statement therein that jarred upon His moral
sense, He rejected it in the name of the higher truth declared by the
Spirit of Truth within His own soul: "Ye have heard that it was said by
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall
be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is
angry with his brother without a cause"--and even "without a cause"
seems to have been interpolated in later days--"shall be in danger of
the judgment." "Again ye have heard that it hath been said by them of
old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the
Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by the
heavens, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is His
footstool. Let your communication be Yea, yea, nay, nay; for
whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." "Ye hath heard that it
hath been said, Thou shalt love thine neighbour and hate thine enemy:
but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you
and persecute you." Jesus knew what He was doing. In all these
instances He was quoting from the Old Testament, and deliberately
superseding in the name of truth certain prescriptions of the very law
which He said He had come to fulfil. Everyone was taken by surprise at
His daring to do this. Matthew vii. 28, 29, says, "And it came to
pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were
astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having (in
Himself) authority, and not as the scribes." No doubt some people
would say to-day that this authority came from His Godhead. But the
people on the hillsides of Galilee knew nothing about the Godhead of
Jesus. To them He was a heaven-sent teacher, a great and inspiring
master, whose words carried weight. His authority, therefore, must
have been self-evident in contradistinction to that of the scribes, who
always began their discourses by saying, "It is written." They never
seem to have thought of appealing to anything else than the authority
of the letter. But we see that Jesus, notwithstanding His reverence
for the scripture, handled it with perfect freedom. His authority was
that of the Spirit of God speaking within His own soul, the only
authority that has ever mattered in the history of religious thought.
He did not deny the authority of Scripture, but He claimed to be able
to see when it rang true to His own inner experience and when it did
not.
+The true seat of authority.+--If we could grasp this principle clearly
and strongly, it would give us a new and higher sense of freedom and of
confidence in the word of God as declared in the Bible and revealed in
human hearts. God has never stopped speaking to men. He speaks
through us collectively and individually. "The word is very nigh unto
thee, in thy mouth and in thine heart, that thou mayest do it." If we
are only in earnest to listen for the divine voice and to trust it when
we hear it, we shall not listen in vain. To realise that God is
speaking to us just as He spoke to earnest souls in the days of old
will send us to the sacred scriptures with an even greater appreciation
and reverence for the men of whose experience they are the expression.
But they will no longer bind us; they can only help and encourage us.
We shall feel that these men of faith of an earlier day and a different
race were our brothers after all, men who lived a life much like our
own, and who were trying to understand God as we are trying to
understand Him. The Bible is not infallible for the simple reason that
the human nature, even of wise and great men, is not infallible. It
helps us because these men were struggling with the same problems as
ourselves, and therefore what they have to say about them is valuable.
But the best of them had their limitations and shortcomings. They did
not know all the truth that was to be known, but they kept their faces
to the light. If we allow ourselves to be fettered by their actual
words, we shall be in danger of losing sympathy with them in the spirit
which animated those words. We are writing a Bible with our own lives
to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes,
but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble
life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a
ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought to become living epistles
known and read of all men while we strive to express the best that God
has given us to see; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, the Spirit
who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, Isaiahs, and Pauls of
history is with us to-day as He was with them.
+The unity of truth.+--But, someone will remonstrate, What then are we
to believe? For by speaking in this way you erect as many standards of
truth as there are individuals. What the ordinary man wants is to be
told just what to believe, so that he can settle down and be at rest.
It is small comfort to tell him that every scripture statement may be
more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his own perception, or
perhaps to his own fancies, as to what is true. I know all that kind
of argument. It is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It
was used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest people of His
time. It was used again at the Reformation. It is still used by
sacerdotal controversialists, and looks very plausible on the face of
it. A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in
Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be
authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead
to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell
you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you
must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church,
the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But
notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infallible Confession of
Faith is almost universally discredited, and common honesty is
compelling Protestants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book.
The supposed infallible church has by no means been invariably
self-consistent. Besides, the important point is this; no man really
believes or can believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of
himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily believing them, no
matter how tenaciously they may be adhered to. But all truth is really
one and the same. I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's point
of view about some aspects of it, but if we are both in earnest and
faithful to what we have seen, we shall arrive in the end at the same
goal. Religious thinkers and teachers are never really so far apart as
seems to be the case. It is in the expression of the truth that they
differ, not in the truth itself. Language is never more than
approximately convenient expression of the reality it is meant to
declare. The man of the future will realise this better than the man
of the present or the past. He will replace all external authority by
the principle of spiritual autonomy. He will no longer be afraid of
trusting the human spirit to recognise and respond to truth from
whatsoever source it may come, for he will know that that spirit is one
with the universal Spirit of all Truth, and needs not to look beyond
itself for anything stronger or more divine. He will know that the
Spirit of Truth in himself is the Spirit of Truth in all men, and that
therefore in the end all men must know, and be, and do the Truth.
+The New Testament and the Atonement.+--Now let us apply this principle
to the New Testament writings about the redeeming work of Jesus. The
same principle, of course, would apply to anything that the New
Testament has to say about the gospel of Jesus, but perhaps the failure
to recognise it has done more mischief in connection with the doctrine
of Atonement than in anything else. At present Paul's opinion on this
great subject is by many people supposed to be decisive: Paul says
this, and Paul says that, and when Paul has spoken, there is no more to
be said. But why should it be so? Paul's opinion is simply Paul's
opinion, and not necessarily a complete and adequate statement of
truth. It is entitled to be considered weighty because it is the
utterance of a great man, and a great seer of truth, as well as being
the earliest writing on the subject which we possess. Any man of the
moral and intellectual eminence of Paul is entitled to reverence when
he speaks, whether his views are in the Bible or not. It is one of the
ironies of history that the words of this Paul who strove so hard
against literalism and legalism in his day have since come to be
regarded as a sort of fixed and final authority for Christian thought.
He would be the first to denounce it. To him the Spirit of Christ
operating within the individual soul was the true guide in matters of
faith. He even made a point of the fact that in thinking out the truth
about Jesus and His gospel he had "conferred not with flesh and blood."
+Inconsistency of New Testament writers with one another.+--Again, it
is somehow taken for granted that Paul and all the other New Testament
writers agree together in their theology of the Atonement. That is
quite a mistake, and the curious thing is that people should have been
so slow in finding it out. It may be instructive to some to give a
brief survey of the main points in Paul's theory of the Atonement, and
compare them with some of the others.
+The fundamental principle of its Atonement always the same.+--It would
simplify our acquaintance with Paul's modes of reasoning if we could
recognise that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, and
which he associates so closely with the life and death of Jesus, is in
principle precisely the same as that which the writers of the Old
Testament had in mind. What that was we have already seen. It was the
assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man, and the means to
it was the principle of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set
himself to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole process centred
in Jesus, just as it does for Christian experience. But to his
presentation of the subject Paul almost of necessity had to bring the
whole apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was which supplied
him with the most of his figures, symbols, and illustrations; but his
gospel was no more dependent upon these than--as I trust I have shown
in a previous chapter--the ancient spiritual truth of Atonement
depended upon Semitic ritual sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were
supplied by the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, just as the
forms in which we ordinarily express our thoughts to-day belong to the
mental atmosphere of our time. Most of the allusions in a _Times_
leading article, for example, would be lost upon an English reader five
hundred years hence unless they were carefully explained. To me one of
the most remarkable things about Jesus is the fact that He was able to
escape so completely the mental environment of the time in which, and
the people among whom, He lived His earthly life. How He managed to
deliver His peerless teaching while making so little allusion to
current Jewish modes of thought and worship is a mystery, and marks His
greatness as perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different with
Paul; he spoke the language of his time, and never tried to do anything
else. When, therefore, we want to get at what he meant about the death
of Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism by which he
illustrates it, and even when we have done this we have to make
allowance for some limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the
punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks through these and
rises into a rarer, purer region without troubling about consistency.
Paul never dreamed that he was writing theological treatises which
would be numbered off into chapters and verses and lectured upon in
class rooms, or perhaps he would have been more careful about being
exact. How many of us could afford to have our letters, written at
different times and to different readers, analysed and dissected and
taken as a full and permanent statement of our thought upon any
particular subject or group of subjects?
+Paul's view of the death of the Saviour and the forgiveness of
sins.+--The first important thing to be noted in Paul's thought about
sin and salvation is his view that there was a vital connection between
the death of the Messiah and God's forgiveness of sins. But we should
be mightily mistaken if we were to understand this view to be the same
as that of a modern evangelical who talks about the "fountain filled
with blood," for it was quite different. The modern evangelical, of
so-called orthodox opinions, believes that Jesus died to save all men
from hell; but this was not what Paul was thinking about at all.
According to Paul, the wages of sin were actually and literally death.
But for sin there would have been no death, and to break the power of
sin would also be to break the power of death. But in this Paul was
wrong, in company with a good many of his contemporaries, and there is
no reason why we should not frankly say so, for, as we shall presently
see, the great apostle did not confine himself to the literal statement
of this view, but gave it also a mystical form in which it becomes
indisputably true. In his thought the Messiah of Jewish national
expectation was the head and representative of the nation in its
relation to God. For ages men had been dying because of sin--"in Adam
all die"--and so when the Sinless One came into human conditions and in
the likeness of sinful flesh, He also had to pass through death. But
there was a difference between His death and all other deaths in that,
being sinless, death could not hold Him, and so He rose again from the
tomb triumphant over it. His triumph then becomes potentially the
triumph of humanity--"in Christ shall all be made alive"--if only we
unite ourselves to Him by faith. God will remit the death penalty to
all who are "in Christ" and "justified by faith"; that is, we shall all
rise from the dead as He rose. Apparently Paul's belief was that no
one would ever have died but for the sin of Adam, a taint which has
affected all Adam's descendants. Death in his view was synonymous with
annihilation.
The next thing to be noticed is the juridical nature of Paul's
conception of the relationship of man and God. God is a lawgiver and
man a transgressor, a rebel against his sovereignty. In accordance
with God's law of righteousness sin is punishable by the death of the
whole race. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." But when the eternal Son of
God, the head and representative of the race, submits to this penalty
and in so doing acknowledges the righteousness of God, justice is
satisfied. "If one died for all, therefore all died." Those who claim
by faith the benefits of Messiah's submission to death on behalf of the
race are at peace with God. Henceforth they are not to live to
themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.
