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  WRITINGS OF FRANCIS J MCCONNELL
  by Francis J. Mcconnell
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A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by Francis J.
Mcconnell, compiled for study and devotional reading.

  Chapters: 23

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00.00. McConnell, Francis J. - Library
    2. 01.00. The Christlike God
    3. 01.01.     Chapter 01
    4. 01.02.     Chapter 02
    5. 01.03.     Chapter 03
    6. 01.04.     Chapter 04
    7. 01.05.     Chapter 05
    8. 01.06.     Chapter 06
    9. 01.07.     Chapter 07
   10. 01.08.     Chapter 08
   11. 01.09.     Chapter 09
   12. 01.10.     Chapter 10
   13. 01.11.     Chapter 11
   14. 01.12.     Chapter 12
   15. 01.13.     Chapter 13
   16. 01.14.     Chapter 14
   17. 02.00. Understanding the Scriptures
   18. 02.01.     Preliminary
   19. 02.02.     The Book of Life
   20. 02.03.     The Book of Humanity
   21. 02.04.     The Book of God
   22. 02.05.     The Book of Christ
   23. 02.06.     The Book of the Cross

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  CHAPTER 1: 00.00. MCCONNELL, FRANCIS J. - LIBRARY
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McConnell, Francis J. - Library McConnell, Francis J. - The Christlike God
McConnell, Francis J. - Understanding the Scriptures


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  CHAPTER 2: 01.00. THE CHRISTLIKE GOD
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The Christlike God: A Survey of the Divine Attributes from a Christian point of
View BY FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal
Church THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1927, by.

.All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian Printed In the United States of America

773221 To

E. H. McC.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. Introductory II. The Divine Personality II The Divine Unity IV. The Divine
Unchangeableness V. The Divine Power VI. The Divine Knowledge VII. The Divine
Omnipresence VIII. The Divine Immanence IX. The Divine Transcendence X. The
Divine Creator XI. The Divine King XII. The Divine Father XIII. The Divine
Coworker XIV. The Divine Friend

NOTE

WE can sometimes get the point of view of an author more quickly if we know what
he is not trying to do. In this book I am not trying to prove anything. I am not
seeking to prove the existence of God, or the primacy of the ethical attributes
in the character of God, or the Christlikeness of God. Assuming such
Christlikeness, I am simply trying to see whither it will lead us in our thought
of God. I seek to follow out implications and not to adduce proofs.

FRANCIS J. McCoNNELL.


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  CHAPTER 3: 01.01.     CHAPTER 01
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CHAPTER I THE CHRISTLIKE GOD

INTRODUCTORY FOR a good many years I have been holding interviews with young
people about the problems of religious experience and theory. Very often I am
asked by these younger persons and by older ones too, for that matter -why the
church, and particularly the theologians, insist so stubbornly upon such
features as the miraculous in the story of Jesus. The questioners say that there
is so much in the life of Jesus that we can accept without taking miracle also!
The wisdom and strength and beauty of the words and life and sacrifice of Jesus
set before us an admittedly ideal character. Why not take Jesus just as the one
complete life and try to make that life our own? This question is being urged
to-day with such sincerity that we must face it, and face it sympathetically. It
does not grow out of a mood of doubt. It may not be the voice of skepticism at
all, but of belief belief in the possibilities of human nature, belief in the
laws in the midst of which we live, belief in the instability of a perfect
character. There is indeed a measure of justice in an impatience against
dogmatists who will have it that if we cannot have a miraculous Christ we cannot
have any Christ, in face of the fact that the picture of the Christ is actually
before us, and that multitudes do take him as the perfect ideal without
reference to the miraculous. Some of the defenders of the miraculous to-day
speak so mechanically as to create a much less vital spiritual impression than
do many of those who reject miracle outright.

I wish it understood that I am not now concerned with the miraculous as such
but, rather, with the question raised as to why believers in Christ hold fast to
miracle in their interpretation of him. The answer is, of course, that they hold
to miracle as a witness to divinity, and the answer makes it clear that there is
a sound aim back of much of the emphasis on miracle. The craving for marvel as
such for sign and wonder has no more spiritual value to-day than when Jesus
called the craving the mark of an evil and adulterous generation. All through
the history of religion the true priests of God have had to fight against this
hankering for some thing which is often but little better than magic. Still, if
we look at the defense of miracle at least implied in the great creedal
statements of the church, the intent of the defense is entirely clear, namely,
to connect Christ so closely with God that men can believe in a Christlike God.
The methods by which thinkers have sought to establish this connection have
often been faulty enough, because the general world view of the thinkers has
often been at fault. For example, men have at times believed that God once for
all created the world and then set it to go on by itself. The only way he could
get into it thereafter was thought of as through miracle. Hence, whatever seemed
natural about the life of Jesus was by its naturalness shut off from the divine.
The defenders of miracle were under a system of philosophy which almost forced
them to rely upon miracle as the only intelligible path through which God could
reach men, inadequate as that path is to us of a later day. By whatever means,
miraculous or otherwise, as have seemed adequate at the moment, the church has
always aimed to keep the connection of Christ and God the closest possible.
There has been no term of intimacy closer than that of Son, and the church has
always insisted upon calling Jesus the Son of God. It is the insistence that
must be kept in mind. If the form of philosophy of a period has lent itself
readily to making Jesus divine, that philosophy has been freely utilized, as
witness the use by the church of the Logos notion.

If the philosophy has not lent itself to the exaltation of Christ, the church
has affirmed his exaltation nevertheless, as in the deistic period noted above,
in which period, with natural processes represented as going on of themselves,
theology found the proof of Christ’s divinity in his miraculously breaking
through the natural processes. The attempt is always to carry Christ as close to
God as possible. If we think of God as triune, the Son is the second Person of
the Trinity. Some ardent teachers would almost make him the first Person, as did
a celebrated Methodist theologian who once spoke of Jesus as God Almighty. The
church has usually, however, condemned such extreme putting of Christ’s divinity
as heresy, insisting that this claim for Jesus would empty the word "Son" of its
essential force.

It is this insistence upon divinity that puzzles so many of the younger students
of the life of Christ. Why cannot we take that life, just as far as we can
interpret it into terms that we can understand, as a statement of the human
ideal? Some students can hardly restrain their resentment at the tendency to
deify Jesus, since that tendency seems to them to rob him of his supreme value
as a human ideal. To such students the tendency to make man into God seems not
much better than other attempts of the kind which were characteristic even of
the heathenism into which Christianity came. Critics point out to us that in the
early days of the church it was quite common even for popular thought to deify a
man. On that memorable occasion in Paul’s missionary journey through South
Galatia when the multitudes called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Mercury, they were
acting true to that idea of their time which conceived of gods as capable of
appearing in human form, and which found it easy to believe that a man could
become a god. Is not this tendency to deify Jesus more heathen than Christian?
Are we not most truly Christian when we cut loose from a heathen propensity and
take Jesus simply for the character that he was and for the ideal that he is?

I would not discourage anyone from making the utmost of the human ideal set
before us in Jesus, but the present-day protest against conceiving of him as
divine does not quite meet the point. There can be no doubt that the early
church and the church in all later ages, indeed has sought to give Jesus highest
honor; but the explanations which would account for the doctrine of his divinity
merely in terms of a desire to honor him fall short. It is true that the more
the significance of Jesus grew upon the mind of the church the larger the terms
used to describe him. Prophet, Messiah, victor-over-death, virgin-born, Son of
God, Logos, second Person of the Trinity all indicate the increasing depth of
the impression which Jesus has made upon the church; and these are all terms of
honor, but their significance is more than honorific.

Why is it, then, that the church holds so tightly to the terms and Scriptures
and theologies which conceive of Jesus as divine, if it is not to honor Jesus?
The answer is, not that the church is trying to lift Christ up to God, but to
think of God in terms of Christ. The essential is not merely the Godlikeness of
Christ but the Christlikeness of God. This may seem to be a fine point; but fine
as it may be it is significant just now as marking a shift in emphasis in
theological debate from that which we used to hear a quarter-century ago. The
former debate spoke in terms of the divinity, or deity, of Christ. The present
emphasis is on the Christlikeness of Deity. The course of church history does
indeed look as if men were trying to give increasing honor to Christ, but, after
all, the back-lying aim has been and is to interpret God in terms of Christ. The
various theological formulas have been so many instruments of such
interpretation. It is true that some thinkers have so spoken as to make the
theological phrasing an end-in-itself. Then we have had a predominantly
intellectualistic ecclesiasticism, with assent to a creed the official requisite
to salvation, and with neglect of the spiritual purpose of the intellectual
statement that purpose being the enforcement of the belief that God is like
Christ. All the elaborately contrived doctrines of miracle, of incarnation, of
trinity, of atonement, no matter how difficult to understand intellectually, are
clear enough in their central intent, namely, to show God in Christ. Understand,
I do not for a moment maintain that the soundness of the aim makes the methods
intellectually sound. Back in the early ages of the church there were some
probably only a few thinkers who taught that Satan had a claim on the souls of
men which only the death of the Son of God could satisfy, and that God met the
obligation by sending the Son to the cross. As an intellectual construetion this
theory arouses only amused pity to-day, but its aim is as self-evident as that
of any theory of atonement ever built, namely, to declare that God himself will
do whatever is necessary for the salvation of men. All our formal theological
creeds may be likewise inadequate as creeds, but all that are central aim at
enforcing the belief that not only in Christ do we see God, but in God we see
Christ.

What is the difference between the older emphasis and the newer? Not much in
actual statement, and yet a good deal in focus and perspective. If we think of
the teaching of the divinity of Christ as resulting from progressive exaltation
of Christ, we may think of God as, indeed, including Christ, but as including
much besides with God as an all inclusive Absolute reconciling everything in
himself. If in God we see essential Christlikeness, the focus is a little
different. Christ is of God as the center of his being, the Word which is
constantly in the Divine Mind. In short, the Christlikeness of God has been
central to Christianity, and the church will not likely surrender a theology
which seems to defend this Christlikeness except for a theology which defends it
better. That such better statements will be forthcoming in the future I see no
reason to doubt. Every age must phrase the Christlikeness of God in its own
terms, and even the best formulations thus far made leave much to be desired. I
repeat that we must keep clear the difference between the aim of the formulas
and the formulas themselves. An intellectualist might revel in a formal theology
without a trace of interest in the Christlikeness of God, and a firm believer in
such Christlikeness might regard all the formal creeds with weariness and
distaste. It is the intention of the present treatment to look at the commoner
philosophical and theological statements about God the so called "attributes of
God" to see how they must be interpreted if we think of God as Christ like.

Someone declares, however, that he is not yet satisfied with thus raising
question about God when we study Christ. Are we not wiser, at least more
sensible, to keep close to the Christ of the human ideal? Why is it necessary to
take on all these theories of the divinity of Jesus when the splendid humanity
of Jesus stands on its own right before us? To which I reply that I am not
trying to get anyone to accept theories of the divinity of Jesus. I am trying
instead to show the direction in which these theories point. They who insist on
the humanity of Jesus must not forget that this humanity itself is always
pointing out beyond itself and is in part responsible for the theories. The very
perfection of the humanity starts theories of divinity. I repeat, however, that
I am not concerned with the theories as such. They may all be true or all false,
or some may be true and some may be false, or all may be partly true and partly
false; at the best all are inadequate. As theories they have to stand or fall on
their intellectual and logical merits, but I am not now thinking of their logic.
I am thinking of them as effects of a cause. That cause is the conviction that
God is like unto Christ, and that in Christ we find God. As long as the church
holds to that aconvietion theologies will be forthcoming to attempt to explain
the relation of Christ to God; but I am not to concern myself in this treatment
with the theologies, except to ask whether they themselves square with their own
fundamental aim, to establish the Christlikeness of God. AN IRREPRESSIBLE
QUESTION

Why should we, however, keep raising the question about God? Because that is the
one question with which every age is sooner or later concerned, and that is the
question especially before our own age. I said a moment ago that young people
are peculiarly prone to impatience with theological inquiries, by which I mean
that they are impatient with the conventional and technical theological phrasing
of inquiries. Young people of to-day, nevertheless, are always asking about God.
Even if they take Jesus just as the human ideal they cannot move an inch into
the study of Jesus without having questions about God arise squarely across the
path. The question as to the Divine Nature is more and more insistent to-day.
The demand is not so much for a proof of the existence of God as for a
conception of his character in which we can trust. I do not know that there is
much out-and-out materialism in current philosophy. The fact that the universe
is intelligible at all means to most thinkers that it is founded in thought. The
difficulty is with the nature of the Thinker or rather of the Doer. The universe
may be uttering speech and intelligible speech up to a point, but is the speech
worth listening to? At the same moment that the universe is more and more
conceded to be the expression of thought, there is more and more doubt as to
whether the thought is worth expressing.

It may be that the whole thought is too large for our grasp. We may be like
children who have learned to read without yet being able to master the meaning
of the whole volume, or page, or sentence. We know what the words mean, but the
sentences are still too vast for us. Or it may be that some meanings of the
universe are not intended for us at all, or not intended for us yet. For
example, we used to conceive of the material universe as created primarily for
men. Everything in the universe was to be judged by its fitness for a human
purpose. We should with difficulty hold such a view to-day. It is open to us to
believe that everything in the universe is to be judged by its reference to the
purposes of persons or a Person but hardly by reference to human persons. This
world may, indeed, be just the kind of world best fitted for the moral training
of men, at least in the first steps of that training, but could that have been
the only purpose in the creation of the world? It is a marvelous power that mind
has of reading off some information concerning an astronomical universe which
can be measured only in "light-years," but we cannot believe that the
immeasurable reaches of stellar space were put forth just to exercise the mind
of man. This does not at all imply that I would belittle the human intelligence.
The physical home of man may indeed be an insignificant, off-the-road corner in
space, but the mind that can find that out is not itself insignificant, and the
power to read off the messages as to the distances of the stars, and their
constitution, and their probable past and future, makes this speck of cosmic
dust on which we spin through space of mighty meaning. Still, one of the tokens
of the greatness of the mind of man is its unwillingness to believe that all
this physical universe exists merely that man may understand it. The universe
may well be the best for the purpose of man’s moral development, but one sign of
that fitness might be that it was not intended for man alone. In some respects
the universe seems to be what it is and to do what it does pretty much on its
own account it being the privilege of man to fit himself into the scheme of
things as best he may. The further his knowledge reaches the further the spread
of the unknown out beyond. The more he learns the more there is to learn, which
is to say, the more he learns the less he knows. For with the increase of the
knowledge of the processes by which the world moves there is the increase of the
sorrow which arises from increasing inability to make out what it is all about.
Knowledge in any field leadeth to mystery.

There is not much need of my speaking of the problem of pain, except to say that
we are about as far off from understanding its purpose as the first man who ever
felt a twinge or an ache. Oh, of course, we may prattle glibly about the
beneficent uses of pain about its efficacy as a warning, and about its being the
foil against which we know pleasure; and all this has its trace of value. Here,
again, however, it seems most reasonable to say that we find ourselves in a
universe in which pain is a feature, and that we adjust ourselves to pain and
make what use of it we can. In the life of almost any individual there is more
pain than he can use for moral and spiritual purposes. With many it comes in
such volume as to leave no strength for learning any lessons; and with some its
usefulness as a warning is marred by the fact that it starts too late and
continues so long as to be worse than the danger it is warning against. If we
should see medicinal plants growing by the ten million and then conclude that
these plants were for the healing of men whose numbers never reach beyond a few
score, we should probably soon revise our conclusion into the more modest one
that the plants are here and the men can use them. Minimize the fact of pain all
we can, discount it as much as we please, there is still more left than we can
explain on any theory that the race has yet heard. Moreover, when we think of
animal pain, where presumably no moral values are being wrought out, the mystery
becomes densely opaque. A world in which men suffer for the sake of moral
development could be construed in intelligible terms, if the development and the
suffering were in some reasonable proportion to one another; but on the problem
of animal suffering all human wisdom is dumb. There is simply no making anything
of it by man’s reason.

Men have about given up the possibility of finding a God whom they can fully
understand. Of old it was said that his thoughts are not as our thoughts nor his
ways like our ways. The search, then, has become that for a God whom we can
trust, when we cannot understand him. If, indeed, men are what the Christian
revelation conceives them to be immortal beings with illimitable reaches of
possible development before them they can well afford to possess their souls in
patience while waiting for larger light. They could have no ground of complaint
if the Divine Being placed them for a time in conditions which they could not
possibly understand. There might be every reason in the divine wisdom for doing
thus. The earth might be the best conceivable place in which to start a race
like ours and yet have a score of other purposes with little connection with
men. So our demand for Christ to-day comes not out of the evidences of order we
see in the world, but out of the meaninglessness of the world for our minds. If
a believer declares that he discerns the evidences of reason in the world and
that therefore he accepts the Christian revelation of God, well and good; but
for most men the actual movement of thought is not so much from a world of
reason to a God whom they can understand, as from a world of mystery to a God
whom they cannot understand, but whom they can trust. If God is like unto
Christ, in some respects the mystery becomes deeper than ever, but to a God in
Christ we can certainly fasten our faith. Our confidence increases at the moment
when our knowledge shrinks. THE SEARCH FOR POWER The other important reason for
accepting God as in Christ comes out of the difficulty of realizing in our lives
that human ideal which we spoke of as in Christ, as long as we take Christ
merely as an ideal. I repeat again that I have not the slightest objection to
what might be called the total humanizing of the Christ life in regard to its
actual earthly conditions. I mean by this the explanation of miracle, for
example, in terms of laws which may be intelligible to us, though my
expectations in this regard are slight indeed. I at present see no way of
accounting for the miracles of Jesus by any laws now in our grasp, but I have no
objection to such interpretations if they can bear the weight necessarily put
upon them. I mean that the divineness of the life in Christ might conceivably be
expressed so humanly as to enforce the fine word of Dr. Henry van Dyke that in
Christ we see the human side of God himself, as if humanity were an essential of
the divine life. Strip the life of Jesus of everything suggestive of physical
miracle; let everything come within the range of the human, so to speak would
that of itself make the ideal in Christ an imitable ideal, capable of being
seized and lived out into expression by men on earth? I do not think so. Power
to attain the ideal might be lacking. The ideal would, indeed, be most glorious
to contemplate, but there would be nothing in it itself to make one like unto
it. The more complete the perfection of the ideal the more likely would it be to
discourage the ordinary man. We have geniuses in the realms of literature and
art and of invention. It is indeed sound advice to tell the young mind to
imitate Shakespeare, or Michael Angelo, or Watt, but the more the ordinary mind
learns about genius the more it despairs of imitation. Genius is, indeed, full
of light for the guidance of men, but it is not largely imitable in those
characteristics which make it genius. How often we have heard a man great in art
or practical achievement try to tell the secret of his own success! What
platitudes he utters! He tells us, it may be, that his success is due to hard
work. No doubt he would not have succeeded if he had not worked, but that
explanation gets us nowhere. The great man himself does not know his own secret.
His achievement may stand out clearly as a benefaction to all mankind to the end
of time, but his own genius cannot be reproduced by others.

Now, this is especially true in the realm of character. Character can be
imitated only to a slight degree. Moreover, the wear and tear of daily living is
such that men tire out in the pursuit of the good life. With the best intentions
men get discouraged by repeated failures. They do not definitely give up, it may
be, but they loosen hold of the higher principles and cease to care. The chief
tragedies of the moral life come of this moral weariness. The most deadening
question one can ask as to the moral life is "What is the use?" When life is
young there is a tingle about the moral battle on its own account; but the years
come on without fail. All sorts of compromises have to be made as practical
adjustments to the world in which we live. Legitimate hopes are thwarted, griefs
settle down upon us, power begins to slacken. The mockery of death is on every
hand. Then comes the question, "What is the use?" This does not mean that a man
who has fought a noble battle all his life is about to cease fighting. It does
not mean that he will give himself up to selfish indulgence. It does mean that
he has lost the zest of the moral struggle. He may hang on grimly to the end,
but with the inner fire burning low. To exhort such a man to imitate Christ is
about like advising a poor artist who has come to middle life with a sense of
failure to imitate Raphael. He would gladly imitate Christ if he could, but he
lacks the power.

I do not wish my putting of this matter to be so extreme as to leave the
impression that every man who imitates Christ as a human ideal comes thus to
despair. There are rare souls who find in what seems to them the meaninglessness
of the universe a challenge to inner rectitude. They look to the coming of night
without dismay. They greet death and everything else with a cheer. They aver
that if the moral life is to be but for a few brief instants, they will
nevertheless hold these instants as the supreme opportunity. They ask nothing
but the chance at such instants.

It is the custom in some quarters not to take profession of devotion to this
gloomy creed very seriously. There is indeed about a good deal of such
profession a suggestion of moral snobbery, as if the devotees scorned the moral
aids which common folk need, and gave themselves to a high and rarified morality
on its own account. Moreover, while it seems unfair to say so, some of the
adherents to this set of negations make free and easy adjustments to the present
order of things, adjustments which do not suggest any desperate moral rigor in
practice.

Still, the statement of devotion to the moral values on their own account is not
to be dismissed lightly. There is so much in religious thought and practice not
moral at all that it is a relief to find the moral on its own account so
exalted. It is as if one should say that these moral values themselves are of
such consequence that a few fleeting instants of gazing upon them are worth more
than eternities of contemplation of all other values whatsoever. The moral
ideals belong to the timeless realm, though we may have no considerable chance
to think of them. Now, I repeat there is a worth here that we must not forget.
In the Christian system the moral realities stand at the center, and stand there
on their own account. Some philosophers are seriously and sincerely trying to
strip those realities of everything which they consider nonessential. Can they,
however, carry the stripping process so far? Does moral value remain valuable
when it is thus taken by itself without clear relation to the system of
actualities, or with apparently so little essential connection with that system?
These thinkers all seem hesitant to push a like stripping process to other
values. Take the intellectual values. All thinkers, of course, insist upon
truth, else there would be no reason for debating. How long could they preach an
utter devotion to truth if they did not believe in truth as holding for the
system of things? Of course one may say, as did John Stuart Mill, that two and
two may make five in some other planet, but nobody will take that seriously.
Truth, however, insists upon being taken seriously. The scientist may, indeed,
be discovering truths of only relative importance, but underneath all his study
is the assumption of law that holds throughout the universe. Just how long
science would go forward if there were no assumption of such law is doubtful.

It is interesting to note what a tough problem this question as to truth
constitutes for those who protest that moral values are not necessarily to be
conceived of as holding good for a universe. Think of the plight of those
moralists whose morality is avowedly a lack of morality. Their advice is that
men follow out each his own impulses, no matter what those impulses may be. In
contemplating the consequences of such advice the advisers are marvelously
complacent at breaches of customary morality having to do with sex relations,
for example, but they do not seem so enthusiastic in advising men to tell lies,
if the impulse toward self-realization takes the direction of lying. At least
they would not advise too many freedom-seekers to take to lying at the same
time. The reason, of course, is that if there are too many liars there is no
basis for living together, or getting along together in communities whatever.
If, however, we should follow out the implications of the ordinary, everyday
assumption that men are telling the truth we should find that those assumptions
carry us pretty far. The pursuit of truth as an ideal, and the assumption of
truth as a basis for getting along together, are in scientific and practical
life precisely similar to that which we make in the religious life when we
conceive of God as like Christ. The assumption is necessary hi each realm to
make the life in that realm scientific search, or practical activity, or the
imitation of the human ideal in Christ worth while. At this juncture someone
remarks that as a matter-of-fact the ordinary religious life that is to say, the
life of the ordinary believer makes no assumptions whatever, or no reasoned
assumptions. I am willing to concede this. Any minister who has served for any
length of time in pastorates knows the haphazard, hand-to-mouth existence in
spiritual concerns characteristic of masses of church attendants. What religious
experience there is in many such lives began with the conventional instruction
in the home or at Bible School and went but a little distance at the best. The
life is lived in unconscious dependence upon spiritual food picked up here and
there, upon the religious atmosphere of the church community, upon prayer which
may never be very serious except in moments of real or imagined crisis. In other
words, men live in the realm of religious experience just about as in the other
realms. They are not careful reasoners, or reasoners at all. Their loyalty to
their country, for example, and their loyalty to their church are much of a
piece. There can be no doubt of either loyalty, nor can there be any doubt of
their embarrassment if they are asked to give reasons for their patriotism or
their faith. The ordinary human being does not tend to philosophizing, or even
to intense thoughtfulness, in any phase of his daily experience.

Still, there are unconscious assumptions even in such experience. The ordinary
believer has, in evangelical circles, connected Christ with God. To be sure, his
notion is altogether unsystematic, but the notion is real, nevertheless. Speak
to him of’ cutting that connection and he is at a loss. He may not be able to
tell why the connection should not be cut, but he does not wish it cut. Under
pressure he will accept, or hospitably listen to, the crudest theories of
Christ’s divinity rather than give up that divinity. Or, if he cannot believe in
the divinity in the old form, he is likely to become increasingly indifferent to
all religious appeal.

Now there are, in spite of this attitude of unreasoned assumption on the part of
masses of believers, increasing numbers of persons who do try to think as far as
thought will carry them in religion. Such persons desire to scrutinize the
assumptions they make and to pull them out into the full light. They find it
increasingly hard to follow an ideal as a bare ideal. They are honest enough
with themselves to recognize that they need help. They find help in the belief
that God himself is like unto the Christ they are trying to follow.

We are not yet through with objections. This type of help is not itself an aid
to some. It seems to suggest that a man is not himself adequate to the moral
task of living a life like that of Christ, and must look to a force not himself
to win the battle for him. That some Christian prayer and testimony do suggest
divine aid of dubious worth there can be no doubt, but I am not now thinking of
aid which comes as some miraculous increase of the soul’s forces. I have in mind
the encouragement and spiritual strength which reach men in the moral struggle
from reliance on the revelation of God in Christ.

Think how much depends in the moral struggle upon our conception of God, or upon
our conception of the nature of the universe if we will not admit the existence
of God. Let the moral ideal stand out before us, on its own account. I do not
see how we can escape asking ourselves as to the significance of that ideal for
the universe itself. It is all well enough to say that the ideal is what it is
on its own account, but the questions surge up nevertheless. Has the ideal no
meaning for the universe outside ourselves? I repeat that this question is just
as relevant as that of the scientist as to whether the laws which he finds in
his laboratory hold good outside the laboratory.

Further, there are intimate problems affecting peace of conscience in relation
to the ideal. What about mistakes and failures past, present, and to come? The
system of nature, if it is only a system of law, picks up mistakes and successes
alike and carries them out to consequences. Here, again, we are reminded that
the moral ideal is an end-in-itself and so on and on. The question, however,
will not down. Is the universe in which we live friendly to the pursuit of the
moral ideal? Does it make any difference to the universe whether a man tries to
be righteous or not? Is the world in which we are placed kindly to the man who
makes mistakes, or hostile, or indifferent? Is a new start after a blunder
possible? Or does the blunder trail forever at our heels? I admit again and
again that I am quite aware that all this means just nothing at all to hosts of
conventionally good people. Such persons, important and indispensable as they
are, do not take the moral struggle with the seriousness of the fundamentally
moral man moral in the same degree of earnestness that marks genuine artists or
scientists in pursuit of ideals. The moral ideal of Christianity is not that of
a merely conventional code. The ordinary man I mean the ordinary man so far as
his devotion to his moral ideals is concerned does the best he can and lets it
go at that. His advice for those who make mistakes is to set them right as far
as possible and then forget them. I do not declaim against this mood, but I do
insist that it does not contain within itself the promise of moral advance for
the seriously minded, for whom the ideal is ever reaching out beyond, or,
rather, stretching back toward them from beyond their reach. We who try to take
the moral ideal seriously arise in the morning and think that we shall be nearer
the goal at nightfall, but sunset finds the goal far beyond where it appeared at
sunrise. The longer we live the more unworthy we appear to ourselves when
compared with the ideal we have sought. As with the individual so with the race.
Leaders have always avowed that just over the next hill has lain Utopia, but
when men have mounted the hill, not hills but mountains lie farther beyond.
True, we make advance. Looking back over the road we see that we have indeed
come a long distance, but the longer we go the longer seems the distance yet to
travel. Thousands of years from now the teachers of individual and social
morality will tell men that the world of moral conquest has hardly begun. There
is no discharge in this war. If it be asked how the case is any different hi the
realm of morals than in science, we admit that the pursuit of the scientific
ideal is likewise without end, but the scientist more readily assumes that the
universe is friendly to his task. It does not seem an effort or strain to him to
believe that law reigns throughout the universe. Say what he will, that
assumption underlies all that he does. Moreover, his failures do not carry with
them such a sense of ill-desert. His mistakes do not haunt his memory. He is
whole-heartedly devoted to his task and does not worry over failures. Why cannot
the moralist likewise take his own good intentions for granted and cease to
worry? Of course he can do this even if he feels that he is in a hostile
universe. He can defy the universe, making allowances in his own mind for his
own mistakes, rejoicing in his own strength. This, however, is in the end likely
to be futile, especially if we are trying to build up a moral society. A man
might likewise defy society all his life in the name of a superior devotion to
morality. The spectacle would be bracing and exhilarating, but it would be
futile in the end. If we can make the assumption that the universe is at bottom
constitutionally moral, just as the .scientist assumes that it is
constitutionally intelligible, everything changes for the better. The moral
struggle seems to be worth while. We are helped not by some strength that
dynamically empowers us and carries us along by compulsion, but by the assurance
itself that we are on the right track and that we shall finally arrive. The
reenforcement of the soul comes through spiritual channels, through the
admission that the goal is, indeed, now far put of reach, but that our paths
lead toward it, that others are traveling thither, that all is in the hands of a
God like unto Christ, who takes intentions for deeds, who helps not by
miraculous wonders but by opening up the best in the life through spiritual
contacts. The struggle is stern enough at the best, but the sternness itself is
joy once the worthwhileness of the moral attempt becomes clear. If God is like
Christ, the attempt is surely worth while.

If, however, we only had a full revelation of what the life of Jesus was on
earth! The critics have so cut into the records that we cannot claim to know as
much about Jesus as we ought if we are to think of God as like unto him. We have
all found that the attempt to meet our moral duties by asking what Jesus would
do is empty, so far as getting light on a detailed situation is concerned. We
find it increasingly hard to know the mind of Christ. Has not an outstanding
scholar within the ranks of the church recently told us that even many of
Christ’s teachings about God show the limitations of the theology of his time?

All this has nothing to do with the main point I am trying to urge, namely, that
we have in Christ a revelation of God which we can trust when we do not
understand. Let us imagine, if our theology will not allow us to grant it, that
God could live on earth as a man. What should we desire most in God living under
human conditions? Should we ask for manifestations of power and of knowledge?
Probably we should; but when we had pulled ourselves together to ask the
question most worth while, what could we ask except as to a revelation of the
spirit in which the universe is carried forward? What does it all mean? At what
does it all aim? Does the moral spirit count? Is that the chief fact about the
universe?

I have read many protests against the claims for the divinity of Christ. I have
read very few based on the assumption that we do not have in Christ a revelation
of a spirit and temper which we should like to see established as holding good
for God. Can we think of any spirit which we should sooner see established at
the heart of the universe than that of Christ? Can we think of any purpose which
we should prefer to believe to be the purpose of God rather than the righteous
love revealed in Christ? The central spirit the moral quality of the life of
Christ is clear no matter whether we can find in the Gospels a detailed guide
for moral conduct or not. I admit the uselessness of asking what Jesus would do
as suggesting detailed commands as to what we should do. It is not possible to
make the Gospels a set of ethical regulations. All we can do is to catch the
spirit of Jesus and strive to live in that spirit. The only answer there can be
as to what Jesus would do, is that Jesus would do whatever we ought to do, if he
were put in our place.

I urge once more that this search for specific rules is off the track. We have
to find our own way through the detailed intricacies of the moral tangle for
ourselves. A codified set of rules for us might be completely disheartening.
What we crave is assurance as to the worthwhileness of our struggle. Probably it
is a mercy that we do not know more about the actual deeds of Jesus than we do,
for many of us are so literally minded, that, with more detail, we should miss
the spirit altogether. The Gospels set forth the spirit of Christ so that anyone
can follow him or accept him as the revelation of the nature of God himself.
Critical study of the Scriptures has only made this essential revelation
clearer.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 4: 01.02.     CHAPTER 02
========================================================================

CHAPTER II THE DIVINE PERSONALITY

EVEN at the cost of wearisome iteration I must make it clear that I am holding
up Christlikeness as a clue to the character of God, trying to see how we can
test the attributes usually called divine by the measure of likeness to Christ.
I am assuming that if we are to keep to the Christian idea of God we must
maintain that the moral attributes of God find their interpretation in Christ In
discussing his own theory of the relation of Christ to God, the late Dr. A. M.
Fairbairn drew a distinction between the ethical and the metaphysical attributes
of God, and made the metaphysical subordinate to and secondary to the ethical. I
think Fairbairn was on the right road. It is not necessary to subscribe to his
doctrine of Christ to see that his subordination of the metaphysical to the
ethical is fundamentally Christian. Of course we cannot formally prove the
subordination, but we cannot prove that God exists at all, for that matter. We
are trying to fashion the most adequate conception of God we can. Christianity
cannot be Christian if it does not put the moral attributes above all others in
its exposition of the divine.

We look first at the fundamental question of the personality of God, though, of
course, personality is something in itself and not an attribute. It is
instructive to note how many believers in Christ to-day actually speak of God as
impersonal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they shrink from
using the term "personal" in reference to God. A good deal of this hesitancy is
altogether intelligible. We often use the word "personal" to denote some of the
weaker aspects of human experience; memory, feeling, will-power are all subject
to such rise and fall of rhythm and are so dependent on material conditions both
inside and outside of our physical organisms that we draw back from speaking of
God as personal. The difficulty here manifestly arises through taking human
personality as the only form, of personality.. The subjection to physical
conditions may be merely a human limitation, while personality as such may be
self-consciousness and self-control, conceived of as in divine form above ebb or
flow. Some speak of God as being more than personality, which is correct enough
if we mean more than human personality.

I was not thinking, however, of the more than-personality idea when I spoke of
the many who accept Christ while denying personality to God. I had in mind those
who conceive of the forces of the universe as at bottom impersonal, the forces
themselves being either materialistic, or idealistic, or, in the latest
terminology, "neutral." They would be willing, many of them, to pronounce Christ
the finest flower of the universe, the apex and climax of creation, but they
would make him nevertheless the outcome of an impersonal process.

Now, in the Christian examination of various world-views the most important
question is as to the adequacy especially the moral adequacy of the views. The
emphasis is not primarily upon scientifically ascertained bodies of fact, or
upon strict logical processes, important as these are. The emphasis is upon
adequacy. A world-view may be in itself consistent enough, or it may be woven
throughout of excellent logical and scientific texture, but it may lack in size.
A naval architect might build a vessel according to the most approved designs
and yet never dream of starting the vessel across the Atlantic. It might not be
big enough for that. It might not be able to carry within itself its own
supplies. It might not be large enough to carry an engineer or a captain. Or
waiving the question of size, a view may not be adequate to the quality of a
result which it assumes to explain. The indifference of many thoughtful
Christians to arguments against Christianity finds its explanation here.
Contemplating the Christ, the Christian feels that the theory which would make
the determining forces of the universe impersonal is inadequate. The theory is
not big enough, and it is not good enough. The critic wonders if the Christian
can be sincere. Cannot anyone see the strength of the reasoning against
personality in God? The Christian may indeed be duly impressed by the logic, but
his answer is likely to be simply that the theory "won’t do." He has been
steeped in the mind and spirit of Christ so long that the magnitude and richness
of that mind and spirit are, for him, not to be accounted for on an impersonal
basis. In this the Christian is, after all, standing for a rational faith.

Faith of some sort is underneath all our world-views. We have to make
assumptions and ventures. Since we have to exercise faith in any event, the
rational course would seem to be to believe something worth believing. Consider
the strain upon a mind schooled in the study of the Christ to try to believe
that Christ is, after all, just the fine flower of the material forces. I
suppose that this would imply that the spiritual balance of Jesus was the
outcome of a phenomenally steady equilibrium in the part of the physical
universe with which he was connected, namely, his own physical organism. For the
period of a short life, but long enough to mark the destinies of the race, that
part of the physical universe which we could call the body of Jesus came into
such stability of equilibrium and such thorough symmetry that the Christ-life
was the result. The impatience of the Christian is not to be wondered at when he
hears theorizing like this. Of course I have put the materialistic position
baldly, but I have not done wrong to the essentials of such theory. Any
reasoning which puts the physical factors in the position of primary importance
is not caricatured by the above phrasing. All such theories have to maintain in
the end what they might as well say in the beginning that the Christ-life, and
all other lives filled with the Christ-spirit, are the outcome of the play of
physical forces reaching peculiarly happy results. There is nothing in the
reasoning to forbid the contention that with a different turn or twist the
forces might have come to as unhappy a result as in the career of Judas, for
example.

No, the theory won’t do. To be sure, anyone who recognizes the existence of
material forces at all has to make place for those forces. For Christianity the
incarnation means that matter can be used to set forth a moral and spiritual
revelation. Matter can be more honored and glorified in Christianity than in any
other view of the world. To make the material supreme, however, is for the
believer in Christ impossible. The believer does not feel called upon to meet
the materialistic reasoning step by step, though he is confident that the
reasoning can be met. He does not feel called upon to deny the pressure and
power of the physical. That would be absurd. He simply declares that to one who
thinks of God as Jesus thought of God, and set forth that thought in life, the
explanation of such thought and life in merely physical terms falls short. It
will not do.

Another form of impersonalism is idealistic. The fundamental fact in the world
is thought. By what seems to the plain man a most curious reversal of things as
they appear, thought in this idealism seems to precede thinkers. Common sense
would naturally conclude that before there can be thought there must be a
thinker, but impersonalism turns it all the other way around. Of course a theist
would say that before there can be a finite thinker there must be a thought in
the Divine Mind calling for the creation of that thinker. This, however, is not
what the impersonalist means. He means that thought somehow gets itself
personalized into thinkers.