Anyone who reads Paul's words without dogmatic prejudice will see that
this is not the present-day doctrine of Atonement. It takes for
granted certain ideas which were current among the Jews of Paul's day,
but which have since sunk into the background of Christian thought or
been abandoned altogether. Paul's use of them in the framing of his
theology is ingenious but not convincing, and was not essential to his
gospel; in fact the juridical and the ethical elements in Paul's
teaching stand in irreconcilable contrast. His theology is saved by
his mysticism, for no sooner has he enunciated these unbelievable
propositions about the death penalty of sin, the judicial sovereignty
of God, justification by faith, the imputed merits of the Redeemer, and
such like, than he proceeds to use them as symbols to illustrate a
subjective change in the sinner and a mystical union between the soul
and Christ. He does this so beautifully that the reader can hardly
discern where Paul quits the region of literalism and takes us into
that of mysticism. Hence he talks about dying with Christ, being
crucified with Christ, dying to sin, and so on, evidently meaning that
the whole redeeming process has to take place within the soul of the
sinner who seeks God. Even the conception of the resurrection ceases
to be literal and becomes the uprising of the divine man within the
human soul by faith in the risen Lord. "If any man be in Christ there
is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold all things are
become new." "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are
in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit."
We see from these expressions that in practice Paul transfers the whole
drama of redemption from without to within the individual soul. What a
pity it is that his interpreters in Christian history have so seldom
thought of doing the same!
+The Hebrews theory.+--The epistle to the Hebrews belongs to quite a
different category from the writings of St. Paul. The dominant thought
in this epistle is that of salvation by sacrifice, a perfectly true and
spiritual idea, as we have already seen. The writer, like Paul,
employs Old Testament symbolism, but in quite a different way.
Probably this is due to the fact that he was an Alexandrian Jew whose
thinking was shaped under the influence of Philo, whereas that of Paul
was governed by the rabbinical schools of Palestinian Judaism. At this
time Alexandria was the greatest intellectual centre in the world, a
meeting place for Greek thought and Hebrew religion as represented by
Philo. The influence of Alexandria is plainly to be seen in the
epistle to the Hebrews, which, possibly, was written by the learned and
courtly Apollos. Like Paul, the writer thinks of salvation as getting
right with God and living a holy life, but he omits all reference to a
judicial penalty, or the necessity for escaping annihilation by faith
in the substitutionary work of a sinless Redeemer. In his view Christ
is from first to last the priestly representative of the race, making a
sacrifice to God after the Old Testament fashion, but in a more perfect
way. He regards the Old Testament sacrificial offerings as being but
the types and shadows of the one perfect and eternal offering which
humanity through Christ is making to God. Most of my readers will at
once admit that this is not fanciful, although the language in which it
is expressed is so different from our own; it is quite faithful to the
spiritual meaning of Old Testament sacrifice. When, therefore, this
writer refers to the offering of the blood of Christ, he is thinking
not only of Calvary, but of all that Calvary symbolises, the perfect
spiritual offering of mankind to God, the sacramental realisation of
our oneness with Him. This view is not worked out with the moral
intensity which characterises St. Paul's, but it is unassailably true
once we get the writer's point of view. As a theory it is quite
different from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's literalism,
get rid of all thought of an angry God and a physical death penalty for
sin, and betake ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where
self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, not only the
individual, but the whole race, by uniting it to the source of all
being.
+The Johannine theory.+--There is a certain similarity between the view
of Atonement set forth in the epistle to the Hebrews and that contained
in the Johannine writings. It is easy to understand why this is so
when we recognise that both are dominated by Alexandrian modes of
thinking. These Johannine writings--the fourth gospel, the three
epistles ascribed to St. John, and the book of Revelation--are all that
have come down to us of what was at one time, no doubt, a considerable
literature. How much the apostle John had to do with it cannot be
determined with any certainty, but it is clear enough that these
writings are not all from one hand, and that they are much later than
the work of St. Paul. The all-important conception in the Johannine
writings is that salvation is secured by the union of the individual
soul with the eternal Christ, or Logos, or Divine Man of pre-Christian
thought and experience. Here again we have a perfectly true and
necessary idea, an idea implied in all spiritual experience worthy of
the name; but as the root factor in a presentation of the doctrine of
Atonement, it differs widely from Paul's way of putting things. When
the Johannine writers speak of the blood of Christ, they mean the
outpoured, forthgiven life of the eternal Son of God, the ideal
humanity, perfectly and centrally expressed in Jesus of Nazareth.
There is not from beginning to end a hint or a suggestion in these
writings that a sinless being was tortured in order to appease the
wrath of God against guilty ones, or that the penalty of sin in a world
to come will be remitted to a penitent sinner in consideration of his
faith in such an arrangement.
+Underlying unity.+--This is by no means an exhaustive examination of
New Testament teaching on the subject of Atonement, but it should be
sufficient to show two things: first, that the theories of the New
Testament writers concerning the redeeming works of Christ are not,
taken literally, mutually consistent; secondly, the truth implied in
all the theories is precisely that truth of Atonement which we have
already seen to be implied in all religion. The great thing which
impressed the primitive Christian consciousness in regard to the life
and death of Jesus was that this life and death were the most complete
and consistent self-offering of the individual to the whole that had
ever been made. In this self-offering was the one perfect
manifestation of the eternal Christ, the humanity which reveals the
innermost of God, the humanity which is love. To partake of the
benefits of that Atonement we have to unite ourselves to it; that is,
to employ the mystical language of St. Paul, we have to die to self
with Christ and rise with Him into the experience of larger, fuller
life, the life eternal.
It is just the same truth under every one of these different theories,
but if we persist in regarding them literally we shall miss it, for by
no kind of ingenuity can we square the theory of St. Paul with that of
the other writers; the way of putting it is different. But once we see
what the essential truth of Atonement is, we are no longer bound by the
intellectual symbolism of Paul or Hebrews or any other authority; we
can get beneath the symbol to the thing symbolised. The Pauline
principle of dying with Christ, the Hebrews idea of the eternal
sacrifice manifested in time, the Johannine thought about the outpoured
life of the eternal Christ, are all one and the same. Jesus did
nothing for us which we are not also called upon to do for ourselves
and one another in our degree. Faith in His atoning work means death
to self that we may live to God; as selfhood perishes on its Calvary,
the Christ, the true man, the divine reality, in whom we are one with
all men, rises in power in our hearts and unites us to the source of
all goodness and joy. Institutional, forensic, external, the Atonement
never has been and never will be. But vicarious suffering, willingly
accepted, is the great redeeming force by which the world is gradually
being won to its true life in God, for vicarious suffering is the
expression of the law that in a finite world the service of the whole
involves pain, although it is also the deepest joy that the human heart
can know. The sacrifice of Jesus is the central and ideal expression
of this principle on the field of time, but it only possesses meaning
and value as it is repeated in our lives; the Christ has to be offered
perpetually on the altar of human hearts. There is no justification
except by becoming just, and no imputed righteousness which means
availing ourselves of merits that are not ours. We are "justified by
faith," indeed, but only in the sense that no man can become good
without believing in goodness, and no man can really believe in the
Christ revealed in Jesus without gradually becoming like Him. Here is
Atonement, Justification, Sanctification, and all else that is needed
to unite mankind to the life eternal which is to know God and Jesus
Christ whom He has sent.
+No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of Jesus.+--It can hardly be
necessary to point out that there is therefore no direct reference in
the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the beautiful
passages with which we are so familiar, and which have become the
language of devotion in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas
Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with Jesus in an ideal
sense. The noble fifty-third of Isaiah, for example, and all similar
passages about the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of
God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever to do with Jesus.
But the striking thing about such passages is that the men who wrote
them were able to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual
Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. The pathetic and
inspiring description, "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from
him, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our
griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of
our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps
the grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ man, that
exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment of it was Jesus, as
primitive Christianity quickly saw; but had the original writer no
specific example in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? To be
sure he had; the case of Jeremiah would furnish it if no other. This
brave and faithful advocate of the moral ideal, after standing alone in
his resistance to the materialising tendencies of his time, was scorned
and hated by his fellow-countrymen, flung into prison, beaten,
tortured, and probably murdered in the end. He shared the captivity of
the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, a captivity against which he had warned
them in vain. "Despised and rejected of men," he died, but in later
days his name came to be reverenced as perhaps none had ever been
before. For centuries afterwards he was referred to by the returned
exiles as _the_ prophet, in contradistinction to all other prophets.
He had lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. It was not
wonderful that the author of the fifty-third of Isaiah should have such
a noble example in mind when he penned his deathless words, but these
words were meant to have an impersonal meaning too. They stand as a
description of the ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour
of the race in any and every generation. This kind of manhood, just
because it is the true manhood, the eternal or divine manhood, must
inevitably suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings are never in
vain; they are the Calvary from which the eternal Christ rises in
redeeming might over the power of sin and death. Let any man ask
himself what it is that is saving the world to-day, and gradually but
surely lifting it out of the mire of ignorance and wickedness, and he
cannot find a better answer than the fifty-third of Isaiah. It tells
of Jesus, but it tells also of all the sons of God who in the spirit of
Jesus have ever given their lives in the service of love.
When we go to the Bible in this common-sense way, entering with
understanding and sympathy into the thoughts and aspirations of the men
who wrote it, it becomes a living book, and a real help in our
endeavour to live our lives in union with Jesus Christ. But to regard
it as a sort of official document written by the finger of God, of
equal authority in every part, and containing a full and complete
statement of the propositions we must accept in order to make sure of
salvation, is hampering and belittling to the soul. God inspires men,
not books; and He will go on inspiring men to the end of time, whether
they write books or not. I do not know anything which is such a
serious hindrance and stumbling-block to spiritual religion to-day as
this supposed authority of the letter of scripture. If only the
average Protestant could emancipate himself from this intellectual
bondage, the gain to truth would be immeasurable. I do not suppose
there is a single man who reads these words who would make light of the
religious opinions of a pious mother, but would he allow them to fetter
him in the exercise of his own mature judgment? But surely your own
mother stands as near to you as men who wrote centuries before she was
born. If God spoke to the hearts of men centuries ago, He can and does
speak to them now. If He spoke to Isaiah, He can and does speak to
you. If your mother's way of stating truth is not necessarily yours,
no more is Paul's. The deeper unity of the spirit forbids this blind
obedience to the letter. Therefore, knowing quite well what use
hostile reviewers will make of this sentence, I close by solemnly
adding: Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth,
but trust the voice of God within you. The Bible will help you in your
quest, just as any good man might be able to help you; but you must
judge, test, and weigh the various statements it contains, just as you
would judge, test, and weigh the opinions of the best friend you ever
had. Nothing can make up for this quiet and assured confidence in the
Spirit of Truth within your own soul. If God is not there, you will
not find Him in the Bible or anywhere else.
CHAPTER XII
SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME
+The inwardness of Salvation and Judgment.+--We come now to the
consideration of a group of subjects which are usually treated in quite
separate categories. I mean the punishment of sin, the nature and
scope of Salvation, Resurrection and Ascension, Death, Judgment, Heaven
and Hell. The reason why I feel that these subjects ought not to be
treated in separate categories is because they are all descriptions of
states of the soul and imply each other; they are inward, not outward,
experiences. This statement will, I trust, become clearer as we
proceed.
So far we have examined pretty thoroughly the nature of sin and its
effects in the world, but have said very little as to its penal
consequences, and yet the consideration of these consequences has been
the determining factor in most of the theories of Atonement, ancient or
modern, which have occupied the field of human thought. It is true, as
I have said, that the idea of Atonement is not necessarily associated
with that of sin, and actually precedes it both historically and
psychologically, but it cannot be gainsaid that in Christian thought
the desirability of finding some means of escaping or minimising the
punishment of sin has tended to overshadow everything else in popular
presentations of the Atonement. But what is the punishment of sin, and
who administers it? What is the Judgment and when does it take effect?
How does Salvation stand related to punishment and judgment? What has
Death to do with the matter? What are we to understand by Heaven and
Hell, and what is the bearing of either upon Salvation and Judgment?
Everyone knows how popular evangelical theology would answer these
questions. Sin, we are told, will be punished in a future life by the
committal of the impenitent soul to everlasting torment. Salvation is
primarily a means of escaping this, and secondarily being conformed
gradually to the moral likeness of the Saviour. Judgment is a grand
assize, which will take place when the material world comes to an end;
Jesus Christ will be the Judge, and will apportion everlasting weal or
woe, according as the soul has or has not claimed the benefit of His
redeeming work in time to profit by it. Death is the dividing line
beyond which the destiny is fixed eternally whether we die old or
young. Heaven is the place into which the redeemed enter--whether
after death or after judgment has never been clearly settled--there to
praise God eternally in perfect happiness; Hell is the place of never
ending torment to which unbelievers are to be consigned.
Now it does not require a very profound intelligence to see that
popular theology is a mass of contradictions in regard to these things.
By eternal the ordinary Christian usually means everlasting; why should
punishment be everlasting? The worst sin that was ever sinned does not
deserve everlasting punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian
who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow-creature undergo
it. There is no understandable sense in which justice could demand
such a terrible sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting
unhappiness; how much more unthinkable it becomes if the punishment is
to be everlasting, fiendish torment! If Salvation is first and
foremost deliverance from this punishment, how is it that it does not
take effect immediately? Justice would suggest that it ought to do so,
for some sinners live a merry life until the eleventh hour, and then
give God "the last snuff of the candle" as Father Taylor put it,
whereas others repent early but never manage, all through a long life,
to escape the suffering caused by their own deeds in youth. In some
cases, at any rate, on this side of the grave, Salvation does not
involve the least remission of penalty, while in others apparently no
penalty will ever be endured either on this side of death or on the
other. The poor drunkard who repents does not find that repentance
gives him back his wrecked constitution, but the selfish, grasping,
cruel-hearted wrecker of homes and lives may just be in time with his
trust in the "finished work," and go right home to glory while his
victims struggle and suffer on amid the conditions he has made for them
on earth. Curious justice this!
+Christian thought never quite consistent about Death and
after.+--There is no need to labour the point; popular evangelical
views of the punishment of sin are incredible when looked at in a
common-sense way. But they are even more chaotic on the subject of
death and whatever follows death. It does not seem to be generally
recognised that Christian thought has never been really clear
concerning the Resurrection, especially in relation to future judgment.
One view has been that the deceased saint lies sleeping in the grave
until the archangel's trump shall sound and bid all mankind awake for
the great assize. Anyone who reads the New Testament without prejudice
will see that this was Paul's earlier view, although later on he
changed it for another. There is a good deal of our current, everyday
religious phraseology which presumes it still--
"Father, in thy gracious keeping
Leave we now thy servant sleeping."
But alongside this view another which is a flagrant contradiction of it
has come down to us, namely, that immediately after death the soul goes
straight to heaven or hell, as the case may be, without waiting for the
archangel's trump and the grand assize. On the whole this is the
dominant theory of the situation in Protestant circles, and is much
less reasonable than the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, however much
the latter may have been abused. But under this view what is the exact
significance of the Judgment Day and the physical Resurrection? One
would think they might be accounted superfluous. What is the good of
tormenting a soul in hell for ages and then whirling it back to the
body in order to rise again and receive a solemn public condemnation?
Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, especially as the
solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a part of the sentence has
already been undergone, and that there is no hope that any portion of
it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies with which
theologians have credited the Almighty are cruel indeed! It is
difficult to speak with patience of the solemn, non-committal way in
which many present-day theological writers discuss everlasting
punishment. Many of them have an "open mind" on the subject, whatever
that may be, and warn the rest of us not to dogmatise on the great
mystery. It does not seem to occur to them that the Christian
fundamental of the love of God renders the dogma of everlasting
punishment impossible, for it implies that God will do the most for the
being that needs the most, and surely that must be the most unhappy
sinner. Others speak of a "larger hope," a second opportunity for
accepting divine grace, and so on. But these theories do not meet the
case at all. While sin remains in the universe, God is defeated;
everlasting punishment involves His everlasting failure. How often we
bear preachers speaking about the obdurate human will, which to all
eternity may go on resisting good. There are not a few who defend the
abstract possibility of everlasting punishment by insisting that it is
impossible to coerce the will, and therefore that to endless ages a
soul may go on choosing evil and rejecting good. But this is an
entirely new argument; it implies that a sinner _might_ choose the good
on the other side of death, and that if he does not he continues
eternally to pass sentence upon himself, God being helpless in the
matter. This is not the way in which advocates of everlasting
punishment used to talk. It is a little more hopeful than the
conventional dogma, for it makes the sinner to some extent his own
judge and executioner, and places stress on the undoubted truth that if
a man keeps on doing wrong things he becomes hardened. I have heard
this view defended in private by a bishop, who apparently never saw
that in adopting it he had given up entirely the orthodox Protestant
view that there is no chance for a man after death, and that the thing
which determines our post-mortem destiny is not our conduct, but our
belief. Repentance at the eleventh hour, however bad the previous life
may have been, is, according to the theology of this particular bishop,
enough to secure admission to heaven. If, therefore, a power of
eternally choosing evil remains on the further side of the great
change, surely there is some hope that that power might not continue to
be exercised. But if not, what becomes of the whole fabric of popular
Protestant theology concerning the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day,
and the atoning merits of the Redeemer?
No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not do. No one really
believes it, and the churches will have to give up professing to
believe it. In our ordinary everyday concerns we take quite a
different view for granted all the time, the view that "Whatsoever a
man soweth that shall he also reap." The harvest may be long in
coming, but it comes at last. Neither do we choose our friends on
account of their chances of heaven or hell. We like or dislike a man
because he deserves to be liked or disliked, and not because he
believes something that will get him into heaven. Neither, thank God,
do we want to see even the wicked left to the consequences of their
wickedness; we want to see them helped to live differently, and it is
hardly probable that this impulse of our better humanity will change
after death. Love cannot be false to itself; in the presence of need
it must of necessity keep on giving itself until the need is satisfied
and the victory won.
But if popular theology concerning the last things is untrue, or at
least misleading and inadequate, what is the truth? Do we want a
different set of terms or not? I think not, but we want a different
perspective. These terms ought to be construed as states of the soul,
rather than as external conditions. Let me try to explain what I mean.
+The true Salvation.+--In the first place if sin is selfishness,
salvation must consist in ceasing to be selfish, that is, it represents
the victory of love in the human heart. This may be represented as the
uprising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ man in the
experience of the penitent. We may even go so far as to say that this
can come about, and does come about, without any strongly marked
feelings of contrition or sudden change of attitude. Wherever you see
a man trying to do something for the common good, you see the uprising
of the spirit of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atonement.
In church or out of church, with or without a formal creed, this is the
true way in which the redemption of the world is proceeding. Every man
who is trying to live so as to make his life a blessing to the world is
being saved himself in the process, saved by becoming a saviour.
Ordinary observation ought to tell us that untold thousands of our
fellow-beings, even among those who never dream of going to church, are
being saved in this way. This is the true way to look at the matter.
The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but who is also the
deeper self of every human being, is saving individuals by filling them
with the unselfish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish
desire to minister to the common good which is the true salvation. I
do not mind what name is given to it so long as it is recognised for
what it really is; there is no stopping-place between sinner and
saviour. This is the way in which men like Robert Blatchford of the
_Clarion_ are being saved while trying to save. Conceive how
differently such a man _might_ have lived his life. He might have
lived it so as to be of no use to anyone, or indeed in such a way as to
be a hindrance rather than a help to poor overburdened humanity. It
matters comparatively little that this man should think he is
destroying supernaturalism and scoffs at the possibility of a future
life. His moral earnestness is a mark of his Christhood and his work a
part of the Atonement. Not another Christ than Jesus, mind! The very
same. Mr. Blatchford may laugh at this and call his moral aspirations
by quite a different name. Well, let him; but I know the thing when I
see it. This is Salvation.