Much Christian speech lends itself to this philosophy. We say that Christ is
Love Incarnate. We adore God as Wisdom and Love. All this is, indeed, without
thought of the logical implication, but aids the idea of God as impersonal. Here
again we pass by the merely philosophical argument and raise the question of
adequacy. We must think of God as adequate to the revelation in Christ. If
Christ is the Divine Wisdom and Love personalized, the divine itself has taken a
step forward in such personalization, for the concrete and personal are morally
more worthy than the abstract and impersonal. The situation here is not quite
the same as in the process of scientific generalization. In generalization the
scientist does indeed strip an idea of every possible vestige of the concrete,
for the sake of finding a formula which will prove good over the widest possible
area. The scientist is aware, however, that he does arrive at a generalization
by stripping off the concrete. He moves by emptying rather than by filling. The
generalization which he at last reaches may in its way be useful, but it is not
a creation. To return to the world which he has left the scientist has to put
back into place all that he took out. If he had nothing but the generalization
to work with, if all that he left out were to be blotted from his memory, he
could not find his way back at all, except possibly by the use of an imagination
which would have nothing to work on. Let a thinker abstract from all extended
objects everything except the one consideration that they are extended in space.
Grant for the sake of argument that those teachers are right who tell us that
our idea of space itself is built up by abstraction from extended objects. By
abstraction, then, we build up the idea of space. Now, what have we? An
interesting subject of thought, about which we can utter many profound
observations, but to make our observations of any consequence we have to get
back to the world which we left out. Our generalizations about space may indeed
supply us with material for noble contemplation, and may indeed quicken us to
many a thrill of intellectual delight, but the thrill, after all, has not much
tingle of actual life.

All this is suggestive for the moral and spiritual life. There is, indeed, a
glory about abstractions like Love, Righteousness, Justice, but these are
abstractions. We cannot get the God of Christ by abstraction, by dropping out
the concrete which is the glory of the Christ-life. If Christ is concrete love
while God is abstract love, then Christ is more than and better than God. Here,
again, we have a view which is inadequate. It will not do. An odd philosophical
theory has appeared in recent years which would have us believe that it is
neither materialistic nor idealistic. The ultimate basic realities are declared
to be "neutrals." What seems from one angle an impression on a photographic
apparatus is from another angle an impression on the retina of the eye. When the
eye sees the "neutral" it takes complete possession of a transparent bit of
reality just as the reality is. These neutrals follow one another in a constant
stream with more or less resemblance among themselves. What appears to be
identity is in the last analysis this likeness among the coming and going
neutrals. It is fair to say that the theory makes a distinction between
existence and value. In the midst of all this flow, the mind can seize truth
which is, on the value side, truth on its own account. There is room also,
according to the theory, for the beautiful and the good. As existence there is
no place for God, freedom, or immortality. In spite of this, however, one of the
leading expounders of the doctrine provides room for what he calls the free
man’s worship.

It requires no keen philosophical expertness to see that this doctrine has
appropriated outright the activity of mind with all its marvelous powers to
relate and to compare and to pass judgment. Just how we could ever use the word
"neutral" except as the expression of a judging mind is a mystery. To judge that
something is neutral is obviously to say that it is neither one thing nor
another, but this implies holding at least three things before the mind for
judgment, and this implies further some mental activity set over against
material on which it can act. The entire apparatus of mind and minds has to be
utilized to get this theory into operation.

It may seem odd that I mention the "neutrals" at all, since my aim is not
primarily philosophical, and since the theory itself avowedly makes no place for
the existence of God. I take the theory as suggesting a remark or two concerning
a type of thinking which to-day draws a line between judgments of value and
judgments as to existence. Many devout men, of high spiritual worth, seem
content to affirm judgments as to values without troubling themselves as to
whether anything corresponding to those values is to be found in actual
existence or not. The theory that I mention is attractive to them as suggesting
the worthiness of a life that stands over against a passing stream of
existences, each inconsequential in itself, each dying as soon as born, and
seizing out of the stream ideas of eternal value, the word "eternal" meaning not
endless existence, but timelessness, as of ideal value beyond time altogether.

There is something appealing about such a doctrine when it comes from a seeker
of the highest ideals; and there is something suggestive of the method by which
such a seeker of ideals actually proceeds. For many a man perhaps for most men
the world of actual occurrences is a procession, meaningless in itself except
for what can be snatched out of it to help in the day’s living. For the nobler
mind, on the other hand, the passing procession of events, events often
meaningless both in themselves and in their contexts, supplies the opportunity,
or at least the occasion, for grasping ideals suggested by events in themselves
remote from anything ideal. On the part of the ordinary seeker for ideals,
however, there is the more or less conscious assumption that in pursuing an
ideal he is on the way to the real. To make the assumption outright and openly
that there is nothing real corresponding to the ideal is too cool for the
ordinary man. It is in the end to subject the ideal to a killing frost.

Why, however, all this reference to the ordinary man? Just because I am trying
to find a religious statement that will mean something to the ordinary man. Dr.
J. S. Mackenzie, in his little book on Ultimate Values, speaks of that doctrine
of immortality which makes the soul live merely "in other lives made better" as
having worth, indeed, but worth chiefly for the extraordinary person. For the
ordinary human being such immortality would mean just nothing at all. We cannot
believe that the higher values of the universe are to be the property of a
select number of rare spirits, a sort of spiritual privileged class. There is no
aristocracy less attractive than that of supposedly choice souls, most of whom
have had more than usual opportunity in this existence, speaking as if they had
plucked the higher ideal meanings of life, and then leaning comfortably back and
telling us that they are not concerned as to whether these ideals root in
reality or not. It may be fine for a privileged individual to testify that he
has found such uplift in the thought of God as the crown of ideals that he does
not care whether God actually exists or not, but this is worse than nothing to
the man whose thought and life are our aim. Understand, we are moving in the
realm of belief. We are avowedly not trying to prove that there is a God like
unto Christ. We admit that the problem is one of belief, and we are trying to
show that the essential Christian belief is that God is like unto Christ. We are
not, however, surrendering to the impersonalists. They do not prove
impersonalism. For one reason or another impersonalism suits them better as a
belief than does personalism as applied to God. Among the elements that count in
shaping the Christian belief is familiarity with the mind and temper of Christ.
The Christians believe that the mind and temper of Jesus cannot be interpreted
as the mere accompaniment of any set of impersonal forces. Of course it is not
fair to play on a word in this discussion, but the word "neutrals" does happily
hit off the inadequacies of some of these doctrines. It is impossible to account
for the fullness and intensity of the moral passion of the Christ life, as that
life was lived in the actual Christ, or is approximated in the life of his
followers, by anything neutral. We are dealing with positive forces and factors
which neutrals can never explain.

We repeat that we do not feel called on to consider, with such philosophical
powers as we may muster, the critical objections to these theories. We may not
be able to state any objections. We can, however, raise the issue of adequacy.
There is not enough in the theories. Moreover, they are not only not large
enough, but they are not fine enough. Take Christ just as a cosmic product. The
forces these theories deal with are not big enough or fine enough to explain
Christ. They lack both the requisite quantity and the requisite quality. We
believe that only a Christlike God can account for a Godlike Christ. The
opponents of Christian beliefs have taken it altogether too easy as to the
inadequacy of impersonal causes to produce Christlike character. All these
systems are confronted with what might be called the problem of good. It is
often said that the stiff problem for believers in a personal God is the problem
of evil. In an earlier section I spoke of that mystery of physical pain before
which all human wisdom is dumb. The Christian may indeed sit dumb before this
problem, but he does not ignore it. In his own experience he meets acute
distress for which he can find no adequate reason whatsoever. He is willing to
admit that the advance in the understanding of the reason for suffering in the
universe has consisted chiefly in progressively showing the inadequacy of
reasons. For example, the glory of the book of Job is in its frankly facing the
problem of woe, hi openly declaring that the attempt to solve human distress on
the ground of the ill-desert of the sufferer falls short. It is a vast gain to
have attained this insight, but Job does not teach that he has solved the
problem. It is better to have no explanation than an explanation which conceives
of suffering as punishment.

Now, it is unusual to find such openness of mind as this among the opponents of
the belief in a personal God when they confront the problem of good. Most of
them do not seem to know that there is such a problem. They demand with glib
assurance that the believers in God account for evil and do not appear aware
that, on their own basis, they have to account for good. Moreover, there is
nothing inherently absurd in holding to belief in the God of Christ while
admitting around us on all sides dark mysteries which we cannot explain. This
present inexplicability, however, does not argue that the mysteries never can be
explained. It means a task at present beyond us, beyond us probably because of
our sheer lack of knowledge. The problem of good is, for the thinker who derides
Christian theism, of quite another order. A wise and good God might, for reasons
as yet inexplicable, make a place for pain in the world and might permit moral
evil, but a God who is nothing but a name for a set of impersonal forces for
which morality means nothing, is simply not equal to the task of explaining the
good.

Apart from aberrations here and there in schools of criticism which speak
without responsibility, the moral uniqueness of Jesus is everywhere granted. It
is one of the strangest phenomena in the history of thinking this admission of
the moral supremacy of Jesus even by the enemies of Christianity without any
attempt to explain him! Suppose, for the sake of the argument, we make no claim
of divinity for Jesus whatever. Suppose we take him merely as the moral climax
of humanity, as the type of good man, or as anything which expresses his
admitted moral greatness. Then the critics may reply that the problem is just
the same sort as with moral goodness anywhere. Let it be so! How does such
goodness intensely personal, seeking to put moral values into definitely
personal relationships get into a world where the determining factors are
entirely impersonal? Perplexing as is the problem of evil for the Christian
personalist, it is nothing in its perplexingness as compared with the problem of
good for the impersonalist.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 5: 01.03.     CHAPTER 03
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CHAPTER III THE DIVINE UNITY

WE are insisting that the so-called attributes of God must be brought to the
test of Christlikeness. If we are to believe in Christianity at its full value,
we have to think of God as Christian. Certain attributes of God which we call
metaphysical have been pretty well established in theology, but the metaphysical
aspect is subject to the moral aspect in Christian thinking.

We look for a while at the attribute of unity in the Divine Nature. We are most
of us fairly sure that if we are to have a worth-while God, that God must be
one. It is a long, long stride forward when any people get away from the worship
of a host of gods to the worship of one God. Looking out over the havoc wrought
in human experience by polytheism we might also say that, paraphrasing
Napoleon’s word about generalship, one poor god would be better than two good
gods, so urgent is the need of unity in carrying forward satisfactory reflection
upon the Divine Nature. Metaphysical unity as a basis for the universe we have
pretty well accepted. Even the dualists who hold to the separateness of mind and
matter maintain that the two work together in a unified system. Of course it is
always possible to find flippant critics, like the scoffer who recently declared
that there is so little unity in the world that to all appearances the world is
being managed by a committee of gods a bungling committee at that. Even this
critic, however, would admit that such a committee would meet in a basic system
whose laws rule everywhere. The committee would not likely be conceived of as
dividing over the law of gravitation, for example. The great metaphysical quest
has been for unity, and unity has been pretty well agreed upon as fundamental.
Even those who, like Bertrand Russell, incline to the fancy that space-time, as
they call it, is broken up into a cosmic anarchy, nevertheless hold with
Einstein to a space-time-gravitation formula universal in its application.

We insist however, that important as is the metaphysical attribute of unity for
God, we cannot have a Christian God until we have judged metaphysical attributes
from the judgment-seat of the moral. In other words, metaphysical attributes
throughout must come to the Christian test; the metaphysical attributes must be
weighed by the spirit of Christ.

Some time ago an earnest student of religions expressed surprise that the
Mohammedan and Christian systems do not get along better together. His argument
was that Islam believes as strongly as Christianity in the unity of God, perhaps
more strongly than does Christianity. For Islam God is altogether one, if such
an expression can be used. There is not the slightest hesitation as to the
impossibility of God’s sharing the oneness. There are no personal distinctions
in the Godhead for a Mohammedan. The one prophet of God is named indeed, but he
is a prophet and nothing more. This reference to the Islamic faith cogently
raises the need of interpreting divine unity in moral as well as in metaphysical
terms. Islam built on the metaphysical foundations of ancient Israel but
certainly not on the moral foundations, for Mohammed nowhere attains to the
moral insight of prophets who lived a thousand years before his time. Islam does
give us divine unity. But such unity! The unity of a moral nature set as
definitely as the most cruel and selfish barbarians on conquest by sword, and
sanctioning as animating motives in that conquest the basest impulses of men, is
not an edifying conception of God. Islam is jealous enough in its intent to keep
God a unit. It makes no provision for man’s sharing the nature of God, but ends
in making God share the nature of man the worst phases of man’s nature at that.
The passion for metaphysical unity is one of the powerful driving energies of
the mind; but if we are to have a Christian God, we must set limits in our
thinking to the demands of that unity. Too much of our philosophy is bent upon
making the universe all one thing or another. Materialism does not necessarily
spring out of an unworthy or earth-bound nature. The tendency of materialism in
philosophy is toward materialism in life, but materialism does not of necessity
arise out of a sordidness of purpose. It arises in part out of this metaphysical
passion for unity. To many the forces of the physical universe seem to explain
more than any other forces; so what is to prevent one’s believing that they may
explain everything? At least let us search and see. Here the effective force
with many a thinker who most reluctantly surrenders his emphasis on spiritual
values is the craving for unity.

Likewise an idealism which dissipates everything body and soul into thought does
not necessarily proceed from a dry intellectualism. The absolutists in idealism
no doubt are as fond of the joy of concrete existence as are those who have no
philosophy at all, but the passion for unity is upon them. There is no denying
the pressure of this passion. It is one of the most compelling powers in human
thought. If we are to have a universe at all, the philosophers tell us that the
very word "universe" itself suggests oneness. Philosophy, for some, is nothing
apart from the search for the one in the many. That is the basic assumption of
their thought.

Now, this passion for unity in the intellectual realm defeats itself by doing
away with the ground of distinction between truth and error. If everything comes
alike out of the One, truth and falsity come from the same source. There is no
possible ground of decision between them, and the theory which started out to be
absolutely logical ends by cutting the props from under all logic whatever. The
plight is worse on the moral side. I have heard theologians speak as if the
metaphysical unity of God must be held fast at all costs and no doubt such unity
is important. How much more important is it, however, that the moral unity of
God be held fast? We have seen the outcome in the theology of Islam. Islam gives
us a unified God, but of no moral worth after we get him. Islam’s God is
distinctively a personal unity, but who, outside of Islam, would care to worship
him? I ask indulgence for returning repeatedly to the supremacy of the moral
attributes of the divine over the metaphysical. Untold harm has come out of the
religious rationalizing which has sought to ground the character of God on
something deeper than the ethical. I once heard a foremost theologian declare
that we must have some basis firmer than the moral for our understanding of God.
This particular theologian was, in deed and spirit, one of the most Christian
men I have ever known, but this deliverance of his was far from Christian. If we
behold in the thought of Christ the thought of God, we cannot believe that the
metaphysical qualities have the right of way. If it be said that Jesus assumed
as a matter of course the all-essential metaphysical qualities of God possibly
without ever stopping to think of them we reply that the moral and spiritual
were the focus of the whole experience of Jesus. At the best we can think of the
metaphysical qualities only as furnishing the stage for the higher. Our
difficulty here is somewhat the same as in our thought of personality for God.
We, indeed, attribute personality to God, but then we fall to thinking of
personality in human terms, with all the weakness of human frailty. Then we
wonder if, after all, we should not do well to think of God in somewhat solider
terms. So with moral unity. The unity in moral purpose in men is so varying and
changeful that we naturally incline toward some other unity. It seems easier to
relax hold on the moral unity of God than on the metaphysical, or, rather, the
pressure for the metaphysical often seems stronger.

Still, we must not put the case here too strongly. The church has indeed always
been more or less willing to threaten the metaphysical unity of God for the sake
of the moral. I now re fer to the more popular thinking rather than the strictly
theological. Take, for illustration, the hold that the doctrine of the devil
has, or had, for centuries in the thinking, or imagination, of the ordinary
Christian. Practically, in the conception of thousands of Christians to-day, the
devil is conceived of as everywhere, as knowing everything, as almost almighty.
In part this is superstition, an inheritance from pre-Christian heathenism, or
an importation into Christianity from without. In part, however, it is an
unreasoned but instinctive attempt to make the problem of evil serious for God
without sacrificing the moral unity of God. It requires only a glance, of
course, to see how far such a doctrine goes toward imperiling the metaphysical
unity of God, but the popular notion is conceived more in respect to the
seriousness of the moral struggle than of the metaphysical requirements.

Now, it is not likely that reasoned thought about God will concede the vast
powers mentioned above omniscience, omnipresence, almost omnipotence to a devil,
but it is not likely either that the Christian consciousness will rest in a
conception of moral evil which seeks to preserve the metaphysical unity of God
at the cost of moral unity. Think how many conceptions of God do strike at his
moral unity. Of course impersonal materialism does not concern itself here, but
some forms of impersonal idealism are attractive to Christian believers who do
not often stop to consider that such idealism in which the many are mere phases
of the One carries moral evil to the center of the divine. Any strictly
deterministic philosophy likewise violates the divine moral life, or makes
absurd any raising of question about distinctions of good and evil. Spinoza, it
has been said, was the one consistent determinist in that he saw that with
determinism there could be no reason for ever raising the question about
determinism or anything else. All forms of strict monism do have a unity of a
kind, a unity in which good and evil lose their differences and merge into one.
The church has fairly well settled down into the belief that the only way that
we can preserve the moral unity of God is by the creation of free wills out of
whose choices evil starts. It is objected that such creations themselves do away
with the metaphysical unity in the universe. Strictly speaking, this must be so.
If we are to have absolute metaphysical unity there is no place for even an inch
of free choice, but is not insistence upon such unity a quibble? Is it not a
play with words? Is not metaphysical unity well enough preserved by such means
as divine wisdom could devise against the splitting of the universe into
independent diversities? Even the pluralists, of whom we hear so much to-day,
who will have it that lives are independent existences with positive power of
creation, hold that these lives meet in a system, or plane, that must be a
common-to-all. Such loss of metaphysical unity as the free creation of finite
wills involves, we shall have to yield to, if we are to preserve the moral unity
of the divine. The result will never please the theorist who desires above all
else a compact and tidy universe. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the
creation of finite selves makes against tidiness and compactness; but better
such looseness than to carry moral evil so deeply into the divine nature as to
make it a part of that nature. Better have God struggling to get evil out of
men’s lives than struggling to get it out of his own. Any familiarity at all
with the life of Jesus would show us how foreign to his thought of the divine is
moral evil.

Another instance of the insistence of the church on the primacy of the moral is
to be found in the persistence with which the mysterious and baffling doctrine
of the Trinity has maintained itself through the ages. Of course no one who has
read a line of theology would think that the church has taught that God is one
and three in the same sense, but the theories have been refractory to handle at
the best. I do not think that it is impossible so to state the doctrine as to
maintain the metaphysical unity of the Divine, but what I wish to urge is that
the church has never been deterred from holding the doctrine because of the
threat to metaphysical unity. Without substantial justice indeed, but with
unrelenting vigor nevertheless, the critics of Christianity have pointed to the
doctrine of the Trinity as the supreme instance of the church’s defiance of
reason in its demands upon the intelligence of men. I am not now concerned
either to defend this doctrine or to attack it. All I wish is to ask for the
reason for its persistence in the face of argument which has seemed to so many
to be conclusive. I think the secret of the longevity of the dogma is not merely
the pressure to make a place for Christ in the Divine Life, hi the sense of
granting him divine honors, but, rather, to carry the Christ-spirit into the
Divine, or, rather, to reveal the divine as throughout Christlike. The life
which men saw in Christ they came to believe in as the life of God himself. They
were willing to follow that life even into their theories about the inner
constitution of divinity. Moral unity has weighed more than metaphysical unity.

Too confident speculation as to the inner constitution of deity is out of
fashion at the present hour, and I think justly so; but while I am on this theme
I may as well remark that the danger in the usual ideas of the Trinity is not so
much to the metaphysical unity as to the moral unity the very end which the
doctrine has sought to conserve. In seeking for distinctions in the life of the
Divine the church has too often made the Father stand for one moral mood and the
Son for another.