+Conversion.+--But in the history of mankind the change from
selfishness to love, from darkness to light, from death to life, has
often meant something much more pronounced than this. A man may have
been living a bad life, and become suddenly impressed by some appeal to
his better nature made in the name of God. He may have felt humiliated
and distressed by his new-found consciousness of sin. He may have
prayed earnestly for forgiveness, and felt that forgiveness has come
and that the peace of God has entered into and possessed his soul. He
has deliberately and solemnly consecrated his life to Jesus and feels
that henceforth he is, as it were, in a new world. This change is
rightly termed conversion, a turning round and going right. Such a man
may be able to say with St. Paul, "To me to live is Christ," and the
words would be literally and grandly true. After this he may go on
believing all kinds of things about verbal inspiration, the precious
blood, the fate of the impenitent, and I know not what else, but the
quality of the new life is always the same; it is dominated by the
spirit of love instead of the spirit of selfishness; it is harmony with
God. Often this change is very complete and beautiful, but in every
case it involves a long and slow ascent to the stature of the perfect
man in Christ Jesus. It is no delusion, either, that in the endeavour
to live the new life divine help is forthcoming. The Holy Spirit of
truth and love is ever present with a child of God to guide him to
higher and ever higher heights of spiritual attainment. Without this
blessed religious experience, the experience of those who are "called
to be saints," this world would be a poor place to live in. I may
perhaps be pardoned for adding that in my judgment even the earnest
redemptive endeavours of men like the editor of the _Clarion_ have
indirectly been made possible by it. Take out of the world what
Christian saints have owed to their fellowship with Jesus, and there
would be very little of hope and inspiration left. Still, what I want
to emphasise here is the fact that, however crude the various
theologies may have been in which this experience has clothed itself,
it is always the same; it represents the victory of love in the human
heart.
+Salvation and penalty.+--But does this kind of salvation do away with
the penal consequences of past sin? If not, what is its relation to
them? To answer these questions we must look a little more closely
into the nature of such penal consequences. Perhaps it would help to
clear up the subject if I were to say frankly before going any farther
that there is no such thing as punishment, no far-off Judgment Day, no
great white throne, and no Judge external to ourselves. I say there is
no punishment of sin in the sense in which the word "punishment" is
usually employed. We are accustomed to think of punishment as a
sentence imposed by some authority from without and containing within
itself some element of vengeance for wrong-doing. But in the divine
dealings with men such punishment has never existed and never will.
What has already been said in a previous chapter on the subject of pain
should help to make this statement plain. We have seen that pain is
life pressing upon death and death resisting life. If there were no
life, there would be no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life,
or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking to burst
through something that fetters and hinders it. Apply this to the
region of morals and let us see how it works out. If a man has been
living for self, he has been making a mistake and preparing for himself
a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine life within him, the
truer, deeper self, will assert itself against the decisive efforts of
sin. It is just as impossible for a man to go on eternally living
apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle to shut out
the ocean; the returning tide would break down the puny barriers and
destroy everything that tends to separate between the soul and God.
For, after all, what is our life but God's? To try to keep it for
ourselves is like trying to catch and imprison a sun ray by drawing the
blinds. To save the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, we
remember that the spirit of man and the spirit of God are one, we know
of a surety that the infinite life behind the human spirit will assert
itself irresistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that
spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin is the
declaration, "Mine is not thine, and I shall live for mine alone."
This is trying to live for the finite; it is enclosing the soul within
barriers; those barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, and
broken they will be just because the deeper self of every man is
already one with God. In the stable-yard of my house there was at one
time a tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew covered
with flagstones and a wall built round it. But the roots of the tree
were not removed, and so that buried life has reasserted itself, the
flagstones have been shattered, and now the wall is coming down. Here
is a figure of our moral experience. A man may go on living for self
all through a long career; he may bury his better nature deep
underneath the hard shell of materialism and self-indulgence, but it is
all in vain; sooner or later, on this side of death or on the other,
that buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be swept away.
This uprising of the Christ in the individual soul, for such it is,
must inevitably mean pain to the man whose true life has been entombed
in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the farther side of the
change called death, but it is itself not a mark of death, but of life.
The fact that a soul can suffer proves its salvability beyond dispute.
An everlasting hell is in the nature of things a contradiction, for the
finite cannot eternally bar the way of the infinite reality whose
uprising is the cause of its pain; if it could, it would itself be
infinite, which is absurd. Sin is essentially the endeavour to live
for the finite, the separative, the divisive, as opposed to the
infinite, the whole-ward, the All. Which will win in this encounter?
+The real judge.+--And who, pray, is the Judge? Who but yourself? The
deeper self is the judge, the self who is eternally one with God. The
pain caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially infinite
and cannot have its true nature denied. If you go and live over a
sewer, you will be ill. Why? Because you were never meant to live
over a sewer. The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you
fights to overcome it, and in the process you have to suffer. It is
just the same with your spiritual nature. You _cannot_ continue to
live apart from the whole, for the real you _is_ the whole, and, do
what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for
separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what
the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love
striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul.
It is our own spiritual nature that compels us to suffer when we sin,
and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we
are so constituted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must
undo. No eleventh-hour repentance can evade this issue; in fact, it
may be the beginning of it. If we have been treading a wrong road,
repentance is turning round and taking the way back. If we have been
living a false life, repentance is the beginning of the true, and just
in proportion as the false has been accepted, so will the true find it
difficult to destroy the lie. _You_ are the judge; you _in_ God. If
you have failed to achieve that for which you are here, you will have
to achieve it here or elsewhere, and the correction of your failure
will inevitably mean pain.
"The tissues of the life to be,
We weave with colours all our own;
And in the field of destiny
We reap as we have sown."
There is nothing horrific about this law of the spirit. In a true and
real sense it is our own law; _we_ make it. Being what we are, we
cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and
the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic
about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes
to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the
prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to
hasten the emancipation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so,
for as long as there is any sin to be done away, love cannot have its
perfect work. This it was which brought Jesus to earth, and this it is
which turns every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must strive
and suffer with sin until God is all in all.
+The spiritual resurrection.+--It follows from this that the true
resurrection is spiritual, not material, and this is the sense in which
the word is most frequently employed in the New Testament. In the
fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, "I am the resurrection,
and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall
he live: and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This
is a great saying, and the writer of this particular gospel meant every
word of it in the sense I have just indicated. He makes the eternal
Christ the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us that the
uprising of this eternal Christ within the soul of the penitent sinner
is the real resurrection.
+The resurrection of Jesus.+--But this subject of the resurrection
demands a further examination. We have already seen how inconsistent
popular Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet Christianity
started with the belief in a resurrection of our Lord, a belief which
has continued down to the present day. What are we to say about this?
We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel accounts of the
physical resurrection of Jesus are mutually inconsistent and that no
amount of ingenuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a Galilean
appearance, and says nothing about the ascension. Luke says a great
deal about the Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and tells
us that the ascension took place from Bethany. The end of St. Mark's
gospel has been lost, and the last few verses are a summary of the
accounts in the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection
appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of course, less historical
than the synoptists, and puts the last appearance at the sea of
Tiberias. A minute discussion of the problem thus raised would be
unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope we can take for
granted the broad fact that without a belief in a resurrection of some
kind Christianity could not have made a start at all. It is almost
indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become
convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world
believed Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic utterance
on the subject in the New Testament is the familiar passage from 1 Cor.
xv: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that
he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas, then of the twelve: After
that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the
greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of
all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." This
statement is clear enough and almost unquestionably authentic. It
places beyond doubt what the apostolic church thought of the
resurrection of Jesus. The little group of disciples must somehow have
become convinced that their Master was not really dead, but alive and
reigning in the world unseen, interested as much as ever in the work
His followers were doing, and spiritually present with them in the
doing of it. This conviction had immediate and important spiritual
results. It gave these simple men a new and greater confidence in
Jesus and in the power of the life He had lived. They saw that this
life was, after all, the strongest thing in the universe. They
realised that in the end nothing could stand against them; evil could
do it no real harm, for God was behind it. Even before the crucifixion
they had looked upon Jesus as the Son of God in a higher and more
spiritual sense than that title had been used before, but now
henceforth they thought of Him as such in a higher way still.
According to Paul He was "declared to be the Son of God with power by
the resurrection from the dead." If we try to put ourselves in the
place of these first Christians, we shall realise better the effect of
the resurrection upon their feelings and behaviour. Let us suppose
that we had known Jesus in the flesh, that we had learned to understand
a little of the moral and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His
life, and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood and shame; I
think it would have taken a good deal to convince us that evil had not
gained the day. Now suppose after this we had absolute proof--I will
not say how--that our Master was still alive, and that His spirit was
with us and helping us, would it not make a very great difference to
our outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We could not but feel
the littleness of the power that had tried to destroy Jesus, and we
should not be afraid of it any more. This is precisely what appears to
have happened in the experience of these Galileans. Defeat and failure
were somehow turned into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again.
+Theories of resurrection.+--But how are we to account for this
new-found confidence of theirs that they had really once more looked
upon the face of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so exhaustively
that no possible explanation of it has been left altogether untouched.
Such a unique event as the raising of a physical body from death is one
which the average western mind of the present day would reject as
incredible if we had never heard it before, consequently there exists a
widespread tendency among liberal Christians to try to account for
primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of our Lord in some
other way. Thus we have the hallucination theory, the apparition
theory, the swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I should
suppose that most thinkers who take the point of view of the New
Theology would hold one or other of these explanations or some
modification of them, but I confess I have never been able to do so.
It seems to me that no such explanation of the universally held
Christian conviction that the physical body of Jesus actually rose from
the tomb is sufficient to account for it. The passage already quoted
from 1 Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate this statement. It is
clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the
body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had
known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and
mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the
impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential
distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The
philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic
idealism, and monistic idealism recognises no fundamental distinction
between matter and spirit. The fundamental reality is consciousness.
The so-called material world is the product of consciousness exercising
itself along a certain limited plane; the next stage of consciousness
above this is not an absolute break with it, although it is an
expansion of experience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that
individual self-consciousness persists beyond the change called death,
it only means that such consciousness is being exercised along another
plane; from a three-dimensional it has entered a four-dimensional
world. This new world is no less and no more material than the
present; it is all a question of the range of consciousness. It is
this view, the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that leads
me to believe that less than justice has been done by liberal thinkers
to the theory of the physical resurrection of Jesus. What is the
physical but the common denominator between one finite mind and
another? It is a mode of language, an expression of thought as well as
a condition of thought. Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional
world trying to converse with a being still limited to a
two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think may have
happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body
would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the
two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only length and breadth,
and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a
line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank
below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an
apparition, although as really present as before. To the
two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost.
Does this throw any light upon the mysterious appearances and
disappearances of the body of Jesus? The all-important thing after
Calvary was to make the disciples aware, beyond all dispute, that Jesus
was really alive, more alive than ever, and that His murderers had been
helpless to destroy Him. When we remember that to the ordinary Jewish
mind the thought of personal immortality was anything but clear, and
that to many of them death was synonymous with annihilation, we can see
how enormous was the change that had to be wrought in the mental
attitude of those who had seen Jesus die a violent and bloody death.
To see Him return triumphant was the one thing required to counteract
their feeling that all was lost, and the best means of demonstrating
this victory over death was to enable them to behold Him in the body
with which they were already familiar and which they loved so well.
For, after all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of language, a
mode of communication between mind and mind; it was no more and no less
a thought-form than an apparition would have been, and, from the point
of view of monistic idealism, it is no more difficult to believe in the
reanimation of a physical body than in the use of any other
thought-form to express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have a
being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane
adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane
for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that--
"Life is ever lord of death,
And love can never love its own."
This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the
post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by
them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends
will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent
with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems
to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New
Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is
absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to
be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its
Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has
no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this
idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it
simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was
dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naïvely regarded
heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually
went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit
of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the
Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a
conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a
geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But
when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is
what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the
under-world, the shadowy home of the departed, in a state of existence
which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they
have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of
them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or
later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the
world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been
impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze
Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at
first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the
rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the
disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory
as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the
light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may
as well say so.
+Paul's mystical view of resurrection.+--But we should do Paul an
injustice if we were to limit the value of his utterances by his views
about the resurrection of the human body. I have already pointed out
that Paul employs physical symbols in a mystical way, and in nothing
was this more so than in his use of the idea of a resurrection. With
him, as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual
resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issuing-forth, of the
Christ or divine man within the soul. When he speaks in this way he
allows the thought of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight.
Thus he writes: "If we have been planted together in the likeness of
His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection."
"That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the
fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if
by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." "If
then ye be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, where
Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.... For ye died, and your life
is hid with Christ in God." Even if this last sentence is not Paul's
own it has a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought the great
apostle seems to have escaped the limitations of his early Pharisaism.
He ceases to speak of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think
of death as the gateway to the immediate presence of his dearly loved
Master. "For I long to depart and to be with Christ which is far
better." Here, surely, we are listening to the voice of Paul the aged.
The moment we succeed in disentangling ourselves from all literal and
limiting New Testament statements about the connection between sin and
physical death, the physical resurrection, the distant Judgment Day,
and such-like, we find ourselves in a position to appreciate the
beautiful spiritual experience in which these very terms become symbols
of inner realities of the soul. Till we can do this, New Testament
language is sure to be a hindrance to any true apprehension of the
moral value of the gospel of Christ. The only salvation we need
trouble about is the change from selfishness to love, "We know that we
have passed from death unto life because we love." This change is
equivalent to a resurrection, the uprising of the eternal Christ within
us. It is also an ascension, the uplifting and uniting of the soul to
the eternal Father. But such a resurrection and ascension may be
preceded by a great deal of pain when the soul is shedding the husk of
selfishness. There is no dodging the consequences of sin; that is
absolutely impossible. A saviour may suffer with and for the sinner,
but the sinner must suffer too. The suffering is not a mark of God's
anger, but of his love; so far from salvation being a means of
screening us from it, the pain is a means by which the salvation takes
effect. It is the true self asserting its dominion over the false.
Heaven and hell are states of the soul, and the latter implies the
former. It is life that suffers, not death. When a guilty soul
awakens to the truth, hell begins, but it is because heaven wants to
break through. The aim and object of salvation are not the getting of
a man into heaven, but the getting of heaven into him. There is
nothing horrifying about the law of retribution, although it is
inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of our divine origin,
our own true being asserting itself against the fetters of evil. But
it is the Christ that saves us, not the retribution; the retribution
only shows that the Christ is there, and that from the Calvary caused
by sin, and from the tomb in which the true self lies buried, He will
rise in glorious majesty in the soul and unite us in the bonds of love
to the eternal divine humanity which is God.
+Physical death of minor importance.+--It follows from what has now
been said that all these familiar terms imply each other, and that
death, judgment, heaven, and hell cannot properly be regarded as the
"Last Things." They are all here now, here within the soul, just as
infinity and eternity are here now. It is not a matter of hither and
yonder, but of higher and lower. Physical death is not the
all-important event which theologians have usually made it out to be;
it is only a bend in the road. My own impression is that when we
individually pass through this crisis, we shall find the change to be
very slight. It will mean the dropping of the scales from the eyes,
and that is about all. The things we have been living for on this side
will only profit us in so far as they have gone to the building up of a
Christlike character. If a man has been living for false and unworthy
ideals, he will quickly find it out; the only possession he can take to
the other side of death is what he is. Belief in the atoning merits
and the finished work of a Saviour will not compensate for wasted
opportunities and selfish deeds; these latter will light the fires of
retribution as the soul awakes to its true condition, and then, and not
till then perhaps, will the indwelling Christ obtain His opportunity.
Nor will the absence of a formal creed shut any good man out of heaven;
it is impossible to shut a man out from what he is. What we sow we
reap, and we do so just because of what we fundamentally are. Every
road to evil ends in a _cul-de-sac_. Sooner or later every soul will
have to learn that it is no use kicking against the pricks; we must
learn by the consequences of our mistakes that, being what we are, the
children of the Highest, we cannot permanently rest in anything less
than the love of God. Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on
the other side of death as on this. The blind soul goes on for a while
in its blundering selfishness, and the Christ spirit, the spirit of
universal love, goes on seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the
truth must prevail if only because we shall have to learn that the lie
is not worth while.
+Evidence for immortality of the soul.+--No doubt there are some
readers of these pages who profess themselves agnostic or indifferent
with regard to the question of immortality, and I am not going to argue
with them. It seems to me probable that before very long it will be
impossible to deny it. The mass of evidence for the persistence of
individual self-consciousness after death is increasing rapidly and is
being subjected to the strictest scientific investigation. Men like
Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, men whose words are entitled
to respect from the point of view of modern science, have publicly
admitted the importance of such evidence; before long the scientific
world in general will have to take it into consideration. But to me
such evidence does not greatly matter, and I know very little about it
at first hand. I build my belief in immortality on the conviction that
the fundamental reality of the universe is consciousness, and that no
consciousness can ever be extinguished, for it belongs to the whole and
must be fulfilled in the whole. The one unthinkable supposition from
this point of view is that any kind of being which has ever become
aware of itself, that is, has ever contained a ray of the eternal
consciousness, can perish.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM Of GOD
+Order of the subject.+--From the consideration of the true
significance of such terms as Salvation, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, we
now turn to one which might be thought to occupy a relatively inferior
position and to precede them in order of time. But if we have been
right in holding that such terms as we have already examined represent
states of the soul beginning here and now, we have considered them in
their rightful place, for now we have to see how these states of the
soul find expression in human institutions. In a word, I wish to
devote some space to the consideration of the great subjects of the
Church and the Kingdom of God in relation to one another. What is the
Church? Where did the idea spring from? What had Jesus to do with it
originally? What is the Kingdom of God, and how do the various
Christian societies which call themselves churches stand in regard to
it to-day? To answer any of these questions we must try to place
ourselves to some extent in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of
those amongst whom the ideas first arose. Let us take the Kingdom
first.
+Origin of the idea of the Kingdom of God.+--At the time when Jesus
came every person of Jewish nationality was looking for the
establishment of what had come to be called the Kingdom of God. For
many generations the Jews had been a subject race. There had been one
brief period of national splendour and prosperity, namely, the reigns
of David and Solomon. After generations were inclined to idealise
these two reigns, especially the former, and to look upon them as a
kind of golden age. David they looked upon as an ideal monarch; they
called him a "man after God's own heart," and the imagination of poet
and prophet loved to dwell upon his winsome personality. They thought
of him as in a special way the king chosen by God, and the Israel of
his time as a true kingdom of God, a kingdom of righteousness, peace,
and plenty under the favour of the Most High. The real Israel of
David's day was far different from this, but compared with the days
that followed it was indeed a time of unexampled greatness. A similar
tendency to idealise the past is observable in nearly every nation
which has entered upon a period of suffering or misfortune, as we can
see from the legends about King Olaf and Frederick Barbarossa. But
Israel always looked upon herself as in a special way a theocratic
kingdom, a chosen of God. At its best this idea was a fine one, one,
it led to the thought of a special spiritual vocation for the sake of
the other nations of the earth; at its worst it meant the assertion of
national privilege and contempt for everything which was not Jewish.
After the great captivity in Babylon the Jews were never without a
foreign master, and the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared from
history. But in quite a remarkable way Jewish poets and preachers
united to keep alive the popular belief that God would yet "restore the
kingdom to Israel." Hence there grew up a firmly held conviction that
God would sometime raise up a prince born of David's line who with
supernatural help, and with a strong hand, would drive out the invader
and establish a kingdom which should outshine even that of David
himself. This was the root idea of the kingdom of God, as we meet it
in the New Testament, and as it is described in some of the most
beautiful passages of the Old.