Or, if the distinction has not been conceived of as strictly personal, Father
has often been made to stand as the phase of righteousness, and Son, of Love.
This can be so phrased indeed, often is so phrased as to imperil the moral unity
which the church aims to guard. Take either of two views of the Trinity which
have been regarded as at least passably orthodox one which provides for personal
distinction of Father and Son and Spirit in the divine life itself; and the
other which treats Father, Son, and Spirit as three manifestations of inherently
different phases of the divine life, not individual persons on the one hand, or
mere appearances on the other. The difficulty is, I repeat, not chiefly
philosophical in such theological construction. There are ways of fairly well
meeting the formally philosophical difficulties. The more serious is the threat
to the ethical unity. Think of the tendency to put Father and Son over against
one another in opposed moods. The Father is, or used to be, conceived of as in
wrath and the Son mollifies the wrath with the aid of the Spirit. To what
extremes have we not heard evangelistic appeals rush in such representation of
the work of the Son! Yet the teaching that God forgives men their sins for
Christ’s sake lends itself naturally to just such difference of moral moods in
the inner life of Godhead. If, now, we are to think of a complexity in the God
life, all the factors, or phases, must be Christlike that is, if we are to have
a Christian God.


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  CHAPTER 6: 01.04.     CHAPTER 04
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CHAPTER IV THE DIVINE UNCHANGEABLENESS

MUCH that can be said about the divine unity holds also about the divine
unehangeableness, for a shifting from mood to mood on the part of the Divine
would be a violation of unity. Here, again, the main aim of the doctrine has
been moral. Men have been trying to free themselves from whim or caprice in the
Divine. I do not think it would be beside the mark to affirm that one of the
desperate burdens of heathenism is the belief in capricious gods so common in
heathenism. I do not lose sight of the idea of fate, of inescapable destiny,
which rules in some religions, but I think nevertheless that something of the
affliction of heathenism, especially in the life of the common worshipers, is
the need of propitiating gods and the difficulty of knowing when the god is
satisfied and how long he will remain satisfied. May I repeat once more that the
objection of many serious-minded persons to a belief in a personal God is their
inability to think of personality apart from changefulness suggestive of whim or
mood. There is no call for attempting to deny this weakness of personality in
human beings. Our feelings rise and fall like tides without the regularity of
tides, and without any law which we can frame. We know that we are dependent on
physical conditions, on social contacts, on the manifoldness of factors which
may instantaneously throw us out of one temper of mind and into another, not to
the harm of our moral principles indeed, but of the firmness with which we hold
those principles. So that many feel that an impersonal Divinity would be better
as a basis for unchanging moral values than a personal Divinity.

Once yield to the impulse to seek a basis for moral steadiness in impersonalism
and we come forthwith to outright wreck. We are moving in the domain of belief
when we avowedly are seeking the best idea of God for our moral satisfaction.
Impersonalism is not safe. The moral values have the right of way, to be sure,
but impersonalism destroys them outright. These values are in peril, on the
other side, from some philosophical doctrines concerning time which at first
glance may seem to afford us relief as to moral unchangeableness. Some
philosophers tell us that there is no change in God that he is the same
yesterday, to-day, and forever, that change means nothing to him. Even for
ourselves change is not the real, but is woven through, with illusion. I once
heard a distinguished teacher of metaphysical idealism remark that in idealism
time is merely a mental form, and that, since it has no substantial reality, our
puzzled bewilderments as to its meaning themselves have no meaning.

All this sounds easy but it is the blankest answer of all. Our lives know
change; in fact, with us the unchanging fact is change. An unchanging world, in
the philosophic sense, would be one which we should have to enter by the most
detached kind of reasoning a reasoning indeed detached from every pulsing of
experience we have ever known. We can think a timeless world or, rather, we can
utter the words but we cannot imagine such a world. If we are to conceive of a
God who has placed us in a universe in which time means everything to us and
nothing to himself, we have in that conception itself a moral difficulty of no
scant proportions. No, there is no vast help for moral reflection in a
philosophical doctrine that puts the divine and the human 1 so far apart that
there is no bridging the distance except by saying the human experience is
illusion and the divine experience real. Whence did all this illusion come? It
is of the very make of the human mind. If Christian morality moves on the avowal
that man is made in the image of God, we arrive at the foot of a blind alley
when we accept a philosophic doctrine that makes change touch everything in
man’s life and nothing in God’s life.

Here, again, we have to remind ourselves that if we are to believe in a
Christlike God, the moral qualities are to have the right of way. It is
necessary that we see sharply the issues involved. Someone asks what we are to
do if philosophy leads us squarely up to an unchanging God in the metaphysical
sense. Are we not to follow whithersoever our logic leads us? That all depends.
In all theistic speculation we deal with assumptions. There is nothing that
gives the hard-and-fast method of the logician of the formal school the
authority to lord it over those who wish to make room for other features of
human experience than the formally logical. The strictly rational reasoner
cannot have everything his own way, except on the assumption that the universe
itself is constructed as a strictly logical product of the mechanical type. That
is just as truly assumption as the assumption that moral values have place in
the universe. We are dealing with problems where strict proof is out of the
question. If we are to have a Christlike God at all, then our construction of
the universe must be such as to enthrone Christlike qualities at the center of
the universe. If the universe is not to be conceived of in such Christlike
terms, we may make any assumptions as to logic we please.

All I plead for is a willingness to look the situation squarely in the face. If
we are going to have a Christlike God, let us have one. Let us see where the
Christlikeness will lead us. The fact is that this enigma of change and fixity
has been with men ever since they started to think at all. From the beginning
men have been seeking the unchanging in a hard core of some kind. They would
find such a core in matter if matter did not so obviously change. Then they look
to some metaphysical fixity.

I am not trying to solve the puzzle in philosophy. I may say, however, that it
is not fair to hold against our attempt to provide for a moral God all the
metaphysical puzzles about change which have been with men from the beginning,
and which tell quite as much against our daily experience as against the theory
of the divine. If a thing changes at all, it is not thereafter the same. Where,
then, is the fixity unless change is illusion? We see that a soul can know
itself as the same, and yet as changing, but how can we work this out in dealing
with the Infinite Soul? The swift answer is to deny either fixity or change, but
that gets us nowhere. Logically we are as badly off as with the puzzles of
Achilles and the hare, and of Zeno and his flying arrow, to which only half-way
solutions have ever been given. So much for trying to be narrowly logical.

I insist that a large part of our trouble comes through giving the metaphysical
considerations the first place. We construct a universe in our metaphysics and
then afterward introduce moral considerations as best we can. The indubitable
foundation stones have to be logical, we say. The mind of man makes logical
demands which simply must be heeded, as it seems. Of course, now, everybody
concedes that if we are to have a moral universe, we must have a basis for
morality; but let us not forget that the basis must be a genuine basis, not a
foundation on which it accidentally happens to be’possible to build a moral
universe. The moral requirements must be primary, if we are to have a Christlike
God. It might, indeed, be possible for a thinker to find a place for the
Christ-ideal and Christspirit after he had provided for everything else to his
mind’s content, but he could not fairly call his system Christian.

Moral unchangeableness means fixity of moral purpose quite a different matter
from metaphysical fixity. Some will be surprised at my protests at metaphysical
fixity, no doubt, or at my statement that such fixity does not imply moral
fixity, but the ethical has to run out to its full implications. The divine
might itself be in constant change and yet be morally unchangeable. All that
would be required would be that all the changes be ruled throughout by a moral
purpose which did not change.

If we are to have a God at all, we may just as well have one worth having. Since
the time of Kant the outright demonstration of the existence of God has been
given up for the assumption of a God whose nature satisfies the demands for our
largest and best life. Now if our best demands are moral, the metaphysical must
be adjusted to those. There can be no denying that divine experience must be
different from human experience, but if we are to have a moral God, the human
experience of change must mean something to God; or he must at least know what
it means to men. To picture the divine experience as stripped of all the
colorful change that belongs to human life and make it one eternal now above
change, would deprive the thought of the Divine Life of much of its moral
dynamic.

Timeless the life of God may well be, but not in such fashion that time, which
is the form of all human experience, is to mean nothing to God. Granted to the
idealist that time is nothing but form, the further remark is pertinent that
while form may be nothing substantial in itself, it may well be more important
than substance. Anything which so colors experience that we cannot for an
instant imagine what experience would be without it, is not to be dismissed with
the flourish that all this means nothing to God. The metaphysician may reply
that he is himself trying to preserve a moral God, one whose moral life is
forever at the full and knows no change. He may say that even if one moral law
rules all the activities of the Divine, we do not have a worthy divine object if
the Divine Life is subject to ebb and flow, or to a process of becoming either
more or less. This point is, indeed, well taken, but it introduces an idea of
divine development which may not necessarily belong here. I think we do not
indeed get help from the thought of a morally developing God, but a God whose
own life is forever at the full might well order the changes in the system in
which we live. He would know all the possibilities of the system. Nothing could
take him by surprise. No change might make him more moral after an event than
before. We might admit that we cannot tell what such change would mean to him,
but that is altogether different from saying that it would mean nothing. We
cannot come close to the mind of Jesus, imperfect as are the records of the
movements of that mind, without feeling that the changes which men know have
mighty meaning for God.

Especially is this true when we are thinking of the moral changes in men’s
wills. Here are moral facts which have significance for God. If God is indeed
unchangeable he must change his activities as men change theirs. The meaning of
the paradox is, of course, that if God is Christlike in his morality the fact
itself that he is inflexibly moral will cause him to treat a sinful life
differently from the way he treats a righteous life. The truth that the church
has gone too far in dwelling on the difference between sinners and saints, and
has usurped too much authority in assuming to apportion to men their eternal
destiny, does not invalidate the conclusion that a moral God must take account
of moral situations which call now for one kind of response and now for another.
It can be said that the sameness of God calls for differences in his treatment
of men.

I crave indulgence as I say again that I do not see any reason -lor putting the
metaphysical difficulties so strongly that we cannot believe in the God of
Christ. There is no objection that I know of to saying that God himself must be
bound by the laws of his own nature, provided we think of his nature as
fundamentally moral. To raise, however, a lot of puzzles as to the nature of
time which make God metaphysically unchanging, is to ruin all possibility of
thinking of his unchangeableness in moral terms. Change is a fact in the world
in which we live. Time may be nothing but the form of that change but the change
and the form itself mean so much to men that they must mean something to God. I
do not say that if God is to be a moral being like unto Christ, he must himself
enter the stream of change, and be subject to its processes. I mean that he must
know what change means for men, and know not just in a formal, intellectual
fashion. At this point some reader, familiar with the current debate about a
finite God, asks if we cannot better provide for an unchangeable moral God by
going the full length and bringing God himself into change. I am willing to
admit that I would sooner do this than to have him outside, looking on the world
with an eternal stare at processes signifying nothing to himself. The
difficulty;*however, is that when we say that we will bring God into the stream
of change we mean or we are understood to mean that we will subject him to a law
of development which may at the end imply a possibility of his becoming better
or worse. That would be a finite God with a vengeance. We do not need to resort
to such heroic measures. I do not believe the Christian consciousness will ever
be content with any doctrine of God that denies that his moral life is forever
at the full. In the light of the attitude of Jesus let us ask ourselves if we
can believe in a God who is morally better now than he was ages ago. But is the
alternative one of a changelessness which means nothing to human experience, and
to which human experience means nothing, as over against a God who is himself
developing toward a loftier ideal? It seems to me possible to believe in a God
above change, so far as his own moral development is concerned, and who yet
knows what change means for men. So long as such a God is revealed in the Christ
his changelessness means unalterable faithfulness to that revelation. Even if
his own mental seizure of change is in accordance with a psychology of
timelessness which we cannot understand, there is no reason for shutting God off
from a knowledge of the way change appears to us. Speaking of the fullness of
divine life, I do not see how we could cut that life off from knowing what
change is without impoverishing it. The divine moral character’s standing
forever at the full means that the divine is not subject to becoming either
better or worse.

It may mean that in an ineffable intuition God grasps all reality past, present,
and to come; but ineffable as that timeless grasp may be, it would be a
limitation of his life if lie did not also know how time and change strike us.
To use a most inadequate suggestion, the reader of Shakespeare may know how each
of the plays ends, but that does not prevent his enjoying them more deeply with
rereading. His knowledge of the plot as a whole does not interfere with the
increased enjoyment of the successive readings. There is a double point of view
that of the drama as a whole and that of the successive and shifting scenes. The
illustration is most imperfect and raises some questions without answering them,
but it does give us a hint. The divine moral life, may be forever at the full,
but that fullness does not preclude a realization, of what change is. The
Christian thought implies that the Christ-idea is the center of the divine life.

If the knowledge of God is a timeless intuition, the Christ-ideal is the center
of that intuition. If God also enters into a realization of what change means
for men, the Christ-ideal is the standard by which all the changes are given
their significance.

All of this seems, to one type of student of religion, to bring back upon us
absolutism of the most aggravated form. At the moment when the world is
impatient of absolutism in metaphysics, this conception of an absolutely
Christlike God brings absolutism back by the way of ethics. To this critic the
doctrine seems ill-timed also because of the larger, more^ catholic view of the
moral worth of some of the non-Christian systems which is coming into vogue.
"Relativity," moreover, is the charmed word. Moral duties spring out of customs
differing from place to place and time to time. The doctrine of a morally
unchanging God runs counter to all this.

It does nothing of the sort, if I may be pardoned the bluntness. I am not trying
to devise a detailed system of ethics for God. I could not, if I would, pick out
material for a codified scheme of ethics from the teaching of Jesus. I concede
the relativity of moral systems in detail, but I am trying to insist that it is
our privilege to believe that the law of good will, stated in the largest and
best terms of which men are capable, holds for God, if we accept the Christ as
the revelation of God. It is the God-ward reference of the moral life with which
I am concerned. Christian duties, indeed, change. The law of good will among men
may call for one attitude and activity at one moment and for another in apparent
contradiction at another moment. The revelation of the revelation in Christ may
continue indefinitely. Christianity makes the claim that the holy love which
Christ taught and lived holds true for God himself. All holiness and all love
everywhere may be broken lights of that love. It is no more a sin of absolutism
for the theologian to say that the universe cannot escape from holy love than
for the scientist to say that it cannot escape from reason.


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  CHAPTER 7: 01.05.     CHAPTER 05
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CHAPTER V THE DIVINE POWER FOR the past few years considerable stress has been
laid on the limitations which any careful thinking must [put on the divine
omnipotence. The problem of evil both in the form of pain and that of sin has
been met by the declaration that God cannot help himself. Nobody has ever put
the difficulties of reconciling divine benevolence with divine omnipotence more
effectively than John Stuart Mill, and the effort of religious thinkers of
recent years has been to find some way out of the dilemma. The theists have held
fast to the divine benevolence, mostly at the cost of the divine omnipotence,
though their surrenders have not been considerable. A good share of discussion
of omnipotence throughout the ages of the church’s life has been purely verbal.
Of course if God is to be at all, he must be something. Much of the debate has
attacked omnipotence in the artificial fashion that would insist that being
something means not being something else, and then this not being something else
is called limitation. All of which is merely words. There is no chance of
advance in theological thinking in manipulating verbalisms. The dictionary is
not the best mine of knowledge about God. In one sense definition itself is
limitation, but the refusal even to define God lest we in some degree limit his
power is no longer looked upon as the path to wisdom.

All seem to agree that the creation of finite wills is, indeed, a limitation of
the omnipotence of God. I wish to deal with the problem of the creation of
finite wills, especially of human beings, in a separate section. The problem of
limitation of divine power is serious enough here, particularly when we think of
the number of such beings. For the present, however, I deal with the power
manifest in other spheres.

It seems increasingly evident that there is no way of understanding the universe
by the exercise of purely intellectual faculties. The only relief is in a
Christlike God whom we can trust but whom we cannot now understand. I think the
problem is sterner outside than inside the distinctively human sphere. No matter
how dark human suffering may be, it is possible to believe that the pain may be
utilized for a moral result. This implies personal immortality, of course, but
such implication is integral in the Christian system. It is when we ponder over
animal pain, and even over some features of the inorganic realm, that we feel
our helplessness. Our only recourse is to carry into our thought of the divine
activity a confidence that God’s power is used under responsibility. In Christ
we have set forth an appeal to such trust. God sees the fall of the sparrow and
clothes the grass of the field.

It is a strain to see how limitation of the divine omnipotence aids us much. No
doubt certain minds will find comfort in the idea of a God who cannot help us in
the presence of stern necessities, but other minds will be worse than bewildered
by such a doctrine. Limit the divine power to whatever extent we please, we
cannot go far enough to get the relief we seek. Our realization of immensity of
the powers in the control of God, whatever may be the divine nature, grows
constantly. We rightly insist that if God is to create at all, he by creation
itself takes limitation upon himself, but we no sooner finish saying this than
the latest scientific journal informs us in most casual manner of discoveries
which vastly increase the range of sentient life on our planet, and of the
distances with which we have been accustomed to measure the universe. The
commonplace expression which we employ to measure astronomical time, the
"light-year," means nothing to the imagination, for who can grasp such a unit as
the distance traveled in a year by light speeding at the rate of over 186,000
miles a second? The distance traveled in a second is itself too long for any
adequate grasp by a dweller on the earth. The longest distance we know is the
circumference of the earth. "When we are told that light can flash seven times
around the earth in a second we are at once paralyzed so far as any imaginative
grasp of the figures is concerned. All we can do is to calculate the distances,
set down the results, and let it go at that. So likewise with time measures for
astronomical reckonings, or even for the reckonings of the periods through which
life has existed on earth. The figures are beyond us. Thus when a seeker for an
explanation of the apparently cruel and meaningless features of the universe is
told that the divine omnipotence is limited he is likely to pass by with a shrug
of the shoulders. With the physicist teaching him that the tiniest speck of dust
in the sunshine is the scene of the interplay of stupendous energies* he is not
ready to conceive of the divine power as enough limited to make such limitation
an answer to his question. There is enough power left to make a massive problem,
if we are to think of God as personal. Of course if God is not personal, the
problem of responsibility can be dismissed forthwith. In the first chapter I
remarked on the difficulty of explaining God’s dealings with the universe in
such measure as to satisfy the intellectual demands. May I be permitted, even at
the peril of seeming repetitious, to delay for a little longer over the
inadequacy of the explanation. May I say that the knowledge of the actual steps
by which the world processes go forward increases faster than the knowledge of
the meanings of those processes. Many a scientist stands in awe at the
prevalence of law in the universe, at the definiteness with which consequent
follows antecedent. Such scientists speak of the unity and harmony of the
physical universe, and declare it easy to believe in mind as the foundation of
that universe, especially when the philosophers point out that intelligibility
of the universe itself is possible only if the universe is woven throughout
according to a thoughtpattern. All of which the seeker after an understanding of
God may accept, while protesting that it does not bring him within sight of the
meanings for which he seeks. Admitting that the universe is grounded in
intelligence, can we have any assurance as to the fundamental spirit and purpose
of that intelligence? Can the intelligence be trusted?