+The Messiah of Jewish expectation.+--As time went on this idea was
deepened and clarified and became more and more associated in popular
expectation with the advent of the Messianic deliverer whose work it
should be to inaugurate it. At the time when Jesus was born this
expectation had become very keen. Everyone was thinking of it, from
Pharisees and Scribes downward. At the moment the foreign master was
the Roman, whose rule, though milder than that of the Ptolemies, was
quite severe enough; the people were impoverished and unhappy. What
they were looking for was a Messiah, a transcendent but quite human
personality of royal descent, who should expel the Roman eagles and
inaugurate suddenly and completely an era of peace and prosperity the
like of which had never been known before, a true kingdom of God. One
extension of this idea was that Israel should replace the Roman empire
as the suzerain of all the other nations of the earth. "Arise, shine;
for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the
people: but the Lord shall rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen
upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the
brightness of thy rising.... And the sons of strangers shall build up
thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I
smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. Therefore thy
gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night;
that men may bring unto thee forces of the Gentiles, and that their
kings may be brought. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve
thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.... The
sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and
all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of
thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of the Lord, The Zion of
the Holy One of Israel." This fine passage shows pretty clearly what
was the general idea as to the nature of the anticipated kingdom of
God. It meant that the Jewish Messiah was to take the place of Caesar
and reign with undisputed sway from his capital of Jerusalem.
But we should do an injustice to the subject if we failed to allow for
the fact that according to the prophetic ideal this kingdom was to be a
blessing to the world, and to abolish all violence and oppression; the
kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of universal peace and joy, a
kingdom of righteousness based on social justice. It was because of
this widespread expectation that the austere preacher, John the
Baptist, obtained his hearing in the wilderness of Judea. All John had
to preach about was the kingdom of God, which he declared to be near at
hand. He believed that he had been sent to herald the coming of the
Messiah, and from his words we can gather what people thought about the
Messiah: "Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his
floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the
chaff with unquenchable fire." According to the Baptist, the Messiah
would spare no kind of sham or hypocrisy; he would root out and utterly
destroy every kind of social evil, no matter what. John insisted that
it would be of no use for Jews to imagine that simply because they were
descendants of Abraham they would escape this general visitation; hence
his words to the Pharisees were particularly scathing: "O generation of
vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" It is
clear, therefore, that, in the opinion of the man who has now come to
be regarded as the forerunner of Jesus, the kingdom of God was to be an
earthly kingdom, was to come suddenly, and was to be inaugurated by a
sort of general judgment or clean sweep of all the elements that made
for oppression, cruelty, foul living, and pretentiousness of every
kind. It had not the remotest reference to a world to come or a Divine
Redeemer whose principal duty it should be to suffer and die in order
to secure a blessed immortality for those who believed in Him.
+Jesus' idea of the kingdom.+--How far Jesus shared these ideas at the
commencement of His own ministry it is impossible to say, but it seems
clear that He was attracted by the moral earnestness of John and wished
to associate Himself with those who were looking for a kingdom of God
which should mean the establishment and realisation of the moral ideal
in all human relations. But at the baptism a purpose long forming in
his mind appears to have taken definite shape. He felt Himself called
to preach the good news of a kingdom which could begin at once in the
heart of any man who was willing to become the instrument of divine
love and the expression of the ideal of human brotherhood. He went
into the wilderness to think this out and then came back to teach it.
I do not think He imagined that it could be realised quickly and
easily, but it seems fairly obvious that at first He expected that men
would be so glad to hear about it that they would hasten to avail
themselves of it. All through His ministry He spoke of little else,
and it was because of what He had to say about the nature of the
kingdom that His followers were attracted to Him. Hence, too, we have
the deathless teaching preserved for us in the synoptical gospels:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.... Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." The
meaning of Jesus is perfectly clear and perfectly simple. It is that
if a kingdom of universal brotherhood is ever to be realised on earth,
it can only come by the operation of universal good will. This has
been much too simple for most of the theologians, and so they have
endeavoured to twist and torture it out of all recognition. As time
went on, however, Jesus came to see that it would not be realised as
quickly as even He had thought. Men could not or would not understand;
they were looking for a kingdom which should mean plenty to eat and
drink, and universal dominion for the sons of Abraham. Even His most
immediate followers were unable to divest themselves of this notion,
and it is plain enough that they went on hoping even to the end that
Jesus would head a revolt and establish a kingdom in which they
themselves would hold positions of dignity and importance: "Grant that
we may sit, the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left in thy
kingdom." The striking rebuke which Jesus administered to these
pretensions, by setting a little child in the midst of the jealous men,
will never be forgotten while the world lasts. Jesus _did_ believe in
an earthly kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, but it is evident
that He would have nothing to say to violence as a means of realising
it. He even believed that the kingdom had already come in the heart of
any man who was desirous of being at one with God and man and denied
himself in the effort to do it: "And when he was demanded of the
Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and
said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall
they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is
within you."
+Early Christian idea of the kingdom.+--An important fact, which I do
not think is generally recognised, is that the first Christians thought
almost precisely what the Jews did about the kingdom of God. Most
people are accustomed to think of Christianity as having been from the
first a religion which had principally to do with getting men ready for
the next world. We can hardly think about it apart from ecclesiastical
buildings, choirs, baptisms, confirmations, prayers for the sick and
dying, and so on. So much have we been accustomed to think of it in
this way that the average man reads his New Testament with these
assumptions in the background of his mind. But this is certainly not
New Testament Christianity. The apostles and their followers believed
like the Jews in the sudden establishment of an ideal commonwealth upon
earth. This was how they understood the Lord's prayer, "Thy kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." They did not even
wish to separate from Judaism, and it is clear from Paul's letters that
there was at one time a great danger that the new faith might become a
mere Jewish sect. The Christians differed from the Jews, not in their
ideal concerning the kingdom, but in their greater moral intensity and
enthusiasm, as well as in their profound conviction that the Lord Jesus
was God's chosen instrument for realising this kingdom, and that He
would presently return to earth and do it. Any unbiassed reader of the
New Testament can see for himself that the primitive Christians lived
in hourly expectation that this was what would happen. Of course they
also believed in their Master's continual spiritual presence with them,
but the dominant thought in their minds was that of a dramatic second
coming and the inauguration of a reign of righteousness and universal
peace, the making of a beautiful world, something like the Utopia of
Mr. H. G. Wells. Nor was this altogether a delusion. If it had been,
Christianity would soon have died. But, on the contrary, it lived and
grew because of the great truth behind this belief, namely, that the
Spirit of Christ working in the hearts of men is gradually producing
this ideal kingdom in our midst. If, with this view of the character
of early Christianity in our minds, we go afresh to the gospels or to
the letters of Paul, we shall find it abundantly confirmed. There is
no getting away from it. All the earnestness and enthusiasm of these
first Christians were centred upon the belief in the near advent of a
divine kingdom upon earth with Jesus as its head. This belief even
affected the practice of these early Christians in regard to the
disposal of their property. To understand this, let us put ourselves
in their place and ask what we should do if we were possessed by the
conviction that the whole existing social order might come to an end
to-morrow morning or next week, and that after that no child of God
would ever want for anything. I think we should be sure to feel that
the holding of personal property would not matter much. If, in
addition to this, our hearts were filled with a divine enthusiasm, an
overmastering love for Jesus and for all our brethren, we should not
want to keep anything back that could serve to make anyone happier for
the short time that intervened before the glorious coming of the Lord.
This was just how the primitive Christians felt. They had no organised
economic system; no one was compelled to give anything, but under the
pressure of the new spirit they willingly gave everything. What did it
matter? they thought; they were only like pilgrims within sight of
home, or watchers waiting for the morning.
+Origin of the idea of the church.+--Where, then, did the idea of the
church come from? It is as plain as anything can be that the primary
interest of early Christianity was the kingdom of God. It took the
conception over from Judaism with a deeper moral content derived from
the preaching and the life of Jesus. Its first adherents did not even
know that they had a new religion; they only thought they had found the
true Messiah, although the Jewish nation as a whole had rejected Him.
What they wanted above everything was to see the kingdom come upon
earth, and we now know that they were mistaken in imagining that it
would be established speedily and suddenly by the visible second coming
of Jesus on the clouds of heaven. But seeing that they were thinking
of it in this way, how did the church arise and why?
It is doubtful if Jesus ever used the word "church," for the two verses
in Matthew in which He is credited with it are probably of late date
and point to a time when the ecclesiastical organisation was fairly
well established. Still the word itself has an interest and a history
of its own apart from its Christian use. The _ecclesia_, as most of my
readers may be aware, was the assembly of the citizens of any Greek
city-state. It was the custom for the whole body of the members of a
Greek self-governing community to be called together from time to time
for the transaction of public business. This assembly was the final
authority in matters affecting the communal welfare, and even after the
various Greek states became absorbed in the Roman empire this custom
was allowed to continue. It was the policy of the Romans to permit a
large measure of self-government to their subjects of any alien race,
and therefore the _ecclesia_ of any particular city-state continued to
be summoned as usual to decide upon matters of local importance. There
is a reference to this in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts, where we
read that the preaching of Christianity in Ephesus caused a riot which
the town clerk--a thoroughly typical town clerk!--succeeded in allaying
by reminding the demonstrators that if they had any real cause for
complaint, the matter ought to come before the regular _ecclesia_.
This properly constituted _ecclesia_ to which the level-headed town
clerk referred was the general assembly of the citizens for the
transaction of public business.
It was quite natural that the primitive Christians should have come to
adopt this word, and to an extent this very idea, as a convenient
description of the new Christian community. After the departure of
their Master the Christians held together, and wherever their
missionaries went, new communities sprang up, animated by a spirit of
loyalty to Jesus and a desire to realise His ideal for mankind. It was
quite natural, too, that the apostles should recognise all these
communities as being in reality one community for fellowship of faith
and love; it was the _ecclesia_, or assembly, or society of Jesus, the
beginning of the church of Christ, as it soon came to be called. There
was no elaborate organisation; nothing could have been simpler. Every
Christian seems to have thought that as it would not be long before the
Master came again, the wise and right thing to do was for His followers
to hold together and witness Him to the world, until that great event
took place.
+Church only exists for the sake of the kingdom.+--But how far did
Jesus foresee and intend this? It is difficult to say, but his choice
of twelve apostles whom He carefully trained to continue His work is
evidence that He contemplated the formation of some kind of society to
give effect to His teaching. The number twelve points to the
probability that He thought of this society as a kind of new Israel, a
spiritual Israel, which should do for the world what the older Israel
had failed to do, that is, bring about the kingdom of God. I have
already pointed out that in my judgment Jesus did not believe, as His
contemporaries did, that that kingdom could be established suddenly
from without, but held that it could only be achieved by spiritual
forces working from within. His _ecclesia_ has lived and grown. It
has survived for nineteen centuries, and is likely to survive for many
centuries more. It has played a leading part in the making of modern
civilisation. But it is no longer a unity, and many different theories
exist as to its meaning and worth.
_The sacerdotal theory._--Broadly speaking, however, there are two
outstanding views as to the scope and function of the _ecclesia_, or
church of Jesus. One is the sacerdotal, and the other is what, for
want of a better name, I may term the evangelical. In outline the
former is as follows: before Jesus finally withdrew His bodily presence
from His disciples He formally constituted a religious society to
represent Him on earth. This society was to be the ark of salvation,
the "sphere of covenanted grace." Its principal work was to call men
out of a lost and ruined world and secure for them a blessed
immortality; those who were members of this church, and only they, were
certain of heaven. Membership therein was clearly defined; the gateway
was baptism. Those who were baptized in a proper way, even though they
were unconscious infants, were members of the church of Christ and all
others were outside. Within this sacred society souls were to be
trained in rightness of living, and, to an extent, made fit for heaven.
The Holy Spirit abiding in this society would sanctify the individual
members and guide them into all the truth. It is even held that Jesus
definitely appointed the way in which this church was to be governed.
Its affairs were to be managed by a threefold order,--bishops, priests,
and deacons. But here a division has taken place amongst the
sacerdotalists themselves owing to the necessity of finding some final
authority, some living voice, within this visible society to which
appeal in the last resort could be made. Romanists have found this in
the bishop of Rome whom they regard as the episcopal successor of the
apostle Peter. Devout Anglicans take their stand upon the faith as
defined by the first four general Councils, while in administrative
matters they regard the bishop as independent. The Greek church also
insists upon its autonomy.
This sacerdotal view has exercised enormous influence in Christian
history, and I have sufficient of the historic imagination to be able
to say that at certain times it has undoubtedly worked on the whole for
good. But did Jesus really found a church of this kind? I am quite
sure He never thought of such a thing, and historical criticism of
Christian origins does not leave the sacerdotalist much to stand on.
Jesus appointed neither bishop nor priest, and never ordained that any
merely mechanical ceremony should be the means of admission to the
Christian society or be necessary to the eternal welfare of anyone. In
the early church the bishop or elder was the president of the little
Christian society meeting in any particular locality. Primitive
Christian organisation was anything but rigid and formal, and was as
far as possible from the sacerdotal model. I do not say that the
sacerdotal mode of organisation which gradually grew up was wholly
mischievous, nor do I say that the primitive Christian organisation
would be the best under all circumstances. All I maintain is that in
founding His new society Jesus did not ordain any particular form of
organisation.
+The evangelical theory.+--The other view of the meaning of the word
"church" to which I have already referred, is that it is the totality
of the followers of Jesus. Under this view organisation is a secondary
matter. There are many reasons why Christian societies should organise
themselves differently from one another. Temperament plays a great
part in the matter. But theories of church government have ceased to
be the burning questions that they once were. Most sensible men are
now satisfied that forms of government matter much less than the kind
of life which flourishes in the society itself.
+What the church exists for to-day.+--But what does the church exist
for, using the word in its primitive sense? What ought it to exist for
to-day? What is the justification for all the vast number of Christian
organisations which exist throughout the world? This is a subject upon
which a clear note needs to be sounded, for a great deal of mental
confusion exists in regard to it. Two inconsistent views of the work
of the church, as well as of the constitution of the church, have come
down the ages together and exist side by side in the world to-day. The
first is that the chief business of the church is to snatch men as
brands from the burning and get them ready for a future heaven. The
Fall theory has had much to do with this. The assumption behind it is,
as we have seen, that the world is a City of Destruction, as Bunyan
calls it. It is a ruined world, a world which has somehow baffled and
disappointed God, a failure of a world which, when the cup of its
iniquity is full, will be utterly destroyed as a general judgment.
When that dreadful day comes it will be bad for all those who are
outside the fellowship of Christ, for, like those who have died without
availing themselves of the means of salvation, they will be relegated
to everlasting torment in the world unseen. This view of the fate of
the world as being at enmity with God, and of the duty of the church to
persuade as many as possible to believe something or other in order to
secure salvation in a future and better world, has been held by
sacerdotalists and non-sacerdotalists, Catholics and Protestants alike.
It is still implied in most of our preaching and in the hymns we sing.
I admit that there is a certain truth in it, the truth that man is
constituted for immortality and ought not to live as if this world were
all that mattered. But on the whole, it has been thoroughly
mischievous, and there is nothing which is acting as a greater
hindrance to the spirituality and usefulness of the churches to-day.
It is based on an entirely false idea as to the relation of God and the
world.
+To save the world.+--But alongside of this view a far higher and
nobler one has been present to the minds of Christians in every
century, namely, that the work of the church is to save the world and
to believe that it is worth the saving. If what I have already said be
true, this is the idea which was in the mind of Jesus when He founded
His _ecclesia_. To Him the purpose of the _ecclesia_ was to help to
realise the kingdom of God by preaching and living the fellowship of
love. Ever since His day those who have been nearest to Him in spirit
have been going forth into the dark places of the earth trying to win
men to the realisation of the great ideal of a universal fellowship of
love based on a common relationship to the God and Father of us all.
This is what Augustine aimed at in his City of God. It was what
Ambrose had in mind when he excommunicated the emperor Theodosius for
having ordered a cruel massacre of some of his rebellious subjects. It
was the ideal of the mighty Hildebrand, grim and arrogant though he
was, when he compelled princes to bow their haughty necks and do
justice to the weak. It was what Bernard of Clairvaux meant to declare
when he defied the cruel and sensual king of France to approach the
altar of Christ. Savonarola realised it for a brief moment in
Florence, Calvin in Geneva, the Covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans
in England, the Pilgrim Fathers in America. They all failed because
the world can never be saved by the imposition of ideal institutions
from without and by force; it can only be by the spirit of Christ
working from within. But to some extent they all succeeded, too, for
the world is a better place to live in because of the gradual and
cumulative redemptive effort of the Christian _ecclesia_, the Church of
Jesus. On the other side of the ledger we have to set many things that
ecclesiasticism has done,--cruel persecutions, infamous tortures,
burnings and massacres, devastating wars, and fierce religious hatreds.
But these things have never belonged to Jesus; they are the very
negation of His spirit. The true church of Christ in any and every age
consists of those and those only who are trying like their Master to
make the world better and gladder and worthier of God. The word
"church" has become so hateful to many because of the admixture of
other ideals with this that I sometimes wish something could be done
either to get rid of it or to change it for another which shall fully
and clearly express what Jesus really came to do. I maintain that the
church has nothing whatever to do with preparing men for a world to
come; the best way to prepare a man for the world beyond is to get him
to live well and truly in this one. The church exists to make the
world a kingdom of God, and to fill it with His love. No greater
mistake could be made than to estimate the church of Jesus by
ecclesiastical squabbles and divisions, or even by Psalm-singing and
go-to-meeting talk. Look for the spirit of Jesus at work, and you have
found the church too.
+Modern industrialism and the church.+--Judged by this standard where
are the churches to-day? We have seen that the only gospel which Jesus
had to preach was the gospel of the kingdom of God; everything He ever
said can be included under that head. His Church, or Christian
society, or whatever else we like to call it, has no meaning unless it
exists for the realisation of the kingdom of God. We cannot state this
too strongly. The whole of the other-worldism of the churches, the
elaborate paraphernalia of doctrine and observance, is utterly useless
and worse than useless unless it ministers to this end. Unless it can
be shown that I am wrong in this supposition--and I think that will be
pretty hard to do--a fairly good case could be made out for burning
down most of the theological colleges in the land and sending the
bright young fellows in them to do some serious work for the common
good. For it must be confessed, as I said at the beginning, that the
churches are to a large extent a failure. We cannot but recognise, for
one thing, that our modern civilisation, with all its boasted advance
on the past, is still un-Christian. It puts a premium upon
selfishness. Modern industrialism is cruel and unjust and directly
incites men to self-seeking. The weak and unfortunate have to go to
the wall; little mercy is shown to the man who is not strong enough to
fight his way and keep his footing in the struggle for existence. We
are all the time making war upon one another,--man against man,
business against business, class against class, nation against nation.
We talk of our freedom, but no man is really free, and the great
majority of us are slaves to some corporation, or capitalist, or
condition of things, which renders the greater part of life a
continuous anxiety lest health or means should fail and we should prove
unequal to the demands made upon us. If a man goes under, his
acquaintances will pity him for five minutes and then forget all about
him. There is no help for it; they cannot do anything else, they have
their own living to get. They are like soldiers in the heat of battle;
they must not pause to mourn over a fallen comrade or they may soon be
stretched beside him. I do not mean, of course, to make the foolish
statement that present-day industrialism is unrestrainedly
individualistic: thank God it is not that. But the principle of
competition still exercises a sway so potent as to stamp modern social
organisation as un-Christian. We may just as well recognise that fact
and state it plainly. The glaringly unequal ownership of material
wealth is anti-social; it is good neither for the rich man nor for the
poor, for it is to the interest of every man that the body politic
should be healthy and happy. That so large a number of our total
population should have to exist upon the very margin of subsistence is
a moral wrong. We have no business to have any slums, or sweating
dens, or able-bodied unemployed, or paupers. Poverty, dulness of
brain, and coarseness of habit are often found in close association.
Some amount of material endowment is required even for the development
of the intelligence and the training of the moral faculties. Wealth
possesses no value in itself; it only possesses value as a means to
more abundant life. If there is one thing upon which Christianity
insists more than another, it is the duty of caring for the weak and
sinful, but at present this duty is only recognised to a very limited
extent.