It would seem to be wisdom here to let the critic of theism state his case just
as fully as may be. There is no need of making things worse than they are, but,
on the other hand, there is only folly in trying to make a better formal
argument for the divine benevolence than is warrantable. Scientific processes
themselves, or the processes which science describes, do not always move with
such show of intelligence as we believer.s in God declare, or at least imply. To
be sure, chemical elements combine according to formulas with finer than
hairbreadth exactness, but when the elements combine into the materials of
organisms many of the organisms seem to be without significance, as if they came
by chance and suffered without purpose. If we could grant to the Darwinians what
has been called the arrival of the fit that is to say, the appearance at the
opportune moment of those organisms qualified to survive a particular crisis we
might well say that Darwinism is in accord at least with appearances. Let
chemical forces rule with mathematical accuracy down to the last cell of the
animal’s organism and to the last atom of the plant it eats, the presence of the
animals themselves and the food they eat seems to be haphazard. The animate
world looks as if it found its way along by trial and error. Organs may, indeed,
have come into existence to meet a need, but they survive the need so long that
A they finally make toward death and not toward life. In the organic world the
rule seems to be the rule-of-thumb. It is no doubt true that design seems to
order the portioning out of the inorganic material on earth just so that organic
life may become possible. A slight change in the proportions of these elements
would have made impossible such forms of life as we know. Professor Henderson’s
argument as to all this is not to be gainsaid. Once the forms begin to appear,
however, the progress takes place, not, indeed, as if there were no intelligence
at all, but as if there were an intelligence not sure of itself, or confronted
by some intractabilities which it could only slowly overcome. The attempts to
make the presence of vestigial survivals, like the appendix in man, strengthen
the design argument are worse than nothing, for they argue an intelligence
lacking in the ability to put the vestiges away once and for all. In other
words, granting that intelligence appears, it is not of the sort that we can
understand. It is not of much comfort to us to learn that organisms are the
outcomes of the finest processes conceivable, processes that can only be
expressed in formulas which show the workmanship of highest intelligence, if the
organisms seem useless or worse than useless, after they appear. As good a
suggestion as any to explain divine benevolence is to say with Leibniz that any
finite creation is a part of a system and that the demands of the system have
the right of way. For a little distance this is sun- clear. In a circle not
every feature can be the center. Some points inevitably must lie off the center.
There must be orders of values and grades of importance. So that even
omnipotence could not make an intelliligible system if everything in that system
were of first importance. Just now we are being told of the "web of life" which
binds all parts of nature together. If some weaver is actually spinning a web,
the pattern of the web seems to be the essential. If every tiny stretch of a
spider’s web could wake to an organic consciousness and ask as to the meaning of
its existence, not much light would dawn oil that consciousness out of the
information that a mathematical design called the logarithmic spiral binds all
the parts of the web into one pattern. The logarithmic spiral, since it requires
mind to understand it, no doubt requires mind to explain its existence; but if
the threads of that spiral were endowed with sentient consciousness, they might,
indeed, ask what light the logarithm throws on the possible or actual pains of
their individual existence. The lot of the individual is most baffling in any
arguments which lay stress on system. I have said that I shall treat of human
individuals later. There may be question as to how far a sentient creature
without selfconsciousness can be called an individual, but such sentient
creatures do feel, or all signs are void of sense. They may, indeed, not suffer
as they seem, since they presumably possess little or no imagination, but to all
appearances they suffer. The suffering of the system is in these separate
centers. Nothing in the general requirement that in a system some elements must
be secondary to others affords the slightest clue to the meaning of animal pain
as we see it. The mere placing of one feature of a system as subordinate to some
other might, indeed, hurt that feature’s pride, but we are talking of suffering
much more substantial than the hurt of pride. No, this problem of animal
suffering, seen in its extent in space and time, is the most potent single
objection to the doctrine of a benevolent God. As men become themselves more and
more sensitive to pain anywhere, the mystery becomes more serious. No bright
light shines on it after all the centuries of speculation. There is scant relief
except in trust in the God revealed in Christ. The questions raised by the
apparent meaninglessness of the inanimate universe are not so seriously acute as
those having to do with pain, but they are not to be dismissed lightly. The
older notion that the universe centers around man, for all its value, is
slippery, in view of the increase of our knowledge. /Granted that just this type
of universe is the best conceivable for starting a race like ours, and granted
that this may be part of the explanation of the universe, we cannot claim that
we have here a full explanation. Nothing in the universe so stretches the
thought and the imagination of the human intellect as the realm of the stars.
The mind which can weigh the distant suns is truly of more consequence than the
suns themselves. What a tax upon our belief it would be, however, to try to
accept the doctrine that light travels to us through thousands of "light-years"
just to give our minds a chance to measure it and to read its story of the
constitution of far-off stars! The incredible size of the universe does make a
mystery of high order.

Now, someone avers that since these features of the universe are manifestly
beyond our minds, why should we raise question about them at all? They are God’s
business and not ours. Let us $tick to our own business. The advice is from one
angle of view sound enough, or sound enough advice from any point of view except
the Christian, for the Christian is allowed to believe in a God of moral
responsibility throughout all the realm of his activity. If this means anything,
it means God’s final accountability to all moral intelligence everywhere
intelligence, that is, able to understand. This seems to take back in one
sentence what has just been given in another, for faced with the dark features
of the universe, men are not able to understand. I do not think I am guilty of
self-contradiction. If the reason for our not understanding is that we lack at
present the requisite data, and the requisite mental power, the answer to our
inquiries is simply that we must wait. Just at present the doctrine of
relativity as set forth by Einstein and his followers is at once important and
difficult to comprehend. What would the demand of the bumptious student amount
to that the relativity theory be forthwith explained to him? From one angle the
theory is the business only of those who have faculties and training adequate to
doing business with it, which is altogether different, however, from saying that
the theory is none of our business. It is, or can legitimately be, the business
of anyone who will pay the costs of mastering it. Obviously, the pain and
apparent aimlessness in the universe are none of our business, in any fashion
that warrants our clamoring for explanations forthwith, and railing against a
universe which does inot carry its own explanations on its face. / What if the
explanations are there all the time, the root difficulty being that we cannot
read them? It may be that injunctions to reverence before the universe are
overdone. It may be that it would be better if we had less reverence for some
phases of the universe, but irreverence is often a mark of intellectual
incapacity or at least of impatience.

Now, if we believe in a Christlike God we open the doors for patience. If God is
Christian, he is Christian throughout. There are no spaces into which he
withdraws to act or live just as he pleases, using the expression for what it
suggests in daily conversation. It may well be that what in the universe seems
to us futile has no meaning connected with men’s notions of usefulness. It may
be that the apparently blank reaches are foils or backgrounds for expressions of
divine mood and idea, good on their own account good, too, for us when we get to
the vantage-ground where we can understand them. It may be that a seizure of the
lordliness of the universe as a whole is impossible from any such little corner
of it as ours; still, the notion of a God endlessly weaving and unweaving, or
acting merely out of caprice or whim, or sacrificing sentient organisms to the
good of a scheme or "web," is not consonant with the idea of God, or the feeling
about God, we get through devotion to the mind and spirit of Jesus. We cannot
prove the validity of the teaching of Jesus, but in the light of that teaching
we stubbornly avow that irresponsibility in the Divine will not do. We shall
have more to say later about the union of the concepts of power and moral
responsibility when we deal with God as the ruler of men. Suffice it to remark
here that this union is one of the fruitful ethical gains of the centuries. The
union was first definitely wrought out in the field f of human relationships.
After ages of revoluv tions and bloodshed men recognized that a ruler’s power
over his subjects must be exercised under a bond of trusteeship. The notion that
a king could do as he pleased with his subjects was early, attacked. The victory
here is fairly sure. Next came the doctrine that the personal possession of
social power of any kind can be justified only by the degree of moral
responsibility with which the power is wielded. The implications of this dynamic
idea are now being hammered out in the industrial realm in particular. Finally,
we are beginning to hear that the possession of power of any sort, even of
native personal endowment, involves, or demands, a heavy moral responsibility in
the employment /of that power. The critic calls a halt. This may be true enough,
he admits, as far as a human society is involved, but we are now arguing about
God himself. We have admitted that phases of the divine doing in the physical
realm are now beyond us. They seem so far beyond us that we cannot make anything
of them. Maybe we can never make anything of them. Possibly there is no
intelligence outside of God himself who can make anything of them. Conceivably
there may be movements of physical forces whose mathematics no mind, except the
Divine Mind, can grasp, or whose purpose no wisdom, except that of God himself,
can ever fathom. What does moral responsibility mean in such case? To whom, in
such imagined situation, would God be; responsible?

I have put the protest thus to bring out an assumption that too often lurks in
the ordinary thinking about God, namely, that responsibility is wholly a
relation between persons. Commonly this is true. Our existence is so made up of
contacts with our fellows that the demand of moral responsibility is about
exhausted in those contacts. Even we, however, speak of loyalty to what we call
our ideals, or our own best selves. We desire to be true to ourselves under all
circumstances. We say that, even if one were cast alone on a desert island, it
would be one’s duty to remember one’s manhood and not to sink toward brutehood.
Now, we are certainly not trying to fancy God as cast on a desert island, but we
are trying to suggest that in the divine life pre-eminently the responsibility
is to the divine nature itself. Responsibility to others could for God mean
little apart from responsibility to his own nature. We are always hearing about
mysteries in the divine nature which might conceivably explain this or that.
Whatever the mysteries, they cannot be out of line with the highest
Christlikeness. In interpreting God thus according to Christ we must not imagine
that our own piecemeal codes are the standard. All we can ask is that in those
phases of activity which we cannot understand, God acts not out of wantonness or
sportiveness but out of a nature rational and moral throughout. If the final
word about God is Christ, we are content, even if we know ages will pass before
we can understand.


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  CHAPTER 8: 01.06.     CHAPTER 06
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CHAPTER VI THE DIVINE KNOWLEDGE THE problem of the divine knowledge, like that
of divine power, has supplied material for debate since men first began to speak
of God. The discussion has usually turned around the enigma as to divine
foreknowledge of what a free being may do. In these later days our moral sense
is demanding more and more that a chance for real freedom be granted to men, no
matter what inroads such freedom may make on divine omniscience, though divine
knowledge of what a free will may do has never yet been proved a contradiction.

Here I wish to look at some of the underlying puzzles which have to do with
divine knowing in general. Those who will not concede personality to the Divine
of course rule out knowledge in any humanly intelligible sense. Again, a certain
type of mind seems to be in hopeless funk over the infinity of combinations of
factors conceivably always present to the divine intelligence. Such intelligence
would always have present the actual combination of factors, but what would
hinder thinking also of the other possible combinations, until consciousness
became smothered under the load? Why, further, should intelligence have chosen
just the combination we see and no others? A powerfully intellectual
acquaintance of mine was once sick and in his illness went into a half-delirium,
in which he nearly drove himself to madness counting the various objects in the
room, and making all sorts of combinations among the squares and cubes of the
numbers. Just so some intellectualists seem to fancy that God must be in a
perpetual inanity because of the infinity of possibilities always before him.

If a man is bound to conceive of the divine thinking in this fashion, I suppose
there is no help for him, except in ceasing thinking altogether till he rights
himself into mental seriousness and balance, for all the above is verbal and
artificial. The thinker is abstracting from the actual to enter into a .circle
of logic-chopping and word-spinning. A Christian idea of God provides a moral
center makes the divine will fundamental. All this fine-webbed stuff about
possibilities is abstraction from an actual doing which is followed because it
is ethically best. We repeat over and over again that while it is impossible to
separate thinking and feeling and doing in any personality divine or otherwise
the essential is to decide which we are to put first in order of value. The
Christian doctrine of God puts moral doing first. Often as I restate this I am
sure that it will not command the assent of some teachers avowedly Christian,
for to some there seems need of a stronger foundation for the divine than moral
purpose. They crave a logical basis on which the ethical can rest. Then,
stepping about among these logical cornerstones, the overrational get to
thinking solely of logic, and after a season ethics seem unsubstantial to them.
Nothing will avail against this tendency except steeping oneself in ethical
seriousness like that of Jesus, for the malady is a species of intellectual
frivolity, seriously though the frivolity may take itself. It all resembles that
old schoolboy jibe that spelling is more important than the Bible, for if there
were no spelling there could be no Bible. Of course no logic will compel a
thinker to accept a Christlike God. If one wishes a logic-chopping God, there is
no insuperable logical objection. If one, however, is to accept a Christlike
God, he may as well make the most of his belief, and trust that even the divine
knowledge bases itself in moral solidity.

It is not quite fair to raise all manner of quibbles as to the manner of divine
thinking, when these same quibbles tell just as pertinently against human
thinking. We do think, in spite of the alleged contradictions in thinking; nor
is it fair to carry into our conception of the Divine all the conceivable and
inconceivable weariness and strain with which we should imagine ourselves
embarrassed if we were put in charge of the universe. For example, when we speak
of knowledge as arising out of moral doing we cannot help suggesting strain
toward an ideal, and of lapse again and again to levels far below the ideal. We
then fall away in sheer weariness from grasp on a moral intelligence forever at
the full which sees always with faultless discernment. At the back of our minds
is this craving for something solid, or for something impersonal which goes by
itself. When we begin to reach about for that something, however, we experience
just as much perplexity as before.

Just a word further about the elusiveness of the divine as a steady, full, moral
will. When we reflect upon the divine intelligence as carrying forward the
ongoing universe let us say, the universe of stars and suns we are prone to
conceive of the process as through distinct and separate acts of will, because
such sharply outlined decisive acts are our methods of willing. When we think of
God’s volitions we imagine myriads of such isolated decisions. Naturally enough,
our imaginations soon break down, and then we conclude that personal will is
inadequate to such a task as this. If it will help the imagination any, why not
take a hint from our moral habits acquired as the deposits of our successive
moral acts until they have become the most substantial strata of our nature? A
man’s nature is never more completely moral than when it has attained to this
fixity. A man’s intelligence is not always consciously and deliberately debating
whether to act one way or another. The more quickly mind seizes upon essential
truth without plodding through all the steps of formal reasoning the more
logical it is. Instead of picturing God as always solving equations for the
propulsions of stars and suns and planets, why not consider him as acting in
such complete conformity with what intelligence calls for that our manufactured
equations are merely the slow and halting stages by which inferior intelligence
reads God’s thought after him? God acts in the full light of wisdom his act the
full expression of intelligence, his act a unified whole. Then our duller minds
trace out the unity, discover how the parts fit into system, partially solve the
equations which so soon run out beyond our mathematical instruments. Likewise
with the activity of God from the moral point of view. I say, "from the moral
point of view" simply to indicate that we can repeat all this over again from
the moral angle. Any such term as "habit" is crudely erroneous as applied to
God, for it suggests fixity after struggle, but it does hint at a steadiness of
doing which meets the yearning of human weariness for something that seems to go
of itself, without innumerable separate deeds of decision. What we think of as
halfconscious, or subconscious, processes in ourselves because they go forward
without our conscious effort, may give an inkling of a divine life which is not,
indeed, half -conscious or subconscious, but which goes forward without strain.
Or, at the other end of the scale of personal experience, we may all recall
moments of rapt insight when we seem to have risen into a world beyond
ourselves. If there is a region of subconsciousness, may we not also speak of a
region of superconsciousness at least "super" the usual consciousness? Now, the
gleams of sudden insight to which some attain when they rise from the customary
levels to something higher have the characteristic of presenting truth or what
seems to be truth in wholes, the truth standing in its own right. Moreover, all
the familiar processes of reasoning seem at such instants like discarded
ladders. We wonder that we ever had any use for them. Since such experiences as
these are possible to men, why may they not be the best clues at least to an
adumbration of the Divine? Instead, then, of our thinking of the moral life of
God as a painful and strained clinging fast to an ideal the difference between
the divine and the human being that the divine needs no development and can know
no lapse we should better think of a full life, imagined after the highest
moments of insight we ever seize, spontaneously and naturally rich on its own
account, every pulsing centered upon an ideal which is moral throughout. Of
course the Divine must know himself through and through. There must be no dim
corners as in ourselves, or hidden depths out of which evil impulses may well
forth. The full knowledge in the Divine must rise out of the full moral life.

Here we may as well mention the old, old debate as to whether God acts in a
particular way because that way is right, or is the way right merely because it
is the divine act? The customary answer to-day is that God acts in a particular
way because that way is right, and yet that the right is itself the expression
of the divine nature. The moral ideal is not something over against God as a
standard to which he must conform, but is itself the expression of his nature.
This seems somewhat like a mere collocation of words, I know, but it is vastly
different from the teachings of the older days as to a divine sovereignty which
made deeds right and ideals true just because God did or spoke them. I would say
that there is a realm of moral truth which God and men alike must recognize, and
to which they must conform, if it did not suggest that God, like men, is
involved in a moral struggle.

Why should we feel any more difficulty in grasping God’s relation to a moral
system than in grasping his relation to an intellectual system? We do not ask
whether truth is truth because God utters it, or whether it is something with
rights on its own account! Whatever truth is, we expect God to conform to it,
though we have no objection to the claim that it is the expression of his own
nature. Even those who deny the existence of God will concede that if there were
to be a God he would have to be, one of whose nature truth would be an
expression. Possibly the admitted relativity of moral codes causes some to draw
back from making moral truth the expression of a divine nature. This relativity,
however, touches all truth. It may be that the crudeness and stiffness and
narrowness of our moral precepts make us shrink from saying much about the moral
qualities of God as the center of his life, but similar shortcomings affect all
our more intellectual processes and deliverances.

We think, then, of God as moral light in whom there is no darkness at all. This
fullness of moral understanding itself implies responsibilities upon a
Christlike God. Knowledge is power. The difference in knowledge between God and
any finite creature puts God under heavy bonds which, we may believe, he
rejoices to assume. It is inconceivable, of course, that the Divine Life be
stained by any knowledge of sin, except as the holy can recognize and fight
against sin; it is inconceivable also that the Divine should live in any moral
darkness, or with any feeling of a divided self. Still, it may be well to recall
what was said about the divine knowledge of change as a finite creature
experiences change. If the Divine, which we think of as changeless, cannot in
any form realize what change means to finite intelligence, then the Divine knows
little about the finite. So likewise with the relation of the Divine to any
growing moral life. If the Divine does not have some realizing insight as to
what moral struggle means to the one struggling, then the Divine knows all too
little about the moral life of the finite. Especially in passing judgment upon
the finite can we believe that the Divine will act under a trusteeship, so to
speak, because of the difference between the Infinite’s full knowledge and the
finite’ s partial knowledge or no knowledge at all. If we worship a God in terms
of Christ, we have less difficulty here.

Just a word further as to the source of the divine knowledge about the goodness
in a finite life. First of all, let us take fair account of such finite
goodness. Was it not Horace Bushnell who once preached on some glories peculiar
to men which perhaps might rank high as compared even with the divine glories?
As I recall, Bushnell made moral development itself a delight worthy to be
compared to the ineffableness of God’s eternal fullness. It almost seemed as if
Bushnell preferred such human development to a divine changelessness. A further
instance of the glory of finite existence might be found in the spectacle of
that goodness which stands for truth when the appearances seem all against
truth. In the Divine there is completion and harmony. In the finite there is
lack and discord, yet in this region of the half-light, or of no light, there
are finite wills which stand for righteousness without ever attaining to a
glimpse of harmony, or without anything which can be called a reward of
righteousness. Perhaps there is no glory of the finite mightier than this of
pursuing truth and right for their own sakes, though the glory fails of
recognition because it is so common.

Now, the obligation is accepted by a Christlike God to note and appreciate
finite goodness. How is his appreciation possible? By the exercise of
irresistible metaphysical omniscience? Such omniscience, if it were not itself
moral, could not attain to an appreciation of i the moral even in a finite
creature. For such appreciative knowledge requires more than a purely
intellectual faculty. I have heard religious teachers speak of the devil as if
he were omniscient. In fact, I can now point to teachers who make the devil’s
knowledge equal to God’s. Just for the sake of the argument let us assume a
devil, or any Satanic intelligence, with a range of knowledge about equal to
that with which popular religions endow him. Necessarily such a Satanic
intelligence could not know everything. It might grasp at a wide range of
objective facts. It might seize all the mathematical principles of the material
universe; it might, in short, know everything knowable from the outside. It
could not, however, know from the inside that universe of fine wisdom which can
only be seized by moral sympathy. Such a Satanic intelligence might behold
everything a noble character might do, and yet might miss the inner meaning
altogether. All that vast knowledge which comes out of loyalty to a lofty ideal,
all that exquisite understanding which comes out of kinship with moral souls,
would be closed to a Satan.

If we are overwhelmed at the contemplation of divine omniscience and God’s
knowledge is virtually that even if we make exception of free acts of finite
creatures we may shift to another center by speaking of the divine insight. A
wonderful touch in the parable of the prodigal son is that story of the father’s
vision which caught the significance of the son’s return while the son was yet a
long way off. It was not an unusually sharp eyesight which enabled the father
thus to recognize the son, but the fatherly spirit back of the eye. In the
passages where Jesus speaks of the Father’s knowledge though he is, indeed, not
discussing metaphysical omniscience there seems to be more of hint of kindliness
and sympathy than of power of intellectual irresistibility in itself. The
reference to the sparrow’s fall is not intended to show the grasp of the Divine
Mind on detail but to reveal the spirit of the Father of all. By the time Jesus
appeared on the world’s stage the conception as to the reach of God’s knowledge
had been so well worked out as simply to be assumed. What Jesus added was
interpretation of the divine knowledge as sympathetic insight. Does not our
exposition carry us too far? If the divine knowledge is based, so to speak, on
sympathetic insight, does not such insight preclude a divine knowledge of evil?
Of course it does, in any sympathetic experience. The divine God of the Christ
knows more about some aspects of evil than any other intelligence. He knows more
of its cost. Evil means more distress to him than to anyone else. Still, he
cannot know evil in the experience of friendly response to evil. He can have
sympathy for the soul of low ideals, but not sympathy with that soul. If this is
a limitation of the omniscience, let it be so. The approach to God through
Christ is not concerned with the preservation of formal omniscience at the cost
of moral worth.

If, then, God is like Christ, at least three considerations must shape our
reasonings about the divine knowledge. The knowledge, like the power of which it
is a form, is held under a heavy responsibility, which God freely carries. It is
revolting to contemplate immeasurable knowledge without immeasurable
responsibility. Secondly, the knowledge must be linked with moral doing. Jesus
said that he that doeth the divine will shall come to a knowledge of the truth.
While this applies chiefly to men as learners it must have some meaning for God.
The divine knowledge must be a mirroring of the divine doing, and the divine
doing must be in response to the divine knowledge. In God the ideal is made
real, God’s own choice forever ratifying the ideal and setting it forth into
expression. Finally, in any dealings with finite intelligences, God’s approach
to men can be conceived of not as through an overpowering intellectual
omniscience, but as through moral insight. Sympathetic understanding is the
diviner term. Omniscience in dealing with souls seems cold if we believe in God
as like unto Christ.


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  CHAPTER 9: 01.07.     CHAPTER 07
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CHAPTER VII THE DIVINE OMNIPRESENCE THE divine omnipresence probably causes less
mental confusion to-day than formerly when being had not been so closely
identified with activity. We now see that the only way being can be at all is to
act. Complete passivity is at bottom what we mean by nonbeing. So that a thing
is fundamentally wherever it can act. Most of our difficulties about
omnipresence have come out of conceptions limited to our own physical organisms.
We identify our own personal life with one part of a physical body and then
wonder how our organism could be everywhere at one and the same time. On the
metaphysical side, I repeat, omnipresence is not so bewildering as it once was,
and yet, the conception of a Force acting everywhere throughout the universe
introduces many perplexities to us. We have seen reasons for believing that in
many of their phases the activities of the universe do not have direct
significance for men. My body is no doubt an item of the physical mass of the
universe. That mass may be shifting its center more or less, all the time I am
in the mass whirling through space at enormous speed. I am in one spot of the
universe in January and in a far other spot in June. Infinitesimal though my own
organism may be, it is of a system which is being readjusted constantly
according to the demands of equations which the highest mathematics cannot
grasp. I certainly cannot grasp the science which controls my body. I do not
know how to give more than a rough description of the gravitation which
incessantly plays upon my body in relation to other bodies, and which helps
relate the parts of my body to each other. It does not help me much to interpret
the divine omnipresence in terms of the operation of such forces. My body itself
may be the seat of microscopic universes. If we are to believe the modern
theories as to the construction of atoms, our bodies may be composed of
throbbing systems which have a use in themselves altogether apart from their
uses to us. No, it is not a large aid just to think of divine forces as playing
around us, except as we believe in the friendly nature of the Source of the
forces. It is not enough for us to believe that these forces will not do us
harm. There are thinkers who conceive of the universe as so friendly to us that
it will do us no vast harm. There is pain, to be sure, and death> but there is
enough of joy in living to make life worth while. This, however, is not what the
Christian intends by the nearness of God. The mere fact that the power is of God
is not enough. We should not feel much at home in a universe where the forces
might constantly impinge upon us indeed, but where they might be mostly
indifferent to us. I think we take a step forward in adjusting ourselves when we
think of the divine nearness not only in terms of doing and knowing but also in
terms of f eeling. When I wish to speak of my nearness to my own body I do,
indeed, think of my power to make a muscle move with practical
instantaneousness, though the scientist’s psychological tests might show me the
instantaneousness as only "practical." I get a livelier notion of my relation to
my body when I think in terms of feeling. I am most certainly wherever I can
act, but I am more keenly and vividly wherever I can feel. It seems to me that I
am closest to the spots I can feel most keenly. This is true both for pleasure
and for pain. Lack of sensitiveness means lack of presence of myself at the
inert or dead spot. I say of a numb spot that it feels outside of me, or apart
from me, or as if it belonged to someone else. As it is with physical
sensitiveness so also is it with spiritual sensitiveness. Let us waive the
question just now as to the physiological basis for feelings of every kind and
consider those phases of sensitiveness which we do not ordinarily assign to a
physical base sympathy for the joy or sorrow of others, appreciations of
excellences in which the mind acts so quietly that we think not of an effort of
thought or will but of these as set to registering instantaneously by the
delicate shades of feeling. Admittedly, all these phases of mental activity are
united in reality, but at any one instant knowing, or willing, or feeling seems
to predominate. For the moment I am thinking of the quality of
instantaneousness, or alertness, or power of immediate reaction. As a rather
crude illustration we may imagine a group of telegraph operators relaying a
message. The wires themselves may speed the message with a quickness which is
for us instantaneous, but suppose one of the operators is slow. It may be
possible to translate his inertness or deadness into the minutes which it would
take the message itself to travel over the wires to a much greater distance, if
it were not for the psychological sluggishness.

Now, immediacy of response seems to me of most aid as a clue to the divine
omnipresence. In the chapter on immanence this problem will come up again from a
slightly different base, for by immanence we ordinarily mean particularly the
divine omnipresence. No discussion of this theme can be satisfactory, but it
does seem to me that in facing the omnipresence of God the imagination gets a
little more help if we make the most of the hints from sensitiveness.

Whatever our categories, however, the essential for us is the character of the
omnipresent Mind. So far as our relation to God goes we desire to know if he is
paying attention to us. The sacrificial rites of religions in all ages have, in
the last analysis, aimed at least partly to attract the attention of the being
conceived of as divine. Elijah’s taunting of the priests of Baal is significant
here. Many features of the story of the contest of Elijah with the priests of
Baal may not be historical in detail, but the taunts against the heathen priests
precisely describe one characteristic of much, , perhaps most, heathenism,
namely, the inattentiveness, or lack of sensitiveness of the gods toward men
except as the interests of the gods are unusually aroused. Elijah called out
that the god of the Baal-worshipers was asleep or off on a journey. The frantic
shoutings of the priests were aimed at waking the god, or arousing him out of
sluggishness, or of diverting his attention from something on which he might for
the moment be engaged. Now we might, so far as the physical forces of the
universe are concerned, think of them as propelled forward by the power of a
Baal, but of what value would be the forces working around us if we could not
attract the attention of the controller of the forces? No, it will not help us
much to believe in a God whose attention wanders, or whose wits go
wool-gathering. The pressure of his attention upon our fate and life is what we
desire.

It may be that I am wandering a little from the essential significance of the
doctrine of the divine omnipresence. The modern putting of immanence lays stress
on the divine nearness. Historically at least, the conception of divine
omnipresence grew out of the realization of an enlarging world, and sought to
find God out on the frontiers of that enlarging universe. No matter where the
Hebrews first got a start in worshiping their God, they rendered vast,
indispensable service in always taking their Deity with them, not, as some
students would tell us, carrying him along in a box, but in realizing that their
God had power wherever they might be. I have no desire to enter a field of
controverted criticism, but let us assume that the God of Israel was originally
the Deity of the Kenites, with special habitation at Sinai. A first stupendous
lesson was that this Kenite Deity had power in Egypt, then in the wilderness,
then in Palestine, then against P.hilistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians, and
finally over all the earth and heavens. The Hebrews’ conviction of the presence
of then- God kept pace with their growing knowledge of the world. They could not
out-travel their God. They could not get ahead of him or beyond him. This same
adjustment of the presence of God to the demands of our ever-enlarging world has
been one of the continuous triumphs of the Christian church. If we wish to
realize how complete the victory, let us consider one or two such adjustments. I
mention first one which I do not remember ever hearing considered in this
connection the matter-of-factness of the assumption of the great explorers from
the time of Columbus on that the lands into which they pressed were the domain
of the God of Christianity, and that their business was to convert the
inhabitants of those lands to Christianity. The world of Columbus before he
sailed was not large. Columbus believed in the sphericity of the earth, but if
he had known how far he would actually have to travel on his first voyage, he
would probably not have weighed anchor. He pushed so far that some of his
sailors, indeed, thought God had deserted them, but their despair was a mood and
not a conviction. The conviction was that God was the Lord of the new lands.
Now, I know this will seem commonplace, but that is because the everywhereness
of God is trite with us. The discoveries of Columbus were scarcely more than two
thousand years later than the time when men believed in separate gods, in
localized deities. The Christian nations at the close of the fifteenth century
were not large, and heathenism pressed in closely upon their borders. Jn spite
of all this the explorers and conquerors assumed the everywhereness of God as
naturally as they assumed the sea and the land. The word of one explorer in a
storm when it seemed that his ships must sink, that Heaven was as near from the
waves of that strange sea as from England, is as significant as giving a glimpse
of the mind of the age as of the spirit of a heroic individual. The
commonplaceness of the conception to-day is itself a tribute to the spiritual
energy of those who enforced the conception till it became commonplace. Two
thousand years earlier the assumption that the gods of the peoples to whom the
explorers came were real ,in their own domains would have been altogether
natural and easy.

Time and again have thinkers emphasized the marvel of the adjustment of
Christianity to the Copernican theory. I have in previous pages urged that the
increase of knowledge of our material world is also an increase of ignorance,
and that the wider the knowledge the heavier the strain on faith. I do not wish
to retract anything thus urged, but I here note that the scientific teaching
concerning some forces that rule everywhere is an aid to the doctrine that God
works everywhere. The metaphysical doctrine is helped by scientific utterance,
though the ethical doctrine is still a call for faith. It is a positive help to
accept the discovery first forcefully set forth by Galileo, namely, that there
is an essential uniformity in nature’s processes. No matter how far the starry
spaces may extend, they are ruled by the same laws as rule our planet. Sir
Charles Lyell made us even more at home in the world when he showed that the
forces now shaping the earth rainfall, heat and cold are the same as have been
shaping the earth from the beginning. After a fashion this stripped the old
geologic days of their strangeness. Likewise the spectroscope indicates that
stars are composed of materials to be found on earth, that the heavenly bodies
some of them are now what the earth once was, that changes are taking place in
them according to laws with which we are familiar. The mathematicians tell us of
the significance of geometry and trigonometry and calculus for the movements of
the heavenly spheres. The physicist speaks of a gravitation which works
everywhere, and the followers of Einstein seek to combine space, time, and
gravitation into one comprehensive formula valid throughout the universe. Now,
whatever may be established by such conceptions some things are disestablished.
All notion of a broken-up, decentralized universe is gone. The universe is one.
The old materialism which conceived of matter as dead mass, or as inert lumps,
called atoms, is gone. Forces are now at the center of the stage. Moreover, it
is increasingly hard for matter conceived of as blind force to hold its sway.
The energies work in ways that can be grasped only by the highest mathematics.
If so much mind is required to read off the processes of the universe, it does
not seem far-fetched to assume that the universe is the expression of mind. Even
the considerations which are summoned to reduce mind to insignificance end by
exalting mind. If mind is insignificant as compared with matter, mind has found
itself out. If mind is just the outcome of the whirl of impersonal powers, mind
has discovered that. If mind is to be ruled out of the universe, the decree must
go forth in the name of mind and there we are, with mind back in the throne by
the very decree that banishes mind. Nevertheless, the everywhereness of God, to
which modern science lends some aid, is of scant comfort, after all, unless we
can think of God in terms of Christ. I admit that there might be joys in a life
lived out before indifferent gods, but a human race which is more and more
taking mind as the clue to the universe, will ask more and more insistently as
to the nature of that Mind. If the ethical aspects are the noblest features of
mind as we see it, the only way we can keep our balance is to hold to the Mind
of the universe as moving according to the highest principles we can conceive.
The believer in the God of Christ finds in the progressive intensification of
his understanding of the moral spirit of Christ a balance to the extension of
our knowledge of the range of intellectual principles throughout the universe.
It is a strange tendency that prevents some philosophers from balance in their
view of the universe. At the same instant that they insist upon the
everywhereness of laws which admittedly imply mind, they become more skeptical
as to the cosmic significance of righteousness.

I suppose it is fair to meet my query by saying that the recognition of mind
means only that laws explain more and more how events are brought about. We
behold mathematics ruling throughout the quantitative universe. There is,
indeed, an everywhereness of mathematics, but we cannot see what the
mathematical movements are for. The skeptic avows that he does not deny mind by
flying in face of the actual mathematical processes, but that he resents
anyone’s telling him what the processes are for. They may be expressions of some
lofty intelligence glorying in the manifestations on their own account, or they
may be purposeful in some practical, manner, or they may have no purpose at all.
Our knowledge, in other words, has to do just with how things hang together, or
with steps by which events follow one another. How things happen we to a measure
know. Why they happen we do not know. What the forces are we do not know, even
if we admit that they are expressions of Mind. For knowledge of Mind is of no
surpassing value till we know the purpose and spirit of the Mind. So the skeptic
protests. Perhaps we can best consider what he says by discussing immanence.


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  CHAPTER 10: 01.08.     CHAPTER 08
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CHAPTER VII THE DIVINE IMMANENCE THE distinction between omnipresence and
immanence may seem too closely drawn, but there are some suggestions which
cluster more naturally about the one term than the other. The skeptic mentioned
in the preceding chapter is just in his contention that the theist takes it all
too easy in resting his argument as soon as he hears the widespread concession
that law and mind are expressed everywhere. God, indeed, may be everywhere, but
what is he doing everywhere, or anywhere? One law may rule everywhere, but is
there one purpose everywhere? Who knows but the law may supply a stage on which
no purpose rules whatever, or on which puppets are jerked about; by wires, all
the time under the illusion that they are free?

Let us admit again that omnipresence and immanence start a swarm of detailed
problems that they do not specifically solve. The advantages of the doctrine of
immanence are that with it we can think of all-pervading law, which is a help
even when we do not know what the law is for, that we do away with the notion of
a Deity who started the world like a wound-up toy and then left it to run, or
run down, of itself; that we conceive of God as free from barriers which he must
break through in order to get to the world in which we live. The old notion of
nature as a manufactured contrivance which even the Deity had to break into, and
whose laws he had to set aside if he reached us at all, was a heavy load upon
mind and heart and will. Relief from all this is distinct advance and clear
gain, though it is astonishing, by the way, to note the traces of deism which
still abound not only in common thought but also in some philosophical
exposition which disavows deism.

Still, this relief is not the whole story, by any means. God is brought near in
immanence; but if we are to hold to immanence, we must face all the implications
of the conception. We must go the whole way. God is in everything, with the
reservation that he is not himself willing the choices of free men. In popular
expositions of the doctrine God is in the blue skies and the green grass and the
pretty birds. But he is also in everything else. "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright"
presents a theological problem which we can escape only by deliberately turning
away from the jungle. If the poet draws comfort out of the beauty which the
immanent God is now and here spreading out before him, the cynic can in his turn
point to facts ugly and even hideous. The doctrine of divine immanence is, I
repeat, a long step ahead, but we may as well recognize its limitations. It
brings God immediately near in something resembling a physical contact. It puts
him in all things alike so far as causal activity is concerned. It also and this
we must not forget forces on us a new conviction that God is immediately
responsible for the features of the world that we see and for those that we do
not see. If we can believe in the God of Christ, that is enough. We must reach
some focus of belief in any case, or quit thinking about the problem.

I would not, however, leave the impression that the older, more deistic systems
were any better off than immanence as regards the divine responsibility. No
matter how far away we put God, so far as intermediaries are concerned, we
cannot acquit him of responsibility for the stern facts of the universe by the
introduction of self-running agencies. A summary deistic procedure is, or used
to be, to draw a distinction between God as First Cause and the secondary causes
through which he does his work. Just counting "first" and "second" gets us
nowhere. "Secondary causes" is a term useful to keep our minds on the factors
themselves without raising back-lying questions, but it does not and never did
get at the final responsibility. Secondary causes can do nothing on their own
account. So with the attempts to put the fault for the mysteries on laws. All
that this can mean is that God made poor tools or that the tools were made of
material that he could not control or that they slip hi his hands! No matter how
long a chain reaches from the universe to God, God is not cleared of
responsibility by the length of the chain.

Nevertheless, the conviction that God is immanent does bring him nearer to us at
least by ridding us of all the clutter of intermediary machinery. Few teachers
of immanence get the full help from the doctrine that they could if they would
push their reasoning far enough to free themselves of the burden of
all-embracing real space, and make the space merely the form under which the
immanent energy works. If God is like unto Christ immanence can be pushed out to
its implications, and be made a support to faith. If God is as near as immanence
brings him, the need for some assurance, at least of faith, as to what he is
like is at once apparent. If we are to live at such close quarters with this
immanent Power, we are immeasurably helped if we can believe that the spirit of
the Power is like unto the spirit of Christ. A moment ago I said that, according
to the ’doctrine of immanence, God is causally in all tilings alike. This is not
saying that he is in all things alike so far as meaning is concerned. If he
were, there wpuld be no meaning. As soon as we affirm that God is in all things
a certain type of theologian forthwith declares that this settles everything.
All comes from God so all our troubles disappear. In fact, a good many of them
just begin. If we cannot have distinctions in the utterances of the universe,
there is no meaning in the universe. God is in storms and sunshine, tigers and
robins, sickness and health alike. Mind means nothing, unless all factors are
parts of a plan in which each plays out its function, with some functions more
important than others.