+Christianity and Collectivism.+--In what I am now saying I am well
aware that I have come to a phase of my subject which thousands of my
countrymen are stating so clearly and forcibly as to compel attention;
but what I want to show is that the present unideal condition of the
civilised world is an indictment of the churches and their conventional
doctrines. We seem to have forgotten our origin. I have long felt, as
I suppose every Christian minister must feel, the antagonism between
the Christian standard of conduct and that required in ordinary
business life. There is no blinking the fact that the standard of
Christ and the standard of the commercial world are not the same. Our
work is to make them the same, and to that end we must destroy the
social system which makes selfishness the rule and compels a man to act
upon his lower motives, and we must put a better in its place. We must
establish a social order wherein a man can be free to be his best, and
to give his best to the community without crushing or destroying anyone
else. In a word we want Collectivism in the place of competition; we
want the kingdom of God. Charity is no remedy for our social ills and
their moral outcome; the only remedy is a new social organisation on a
Christian basis. I do not believe that any form of Collectivism, as a
mere system superposed from without, can ever really make the world
happy; it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood working
from within. Neither do I feel much faith in any sudden and
cataclysmic reformation of society. The history of Christendom proves
that no institution can be much in advance of human nature and survive.
Covenanters and Puritans found that out when they tried to make men
godly by Act of Parliament; Savonarola found it out when the wild
passions of the Florentines, restrained for a brief hour, broke their
chains and destroyed him; the Christians of New Testament times found
it out when their beautiful experiment of social brotherhood came to an
end in the horror and darkness of the break-up of Jewish national life.
But at least we can recognise the presence of the guiding Spirit of God
in all our social concerns and work along with it for the realisation
of the ideal of universal brotherhood. We can show men what Jesus
really came to do, and, as His servants, we can help Him to do it. We
can definitely recognise that the movement toward social regeneration
is really and truly a spiritual movement, and that it must never be
captured by materialism. I deplore the fact that, for the moment, the
main current of the great Labour movement which, perhaps more than any
other, represents the social application of the Christian ideal, should
appear to be out of touch with organised religion. This cannot
continue, for I observe that the men who lead it are men of moral
passion, and often men of simple religious faith. It could hardly be
otherwise. It seems to me in the nature of things impossible to
sustain a belief in the moral ideal without some kind of belief in God,
and assuredly God is with these men in the work they are doing and have
yet to do. In fact, the Labour Party is itself a Church, in the sense
in which that word was originally used, for it represents the
getting-together of those who want to bring about the kingdom of God.
+The New Theology and Collectivism.+--The New Theology, as I understand
it, is the theology of this movement, whether the movement knows it or
not, for it is essentially the gospel of the kingdom of God. No lesser
theology can consistently claim to be this; systems of belief which are
weighted by dogmatic considerations have not and cannot have the same
power of appeal. This higher, wider truth, which sweeps away the
mischievous accretions which have made religion distasteful to the
masses, is religious articulation of the movement toward an ideal
social order. This fact ought to be realised and brought home to the
consciousness of the earnest men who are labouring to redeem England
and the world from the power of all that tortures and degrades humanity
and stifles or destroys its best life.
This, then, is the mission of the New Theology. It is to brighten and
keep burning the flame of the spiritual ideal in the midst of the
mighty social movement which is now in progress. It is ours to see God
in it and help mankind to see Him too. It is ours to show what the
gospel really is and has been from the first. We shall not suffer the
world any longer to believe that Christianity and dogma mean the same
thing. Our business is to show that the religion of Jesus is primarily
a gospel for this life and only secondarily for the life to come. We
have to demonstrate that material things have spiritual meanings, and
that wealth has value only as it ministers to soul power. We have to
make clear to the world that the reason why we want to lift any man up
and give him a chance of a better and happier life here is because he
has an immortal destiny and must make a beginning somewhere if he is to
reach the stature of the perfect man at last. We believe that faith is
the one indispensable qualification for this work, as for any work that
is worth the doing, or ever has been worth the doing, in the history of
mankind. It is the victory that overcometh the world.
CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSION
+A personal word.+--The task which has occupied the greater part of my
winter resting time has now been accomplished, as far as opportunity
affords. What has been said in these pages is no more than an outline
statement of the teaching which has been given from the City Temple
pulpit ever since I came into it. There is not a single thought in
this book with which my own people are not already quite familiar, and
chapter and verse for it can be produced from my published sermons
which have been appearing week by week for years past in the _Christian
Commonwealth_ and other periodicals. If space had permitted, I should
like to have said much more, for necessarily many phases of the subject
have had to be left untouched; it has only been possible to deal with
those of fundamental importance. For example, I should like to have
included some examination of the great question of Miracles, the place
of Prayer in Christian experience, and the value and significance of
Biblical Criticism. But as it has not been possible to do this I must
add a word or two to indicate my position in regard to these matters.
+Miracle.+--It seems probable that before long we shall see a
rehabilitation of belief in the credibility of certain kinds of
miracle, and that this rehabilitation will proceed from the side of
psychical science. Already there are signs that this rehabilitation is
on the way. The power of mind over matter is being recognised for
therapeutic purposes, for instance, in a way hitherto undreamed of, and
is receiving a large and increasing measure of attention from the
medical profession. This appears to me to throw a considerable amount
of light upon the healing ministry of Jesus, which, as the late
Professor A. B. Bruce has pointed out, rests upon as good historical
ground as the best-accredited parts of the teaching. Given a time and
a mental atmosphere in which men expected miracles of this sort, and
given a personality of such wonderful magnetic force as that of Jesus,
such miracles would be sure to happen. That they did not happen apart
from such conditions is evident from such hints as the statement that,
"He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief." There
are other kinds of miracle recorded in scripture which are not so
easily credible, but I am not always prepared to brush them aside as
mere childish fancies. As a rule it will be found that they belong to
the poetry of religious experience, and that some valuable truth is
contained in this particular form of statement. To this order belong
the accounts about the horses and chariots of fire on the hillside
round about Elisha, the whirlwind in which Elijah ascended to heaven,
and Jesus walking on the sea. These accounts are forms in which the
oriental imagination is, even to-day, wont to clothe truths too great
for prosaic statement; they are poetry, not history, and the western
mind ought to make allowance for the fact. Sometimes we can discern in
scripture records of an event, which to the stolid western imagination
seems utterly incredible, a genuine historical truth. Such, for
instance, are the passage of the Red Sea--a stirring and dramatic
incident, thoroughly well told--and Joshua commanding the sun and moon
to stand still. In the latter case we have two lines of poetry from a
book which has been lost, and a comparison with similar poetry in
almost any literature gives us a clew to its meaning. The poet
represents the old warrior as declaring in magnificent style that the
sun of Israel shall not go down, and that day and night shall be alike
to him until her enemies are discomfited. Any reader with a shred of
sympathetic imagination ought to be able to feel the force of the
sentiment which provoked this utterance without either accepting or
rejecting it as a literal statement of fact; the best things which have
been written in the books of the world are seldom literal and exact
statements of fact. It has been well pointed out that myth and legend
are truer than history, for they take us to the inside of things,
whereas history only shows us the outside.
+Prayer.+--Prayer is a vital necessity to religious experience, and
without it no religious experience has ever existed or ever can. It is
not primarily petition but communion with God. Our intercourse with
our friends does not chiefly consist in asking them for things! But
when communion does become petition, there is a real place for it as
well as for the answer to such prayer. It is not too much to say that
no true prayer has ever gone without its answer. This is quite
consistent with the assertion that prayer does not change God; it only
affords Him opportunity. It is impossible to improve on what God
already desires for us before we pray, but upon our prayer depends the
realisation of that desire. Everything that the soul can possibly need
is present beforehand in the eternal reality, and the prayer of faith
is like going into a treasure-house and bringing forth from what is
contained therein all that the soul needs day by day. Prayer,
therefore, cannot be too definite, but it should be as unselfish as the
worshipper can make it in order that the highest can operate in
response. The same law holds good in this as in all other activities
of the soul; selfishness draws away from the source of life, whereas
love is instantly at one with infinity. I question whether many people
realise the enormous value of definite and systematic prayer; it is the
secret of all spiritual power. Everything that we can possibly want is
waiting for us in the bounty of God, and what we have to do is to go
and take it. "Believe that ye have received them and ye shall have
them."
+The Bible and the young.+--One thing that urgently needs to be done
for the young people in our Sunday-schools and various Christian
societies all over the world is to issue a series of well-written
popular manuals presenting in succinct form the best results of
Biblical Criticism. The way the Bible is taught to young people at
present is most regrettable, for in after years it leads them to doubt
and distrust the very foundations of Christianity. If the teachers
only had a little more intelligent acquaintance with the sources of the
scriptures, this danger would be avoided and the Bible would become a
far more interesting and helpful book both to young and old. At
present it is interpreted by many people in a way which is an insult to
the intelligence and harmful to the moral sense. Will anyone seriously
maintain that the trickeries of Jacob and the butcheries following the
Israelitish invasion of Canaan, not to speak of the obscenities which
are to be found in so many parts of the Old Testament, are healthy
reading for children or a mark of divine inspiration? Is it not time
we adopted the more excellent way of facing the truth about the Bible
records and presenting what is valuable in such a way as to help and
not to hinder the growth of a true knowledge of the relations of God
and man?
In conclusion, let me say emphatically that no one but myself is
responsible for a single word in this book. Among the many wild and
unjust criticisms which have been published concerning my views, none
is wider of the mark than that I have borrowed from this man or that in
my statement of them. I am not conscious of owing a scintilla of my
theology to any living man. In so far as it coincides with anyone
else's views I am thankful, for it shows that the same eternal Spirit
of Truth is speaking to others than myself. But I hope I may be
permitted to say with due humility that in thinking out my position, "I
conferred not with flesh and blood." Perhaps some people will maintain
that this makes my teaching all the worse, but if so I cannot help it.
It can hardly be denied that in its main bearing, to say no more, it is
seen to be rising spontaneously in every part of the civilised world.
Again, no thinker can ever succeed in completely closing the circle of
his system of thought, and I cannot claim to be an exception. But I
trust it will be seen that what is contained in this book is at least a
self-consistent whole: every arc of the circle implies every other. It
only remains to reiterate my conviction that the movement represented
by the New Theology is only incidentally theological at all; it is
primarily a moral and spiritual movement. It is one symptom of a great
religious awakening which in the end will re-inspire civilisation with
a living faith in God and the spiritual meaning of life. If what I am
trying to do can contribute in any way toward this grand result, I
shall be humbly thankful to the Giver of all good.
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