If we are to believe in a Christlike God, we must get away from the conception
of the divinity of all things alike. If we are to hold to immanence, we must do
so as a statement of the everywhereness of God’s activity and the oneness of
plan that works through that activity. This is important because of the
tendency, since the coming of the immanence teaching, to say that God is in
Christ and in all other men, that he is in Christ and also in the blue skies
which, of course, has its measure of truth, but which misses the essential. In
painting a landscape there must be a focus, which the artist sometimes calls the
eye of the landscape. In a masterpiece of oratory there is a climax; in a drama
there is outcome or denouement; in orchestral music there is a theme; in
argument there is a conclusion. Painters, orators, dramatists, musicians,
philosophers are, it might be said, in all parts of their work alike. They
composed it all, and painted and played and spoke and wrote it all. To say that
each creator, however, was "in" the interpretative key, which unlocked the one
regnant meaning toward which every detail had been moving, in no different sense
from that in which he was "in" a minor detail is absurd. That is to say, if we
are to preach God as like unto Christ, we have to maintain that the doctrine of
the Divine Presence in everything is not to conflict with that presence of God
in those central aspects which lead to intelligibility. In the Messiah Handel is
present in every note of the oratorio, but we should not say that he is in the
drumbeats alone just as he is in the majestic song of the "Hallelujah Chorus."
If some hearer should begin to disparage the chorus on the ground that Handel
also wrote the drumparts, we should declare he was either putting forth
commonplace or nonsense. The believer in a Christlike God beholds in Christ a
climax, a theme, a motive, a spirit which gives him God in his deepest nature.
In other words, God is in Christ as he is not elsewhere as revelation of spirit
and character. If, now, some objector will have it that God is also in
everything else, we have to reply that no doubt he is, but that we are on the
search for meanings, and that we do not find meanings in settings of scenes, as
we do in the scenes themselves. With a clue to a meaning once in our hands the
accessories fall into place, but the accessories themselves do not supply the
clue. In Christ we feel that we have arrived at a center. The view outward from
a center is altogether different from the view inward from a circumference.

Some one seeks to turn upon us the admissions we have already made as to the
vastness of our ignorance, or as to the increasing extent of the unknown out
beyond the known. Is it not the height of rashness to affirm that we have in
anything in Christ, or in anyone, or in anything the central focus of all this
universe? We repeat that all we are trying to do is to show what the
Christlikeness of God implies. We are not trying to prove to scientists or
philosophers that such a God exists. We avow ourselves again and again as unable
to deduce God from any data within our reach. We aver that a God of any kind
must be seized by faith. All we are doing is to try to unfold the implications
of the teaching that in Christ we see God. We insist that there is nothing in
the doctrine of the divine immanence to shut us off from seeing God as
especially in Christ. A man might conceivably sit by the bank of a river flowing
into the sea, or by the edge of a cove into which wash the tides of the sea. By
watching ebb and flow he might master the essential laws of the tide without
ever looking upon the sea. His knowledge would be admittedly limited. He would
know nothing of the thousand-league stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific. He
would not be able to tell how high the tide rises at the Bay of Fundy or at
Hangchau in China. He would, however, so understand the principles of the tide
that wherever he might travel the tide would be intelligible to him. In some
respects his little cove might be the best of observation stations, better than
the broad expanse of the ocean itself. The scientist never wearies of telling us
of Newton’s leap from the law of the falling apple to that of the falling moon.
Given all the circumstances, the hint of gravitation was for Newton centrally in
the falling apple. Now, these illustrations are inadequate in that they are
merely specifications of a law. Christ was more than a specification, so that
the other illustrations suggestive^ of climaxes, and themes of dramas, and
reasonings are more pertinent. Still, cove and falling apple do suggest that we
are not to allow our minds to be terrorized or bullied by quantitative or mass
considerations. Moreover, while we may concede all possible worth to that
quantitative realm with which the scientist deals, we must never forget that in
Christianity we move among qualities as well. Just what could we mean if we said
that we believe in an immanence that puts the divine in all qualities alike?
That would be equivalent to saying that God is in all values alike, which could
only mean that God is in no values at all.

If we are to accept a doctrine of immanence which leaves us a God like unto
Christ, we shall have to admit that God is even in some things for their
elimination. Was it not Jonathan Edwards who said that some things show forth
the glory of God in being acted upon and destroyed? Of course Edwards would have
included souls, who for God’s own glory were thus to be destroyed, and a God who
would work in men to destroy them merely "for his own glory" would not be the
God of Christ. Still there is a truth in Edwards’ words. The perverse or
imperfect choices of finite wills might, indeed, make it necessary for God to
decree the elimination of features of the universe introduced by evil choices.
Or in a progressive advance of the system it might be necessary to work out of
and away from features once important but now no longer so.

It is to be always kept in mind that if God is like unto Christ, the u|iiverse
as we see it may not be altogether the universe which would have been if the
divine will could everywhere have ruled. God is, indeed, in all things; but if
our philosophies of immanence take unto themselves to declare that, since God is
in all things, everything, therefore, is as God would have it, we are in danger
of getting out of the perspective and away from the moral balance of Jesus.
Here, again, we are not in the region of formal proof, but it is not possible to
keep close to the words and spirit of Jesus and believe that the world is just
what God would have it be. We need not now talk of a taint or an impairment of
the realm of nature caused by a fall of man. All that is necessary is to
recognize the actual moral struggle, and the consequences of the evil or the
imperfect for men, and even for the material conditions under which men live. An
evil choice is seldom merely an inner spiritual event in its total effect. ,The
closest connection of the human will with the nature outside is through the body
which is the organism of the will. That organism is connected with other
organisms, and with the other material factors which form a meetingplace for the
organisms. Through this web of life the consequences of an evil or mistaken
choice may work out into an expression not at all suggestive of divine
indwelling, except that the divine life is laboring in all this for elimination
and purification and redemption. The redemptive activity of God brings us
closest to the mind of Christ. God is working everywhere for redemption among
men who have made wrong choices.

Further food for meditation as to the right interpretation of immanence is to be
found in a little reflection on the institutions of human society. Suppose we
could assume that men everywhere work in society with unselfish purposes. Even
so the institutions of society are imperfect. The most radical social agitators
to-day insist* that it is at least bad tactics to hold any individual, or set of
individuals, responsible for evils arising out of the faulty constitution of
society, that we can better spend our time seeking for the reorganization of
society. Jesus himself spoke of the most important human institution, the
family, as in one stage faulty, the fault due to the ignorance of men. God
himself had to overlook the faultiness for the time being a word of Jesus which,
of course, is to be taken as a description of the attitude of divine kindliness.
In complete strictness God could not overlook the faultiness of a human social
institution, for by his own laws that faultiness had consequences of which he
had to take account if he was to deal with the chosen people at all. So with all
human institutions. All are imperfect. Now, an interpretation of the divine
immanence which would have us believe that because the institutions are divine
in origin they are therefore all that God would have them be, is far from any
ideal of the God-life which we could call Christlike. The doctrine of divine
immanence, then, is more for faith than for sight, in any case. I say "in any
case," for those who accept the modern lazy, hazy notions of the popular
puttings cannot actually see any more than the others of us. As soon as they
have heard that God is in all things alike they do not ask as to the different
senses in which he may be indwelling, or even as to what indwelling means. They
take a causal nearness as sufficient and let it go at that, regardless of the
truism that a merely causal nearness settles little. If asked to elaborate on
the belief, they talk of those blue skies and green fields and song birds which
we mentioned above. That this is better than nothing goes without saying, but
the immanence becomes of service only in the hands of the believer that God is
in Christ. Once firmly hold of that conception, the believer is willing to look
the darkest aspects of the universe in the face. It is noteworthy that
Christianity and the Judaism from which it came have always been willing to look
squarely at the grimmest of grim facts, with no palliation of the grimness and
no glossing it over. The strictest scientist has never shown more willingness to
look at things as they are than has the genuine Christian. Only, the Christian
has looked at more; or he has looked out of a conviction that the moral nature
of the Power working in the most mysterious ways has been Christlike. It is
entirely possible, therefore, for the Christian believer to accept the doctrine
that God is in all things, and to maintain that he is in some things differently
from the way he is in others, and that we do not know what much around us means,
so far as the actual processes are concerned.

Here may be as appropriate a place as any for a word in behalf of genuinely
Christian agnosticism. The avowal that God is in a manner in all things may be
accompanied by a frank profession of ignorance as to how he is in this or that
particular fact. Most witnesses to their belief that God has led them along
life’s pathway do not go far in their story before creating more doubts than
they destroy. I once knew a worthy saint who was never weary of proclaiming that
God had so shaped his career as to bring about certain consequences favorable to
himself. The supposedly divine guidance had led this one man to a happy outcome
through a chain of happenings which necessarily had involved the death of
others. Just how these others were favored did not appear. Of course there are
crises in life where men justifiably feel that the working out of events shows
in especial definiteness the presence of the Divine. I have just been trying to
say that if the divine immanence is to be adjusted to a belief in a Christlike
God, the adjustment must be on the basis of special nearness which the
everywhereness of the divine causality does not of itself imply. Now at the risk
of seeming to withdraw all this it becomes imperative to add that the
interpretation of such special nearnesses is dangerous if they depart far from
the realm of inner spiritual nearness. It is possible to believe that God is
with us in the peculiar intimacy like that which we have in mind when we feel
that a friend is with us in our work, or struggle, or sorrow, at the same
instant that we admit complete agnosticism as to how the nearness of the Divine
is to reveal itself in the outer working of events.


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  CHAPTER 11: 01.09.     CHAPTER 09
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CHAPTER IX THE DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE THE transcendence of God is often used as if
it had one clearly cut meaning, but it too serves different purposes in the
hands of different persons. With some it lends itself readily to the thought of
God as Christlike. For example, it is at times taken to mean that the range of
the divine activities is beyond the comprehension of man. This is admitted by
the Christian outright. All that Christianity asks is that in all realms the
Christspirit rule. Suppose there are millions of worlds like ours which never
yet have come swimming within focus of the farthest-reaching telescope. There is
nothing in this to make us modify our conception of the character of ’God. Or
suppose that every atom is to a degree a self-contained universe. The physicist
thinks that the atoms are like solar systems, with planets of negatively
electrified matter revolving around a positive center similar to our sun, that
the distances between the electrons are, as compared to the size of the
electrons, like distances between the planets of the solar system compared to
the size of the planets. Suppose that every atom is a universe. On a different
scale with a difference which nobody on the electron-planet might recognize it
might be that each of the atoms is the seat of a history of an atom-race of
minds. This is fancy, but let fancy have her way for a little. Is there anything
in all this to require modification of the nature of God? Not at all. Or suppose
there are universes possible in some dimension beyond the three dimensions. Or
suppose that there are realms of existence outside of space altogether. Nothing
in this necessarily calls for change in our attitude toward God. We are here
merely dealing with a God of whom our knowledge grows from, more to more. This
kind of transcendence is compatible with immanence, in that God is immanent not
only in the world we know, but also in all the worlds that transcend ours. This
is not, however, what transcendence always means. In the interpretations, or at
least the implications, of some theologians, it implies that there may be as
many different moral systems as there are different worlds, and that it is the
height of impertinence for us to try to make our moral ideas of God rule for
systems other than our own. Let me repeat that John Stuart Mill once found
himself in a logical corner from which he sought to escape by saying that two
and two might make five in some other planet. Only very gritty pragmatists would
go that far to-day, though some do indeed make truth just an agreed-upon
convention. In the field of moral theory, however, more than a few who would
maintain that in another universe our mathematics would have to rule as far as
applicable* will have it that we could not for a moment apply our moral
conceptions to such a transcendent sphere.

There is confusion here. When we speak of a moral God we do not refer to any
detailed code as the expression of God’s moral nature. Nothing hi our conviction
as to the Christlikeness of God will tell us in concrete detail just what God
will do in a given situation. Inasmuch as we do not claim to know what the
divine Christlikeness calls for in the limited round of our present experience,
we are not so bold as to expatiate on what God will do in other spheres beyond
our knowledge. In general, however, we are sure of some features of moral
character which must be true of the divine nature anywhere, inside or outside of
our experience, if the divine is to be Christlike. Wherever a Christlike God
acts he must act with good will toward the intelligences there, no matter how
different the form of the experience of such intelligences from all others in
the universe. The good will, in other words, is absolute for the Divine
everywhere. Next, good will demands that the Divine must give those
intelligences all the chance of which they are capable, the opportunity being
presented in terms of possible Christlikeness of spirit. With these two
requirements in hand as the absolute fundamentals, we are then ready to say that
just how the requirements are to be met depends upon the divine knowledge of the
concrete circumstances, about which no outsider can say anything. For some
reason there are those who will maintain that such talk as the above is the
utmost limit in presumption, but is it? Is it any more presumptuous than to
affirm that if the Spirit back of the universe is to be a Spirit of Truth, Truth
must be the ideal everywhere? The backlying Force may conceivably not be devoted
to truth, but if devotion to truth rules, is it not to rule everywhere? To be
sure, this would not say one word as to the concrete content of truth, but would
not the demands of such an ideal be final? It may be that some restlessness here
comes out of our uneasiness at being told too much about God, that is to say,
out of a feeling that it is not altogether reverent to speak so confidently.
There is a sound instinct which tells us that, in a degree, God is and should be
unknowable. For this instinct we ought to have all respect, but let us glance
for a moment at an illustration which can, unhappily, be taken too often from
actual life. A man is stricken with a terrible affliction. A spiritual
counselor, anxious to console, proceeds to tell the sufferer in detail just why
the affliction came. The grief -laden soul may himself be the first to resent
such positiveness of utterance as irreverent and impertinent, whereas he would
not resent a frank declaration from the counselor that there is no light on the
reason for the affliction, at the same time that there is the deepest wisdom in
trusting that God even in such blows acts with the spirit of Christ. We admit
the havoc wrought by the teachers who have set before us a too-knowable God, but
how the interpretation of God as of Christlike spirit sins against reverence we
fail to see. To return for a moment to the man in sorrow. It is, indeed, a sin
against a fine reverence to converse glibly with souls in distress as to just
why God permits woe, but an error just as grave, from the point of view of
Christian experience, is to quote without much understanding the passage which
tells us that his ways are not as our ways. The man who wrote that line was not
preaching the transcendence of which I am speaking. He believed in God as most
real in Israel’s life as the shepherd of his people at ,the same time that he
admitted the mysteriousness of his actual dealings. God’s ways are not our ways
indeed, but if they are Christ’s ways, we can be content. Of course it will
always be possible to speak of God as the Unknowable. There will always be an
element of knowledge beyond us, because of the impossibility of our overtaking
anything infinite, but the spirit of the mind back of that knowledge must be
knowable if we are to hold to God as Christlike. It is interesting to observe
that many who will not accept Christianity because God is unknowable, end by
specifying quite a’ few items of information about God. It would be instructive
to examine the agnostic philosophies from Spencer’s day down to our own and note
the professed knowledge they set before us about the unknowable. In a
considerable part, I urge, this insistence upon transcendence comes from
confusing moral spirit and the concrete details of a moral code. We have heard
the departures in conduct of geniuses from our ordinary morality justified on
the ground that it is impossible to tie a genius down to the cramping limits of
the accustomed. The genius must break new paths. So too it is folly for us to
try to frame any conception of what a divine morality would be, we are told. The
most elementary data are too far beyond us. According to the old saying, we are
no more fitted to understand the moral constitution of the universe than is an
ant to know the constitution of the sun.

Here, again, is confusion, confusion even in the "genius" illustration.
Ordinarily, this "great man" argument is brought forward in connection with a
genius who has been notable for some self-indulgence one who has been drunken,
or licentious, or untruthful. What to the unsophisticated onlooker would seem to
be falling below an established moral standard is proclaimed by the friends of
the genius as a rising above the conventions. Now, genius of this type is likely
to be overbalanced on one side or another. An acute student has said that the
only two geniuses in art of the first order who apparently showed no traces of
nervous instability whatever were Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare. It
may be wholly proper to pass charitable judgment on an irregular, unbalanced
genius in his defiance of moral laws, but the procedure is not calculated to
throw much light on the nature of divinity. When the irregularity of the genius
is just a career which ordinary intelligence does not understand, but which is
nevertheless followed in a spirit of devotion to truth, we have a problem more
like the one we are considering. Moral spirit may call for one course of
detailed conduct in one situation and for exactly the reverse in another.
Abraham Lincoln was admittedly a great democratic leader, and yet Lincoln at
times acted more autocratically than any other ruler of modern times. He
transcended all customary precedents and expectations, so far as detailed deeds
were concerned, in what seemed violent autocracy, yet his democratic devotion
was complete throughout.

We are not quite done with this problem. I once heard a defender of a rigorous
theory of atonement avow that he could not make his theory intelligible because
of God’s transcendence of all human faculties of understanding. He spoke of
demands in the divine nature itself that must be satisfied, demands wholly
beyond our grasp. It will be recalled also that some of the followers of Dean
Mansel, if not Mansel himself, insisted that God could not be seized by human
thought, and that they used this transcendence to attack all attempts at
theological reasoning, all attempts possibly except their own. It is true that
these Mansellians discoursed of absoluteness rather than of transcendence, but
it all came to the same thing in the end. The Absolute was so far above any
definition that nobody could intelligibly say anything about him. The
Mansellians thus practically joined hands with the Spencerians as to the
Unknowableness of God, though both groups found for themselves a good many
things to declare. Even a too fluent insistence upon the divine unknowableness
is saying quite a little about God.

Some years ago I heard a leader of the extreme fundamentalist party, so called,
avow with Boanergic vigor that we must keep silent before the awful
transcendence of God. I intend no disrespect toward fundamentalists when I say
that this particular leader was using transcendence partly as a shield from
criticism which his own theory called forth. He was proclaiming a most amazing
theology, and when men asked questions fell back on the divine transcendence. In
this instance, however, there was a consideration beyond that of mere avoidance
of formal argument. The speaker was a trained scholar, and was not merely trying
to avoid meeting difficulties in intellectual debate. He was a thoroughgoing
Calvinist of the old school, with outright emphasis on divine sovereignty. He
especially resented discussion that spoke as I have done in these pages about
divine responsibility, especially God’s responsibility to the man whom he has
created. This was, ’according to the fundamentalist, to fasten man-made moral
categories on God with irreverence almost blasphemy. It seemed that, according
to this fundamentalist, the world was in a fair way to become Christian up to
about one hundred years ago, and had then turned sharply back to paganism, the
paganism being, as far as I could make out, the spread of modern scientific and
democratic ideas. Of course, if one is to accept the old Calvinism with its
doctrine of virtually arbitrary sovereignty for God, one will have to hold fast
to conceptions which violate morality and common sense, judging the conceptions
by any sort of human standards.

We shall have to admit the dangers of irreverence in frank discussion of the
divine attributes, and we must always remind ourselves that in the concrete
ongoings of the universe we are as much in the dark as the most thorough
doctrine of transcendence would demand. That is different, however, from saying
that intellectual and moral obligations cannot bind the divine life. Hegel
established the principle that things must come within thought or go out of
existence. Likewise all reality must come within the sweep of moral obligation,
or a Christlike God must drop from our hold. God’s morality is above ours
indeed, as his thought and feeling are above ours. Transcending us, however, is
not quite the same as transcending morality.


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  CHAPTER 12: 01.10.     CHAPTER 10
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CHAPTER X THE DIVINE CREATOR

THUS far we have been treating what are usually called the metaphysical
attributes of God. We pass now to the attributes which have more definitely to
do with men, and we begin with God as Creator of men. In previous chapters I
have here and there discussed some phases of this same problem, especially in
the paragraphs on power, but as far as possible I have tried to keep the more
metaphysical attributes free from the specific considerations raised by the
relations of God to men, though this has been possible only to a limited extent.

We have already mentioned more than once the perplexity raised by the power
which we usually attribute to God, and the presence of human suffering. To-day
there is more or less willingness to limit God’s omnipotence so as to relieve
him from blame for such suffering, though as far as men are concerned there is
always the possibility that the suffering may be utilized for a moral purpose,
dark as is the problem before the sufferers themselves at crises of apparently
unutterable and needless agony. There is conceivably an explanation for such
suffering which makes it different from that animal suffering which is so dense
a mystery. We would better hold fast to the power of a God who can overrule
suffering for the sake of ministering to the higher welfare of men than to be
overanxious to limit that power.

It is in another quarter that of human freedom that we confront the obstacles
which arise with belief in divine omnipotence. For we simply must have freedom
if there is to be any reason at all in our holding to a belief in the Christian
God. On the human side I do not see that present-day theorizing has added much
strength to the usual arguments against freedom. When the doctrine of the
conservation of energy was newer it was often interpreted to mean that, the sum
of energies in the universe being constant, there could be no addition to these
physical forces by free will. Now we see more definitely that free will requires
only the power to choose among physical forces already existing, the human
choice being simply the occasion on which one energy or another, already
existing or potential, is directed into one channel or another. If this is
conceded, the dreaded bugbear of the relation of free will and the conservation
of energy reduces to the commonplace conclusion that in making choices our wills
have to limit themselves to the forces available for carrying out those choices.
The universe is ruled not by law, but by laws. There would be no setting aside
law in human choice, but the utilization of one particular law, or set of laws,
rather than another. Let a man make the craziest choice imaginable. Let him to
all appearances be wildly arbitrary. There is no way that his choice could
reflect the arbitrariness, except that he chose a lower law instead of a higher.
There is no chance of a human being’s escaping the web of law.

I do not intend to review many of the arguments as to freedom; all I wish here
is to touch upon those having a bearing on the nature of God himself. I will
admit that there is no formal logic by which we can prove that man is free apart
from some assumption as to the nature of God. The difficulty we fall into,
however, as soon as we begin to declaim in high fashion about proof, is that
there is no use talking about proof apart from freedom itself, or apart from
recognizing a standard. For if there is no freedom, one choice stands on the
same level as another, all being alike necessitated. The debate on freedom, by
the way, has been waged too much in the specifically moral realm.

There has been in the utterance of the determinist an air of noble tragedy at
the plight of man, who is compelled to take courses which arouse moral
condemnation in his own mind and in that of his fellows, and yet without any
ability to help himself. There is a sad self-pity in reflection of this type.
Most of us, however, who might find a solemn comfort in thus pitying ourselves
for the black tragedy of our moral helplessness, dislike to be laughed at for
the ridiculousness of our mental plight. If there is no freedom whatever and
everything is alike determined, all our intellectual processes are determined.
The socalled "speculative significance of freedom" is skipped over all too
lightly by many a determinist. Determinism is, on the strict basis, the product
of forces which never for an instant slip toward freedom, but so is the belief
in freedom. This iron-bound structure of law generates in the ordinary mind in
all stages of the world’s history a conviction that it is not iron-bound. Now, I
repeat that while we may work up a good deal of sympathy for ourselves over the
moral aspect of our steel-clad helplessness, it is hard to feel anything but
humiliation when we reflect that our truth and falsehood have no standard by
which they can be judged. All are alike ridiculously false. Or, if we prefer,
all are true but this is no happier an outcome than the other. We are like
children at a movieplay applauding the actors, or shouting warnings to them,
when they are nothing but shadows on a film with the ending fixed. We can laugh
at it all, or cry at it all, for in such situation laughter and tears are much
the same. No, if God makes us at all, he must give us a measure of freedom,
provided he has it to give. There is no use of talking about the Christlikeness
of God unless God has and can bestow freedom. This all, however, has to be
limited and qualified by a steady grip of confidence in the divine fairness with
men. In the chapter on "Power" I wrote of the general necessity of the union of
power and responsibility in the divine, but I reserved part of this discussion
for this special theme of man’s freedom. We must see that there is no use
talking about moral or intellectual life without a degree of freedom, but that
the granting of that freedom involves an incalculable responsibility for the
Grantor. Obviously, we human beings could not be consulted about whether we were
to be given freedom or not, or whether we cared to come into the world or not.
While such a question could be seriously put only by a lover of Hibernian
paradox, nevertheless a grave moral responsibility for the Creator here
confronts us. I have spoken of our freedom, but in the most important of all
issues, namely, that as to whether we were to exist at all or not, we had no
freedom. Here determination rules. Now, if relations of man to man suggest
anything as hints of the fairness of the divine attitude to men, the fact that
we were not, and could not be, consulted about coming into this universe implies
a stupendous responsibility upon the God who sent us here. There has been a
religiously conventional emphasis on the worthlessness of man in the sight of
God, an emphasis which at various times in the history of the church has
altogether obscured the rights of man at the hands of God. Along with this has
gone an assumption that life itself, with the possibility of eternal salvation,
has been such a boon that the question of the divine responsibility is
sacrilegious. This will not do. Even if life itself be selfevidently a good,
responsibilities are upon the Creator for putting men into the stream of life.

Here, again, we must be on our guard lest the general proposition seem to throw
more light than it does upon particular facts. It seems that some human beings
are born practically without freedom. They are, as we say, creatures of animal
impulse, by which we mean, in some instances, that animal impulses shaped or are
shaping them. These are, indeed, an inescapable problem for a just and
responsible God, but the question of their own moral or intellectual desert does
not arise. They are far, far below a normal human plane, but the fault is not
theirs, and the divine justice and compassion can be trusted concerning them.
Moreover, we are all limited, but still there is the degree of liberty hi human
life which makes choices in normal experience possible. We cry out at times that
we have not enough freedom, and at other times that we have too much, but, much
or little, all the freedom is a gift from God, and the Giver of the gift shares
with the receivers the consequences of the gift. I think we all agree that the
power involved in the creation of free souls is so immeasurable that the Creator
is justified in creation only if the creation takes place in the light of his
full knowledge. Volume after volume is being published to-day about God as Life,
or as Life-urge, the popular exposition suggesting an unconscious somewhat
pushing along through the lower material and animal existences until it comes to
a manner of consciousness, without distinct personality, in man. It may be so,
but there is no possibility of interpreting such "urge" in terms of
Christlikeness. "Urge" is denied a responsibility which can be held to account.
Responsibility for the creation of men can be assessed only if creation takes
place through the will of a Creator. Of course if an intelligent God created men
without full understanding of all possible consequences, the situation could not
be saved by avowals that the creation came as the expression of love, without
consideration of consequences. I am speaking more particularly, however, of the
doctrine that socalled Life is back of creation. That Life is usually
represented as an impersonality to which we could not attribute responsibility.

Here someone cries out that we have arrived at a blind alley that even God
cannot know what a free soul will choose! This brings up an age-old debate
which, however, need not detain us long. The foreknowledge-of-a-freechoice
argument is a drawn battle. At least it has never been proved that such
foreknowledge is a self-contradiction. I do not mean, though, that the
responsibility of the Creator would imply that he must foresee what particular
direction a free choice would take.

Responsibility admittedly must involve a knowledge of all the possible
directions the choice could take. Permit me to repeat what I said about freedom
as possibility of choice between or among laws. All that the demands of moral
law might require of the divine knowledge is that the Creator know all the
possibilities of choices. Absolute foreknowledge of the choice taken might not
necessarily be essential, but enough knowledge of all possible outcomes to
prevent the creation of men from becoming an irresponsible piece of
foolhardiness, out of harmony with the character of God as we see it in Christ,
is a just expectation. The risks involved in the creation of a human race we
have no means of knowing, but we do not believe they can be assumed without
knowledge enough, and power enough, and love enough, to prevent disaster, if God
is to be like Christ. Moreover, we do not know what Christlikeness calls for in
detailed treatment of this or that person. What we do believe is that divine
judgment must not condemn a man for anything for which the man is not to blame.
All the influences which we call hereditary, environmental, subconscious, which
lie beyond the reach of the man’s own will are grounds for moral judgment
against man only so far as he acquiesces wrongfully in them. The ultimate
responsibility for them lies outside the man himself in that system of which the
man is a part, which implies that the responsibility at last gets back to God
himself. We need not shrink from this conclusion. The responsibility can best be
lodged with God if we sincerely think of him as like Christ. In these references
to the power and knowledge presumed if God is to create a world of men, I do not
take back what I have said about the self-limitation of God in a system like
ours. I have in mind now power described in the more spiritual aspects. I do not
mean that God is not to create unless he is willing at a crisis to prevent human
failure by metaphysically transforming men into puppets. That would be a
surrender of the creative task altogether from the moral viewpoint. I here mean
by power the resources of education, of persuasion, of spiritual influences. It
may be that a world like ours is the best for the training of imperfect wills,
but that with the growth of the wills in self-control, a radically different
environment might be .granted man, an environment which, if given him now, might
be the worst for moral training. It has often been said that the final test of
Christianity is not adversity but prosperity. It may be that after the moral
will has been disciplined into strength by adversity it can then be trusted to
prosperity. The writer of the first chapters of Genesis manifested deep insight
when he let us see that it was possible for men to mishandle an Eden prosperity
through lack of moral strength. We probably could not use much more light of
knowledge than we now have. The events of the Great War showed that. It is
evident that In this year of our Lord 1927 the only way to keep civilization
from destruction is by development of a moral self-control a thoroughgoing
devotion to righteousness and good will. Otherwise, the growth of knowledge of
the forces of destruction may invite worldwide disaster. To come back to the
point the powers of God to which I refer for the development of men are those of
the education of mind and heart and will.

It is not for this essay to try to discuss elaborate theories of the salvation
of individuals, but it is necessary for me to say that if individuals are to be
"lost" using the old evangelical word for whatever meaning the reader may put
into it the loss can result only after the divine resource, short of making the
individual over into a puppet saint, has been exhausted. The evangelical
preachers have too often overlooked the responsibilities assumed by a Christlike
God in salvation. There has been too much flavor of arbitrariness, not to say
high-handedness, in their presentation of God’s dealing with souls. We have long
since learned that it is beyond our province to pass judgment on the destiny of
individual lives. Even with those who sin against all our understanding of the
possibilities of divine grace we are more and more cautious in uttering
judgment, because we do not have the divine knowledge and we cannot measure the
divine resources. Souls must not be pronounced lost until every resource
possible to the divine persuasiveness has been brought to bear upon the stubborn
will. The fundamental consideration that men are not here by their own choice,
that the measure of necessity and the measure of freedom under which they work
are not of their own choice, throws responsibility upon the Creator which only
the paying out of the last ounce of divine resource can discharge. If men come
to doom, it must be after these resources have been so thoroughly tried that all
moral intelligences everywhere will acquiesce in the doom. The public opinion of
a redeemed race must finally sanction the divine judgment. Under whatever form
we think of heaven it must be the kingdom of moral intelligences. What would we
say if the moral sentiment of heaven failed to sanction and ratify the judgment
of God? Then there would at once arise the question as to which was the more
Christlike, the judgment of heaven or the judgment of ,the Creator? This is not
intended as irreverence, but an insistence that the final judgments upon moral
failure must rest wholly upon a moral base, if we are to think of God as like
unto Christ. There must be no trace of arbitrariness whatsoever. The Cross shows
how seriously God has taken this responsibility. When we are using such
expressions as "discharging moral obligations," and "counting the cost," we lay
ourselves open to the charge of anthropomorphism, but the charge is not to be so
heeded as to empty the words of their essential meaning. The moral
considerations suggested here may not mean the same to the Creator as to us, but
the difference probably is that they mean more to him. He knows what they mean
to us. Our meanings point not away from his, but toward his. The essentials of
Christ’s moral seriousness could not rule with the Creator if he plunged into
the launching of a race light-heartedly, or with a love that had not counted the
cost. It will never do to imagine the mistaken or evil choices of men as taking
God by surprise. To read the story of Eden, for example, as if the Creator had
fitted the world with all manner of goods for men, and as if men had then so
surprised God by disobedience that he had to alter his plans and make some
second-thought adjustment outside the garden, is to argue against the moral
responsibility of the Creator. All the possibilities had to be taken into
account. All the costs had to come within the field of view. If the trees in the
garden were prepared, the weeds outside were prepared also. Moreover, the moral
requirement is that the cost itself shall be justifiable. It would not do to
allow for a possible question at the end as to whether redemption had been worth
while. The salvation of the human race must not be conceived of after the
analogy of the king who goes to war and finds the expenses far outrunning his
original estimates, or after the analogy of the house-builder who, after he has
begun to build, finds himself embarrassed by unforeseen drains upon his funds.
No doubt the cost of the human race to the race itself because of the harmful
influences that men exert over one another to say nothing of the cost to God
himself, must be beyond all our ability to estimate, but we do not honor God in
speaking as if he had been taken by surprise in his plans for men. Dreadful as
is the cost, it can be met. If we are to think of God as the Christian God, the
launching of a race of human beings was not a foolhardy outburst of
irresponsible good-humor, afterward confronting an insoluble situation brought
about by the misuse of freedom. That conception is not an honor to God. James
Russell Lowell’s whimsical word that God would not have allowed men to get hold
of the match-box if the universe had not been fire-proof has its point. A God
who would have permitted men to burn up the universe in wild excesses of freedom
might have been a God of a sort, but not the God of Christ. Here, again,
familiarity with the temper and spirit of Jesus is a steadying force. Jesus had
none of that silly, sunshiny optimism which will have it that everything is to
come out all right by some turn or other, but he never knew blank hopelessness.
The bearing of the cross, whatever it means, does not mean a smiling
all-will-come-right superficiality, or a helpless despair. It is not a
last-minute expedient, but an essential, inherent in the divine putting forth of
the powers that are to win men.

It does small credit to God, it hardly is consonant with the revelation in
Christ, to represent the redemption of men as brought about by expedients which
suggest last-minute frenzy. Such representation implies that God introduced men
into a world without quite seeing the future. Earlier in this essay I spoke of
the difficulty of believing that this present universe was created for human
purposes alone. That does not mean, however, that God did not know what he was
doing in putting men here.

I am not much concerned, in this present discussion, about the problem of
miracles as popularly understood, but some debate about miracle does not do
credit to God. In the assumptions of some thinkers the scheme of law is in
itself so tightly bound that if it is to serve men it must be now and again set
aside. It is easy to see how this conception comes about. The weaving of every
event to every other in a web of relationships literally "gets on our minds"
till we are almost obsessed with a notion of the inflexibility of law. The
assumption here argues a measure of helplessness on the part of God, as if God
had so committed himself to a tangled net of interlacings that he can do nothing
but upon occasion set the law aside. Here we have grave reflection upon the
divine responsibility. If God has devised a set of methods that he cannot really
use, but which he has to set aside to redeem men, he is not the God we have a
right to accept from the teaching of Jesus. Too much of the argument for miracle
leaves God in a dubious plight as having started a system which he had afterward
to set aside. The possibility of miracle as departure from the accustomed method
is hardly open to doubt by believers in the God of Christianity. The actuality
of miracle, as the seizure of the higher powers of nature by the higher
spiritual personalities, is likewise not open to serious doubt. Miracle,
however, as a desperate tearing loose from all law is questionable.

It is the character of God that is at issue in this debate. We have to do with
the fundamental purpose in creation. If that fundamental purpose was appropriate
to a God like unto Christ, then the purpose must have been in the divine mind
from the beginning. We are not to conclude that the system of laws was
inaugurated first on its own account, and was then set aside because an
unforeseen crisis afterward arose. If the moral purposes of God are an
afterthought, they are not the purposes of the God whom Jesus has taught us to
follow. Why may we not hold that the laws were from the outset themselves fit
for redemption purposes? Does it not make for greatness in our view of man to
conceive of God as willing to make miraculous departures from law in his behalf?
This question cannot be answered without asking ourselves as to the character of
God set before us by the emphasis on miracle. The best boon we can confer upon
man is to teach him the best idea of God. I insist that there can be little
cogent criticism of miracle as the anticipation and seizure of methods beyond
the organized knowledge of a given period, but that is not a setting aside of
law as if it were of secondary importance. If men are to be saved into a
salvation worth while, one element of that salvation must be the development of
the mental orderliness and sanity which are best revealed to us in the
regularity of the operations of the universe. To be sure, the law as taken in
itself seems cold and impersonal, but this is chiefly when we look at the
outside objective world. Law is the expression of the regularity of the inner
realm as well as of the outer. Miracle as too often taught would mean that the
universe proceeds without regard to what conies before or after, that the
demands of system are lightly to be thrust to one side. This would argue for the
imperfection of the methods of the Divine Mind.

We shall have to exalt more and more the resources of redemption in the realm of
law, law being the method by which a responsible God acts. The scientific
method, justly viewed, has its value not only in its practical results but in
its efficacy hi religious revelation. Of course anything can be ponderously
studied; and that worthless aims determine much scientific study is altogether
too apparent. Still, the scientific method in itself can be made to tend to the
development of the religious mood. I refer now more directly to some
prerequisites of scientific procedure the willingness to face the facts and all
the facts, the assumption that we have a right to the truth and can know the
truth, the ability to suspend judgment and to make a conclusive decision at the
end of our reasoning. All this is of the essence of the righteousness which we
believe to be so distinctive in the revelation of Jesus. We do not need to be
told that the thinking of the day of Jesus had not come within hailing distance
of what we call scientific method. , Nevertheless, the Christian spirit was from
the beginning a willingness to recognize facts. Christianity is a fact-religion,
and progresses by the spiritual use of facts squarely faced. There is not a
writer of New Testament Scriptures or of the Old Testament, for that matter who
does not manifestly live in a fact world. From an early date the great heresies
condemned by the church were those which, in the name of extravagant vision or
theory, failed to take enough account of actual facts.

I know that there are many who, in spite of all we can say, will have it that
emphasis on miracle conceived of as virtual contempt of law makes God’s efforts
for man’s salvation more serious. It may be so, but it makes God’s creative
activity less serious; and when we are striving to understand the moral nature
of God let us remember that after-adjustment is less a tribute to the divine
nature than preadjustment. There was, indeed, something of the artificial and
mechanical about the old "Plan of Salvation," but the plan did suggest a
Planner. The picture of God as the Rescuer of men is not complete without
account of his provision for men’s rescue. In other words, though the universe
is not made for us alone, it, we may believe, contains provision for redemption
from evil choices and their consequences, provision woven constitutionally into
the texture of which the world is made.

It is trite to say that the greatness of the possibility of a good can be
measured by the greatness of the actuality of an evil. This is notably true when
we are thinking of the choices of men. More than this, there seems a degree of
self-limitation in the consequences of an evil choice. There may be there often
seems to be a loosening of further and further beneficial forces in a good
choice, more powerful than the consequences of an evil choice. Perhaps in the
long run the consequences of good travel farthest. Mark Antony was speaking as
an orator and not as a moral philosopher when he declared that the evil men do
lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Perhaps in the
kingdom of God it is the other way around.

We cannot linger too long with this theme, but we must say that with freedom not
an abstract somewhat just rushing about in a void, but a choice of laws which
leads to consequences already involved in the choice, and with the Creator
expressing his own nature through these consequences, it becomes a duty of men
to peer as far ahead as possible toward the consequences. If there is a moral
obligation upon God to make a universe of flexible useableness, it becomes the
duty of man to bring his mind to bear to make the most of that universe for
moral purposes. In a -measure it is given to man to enter into the mind of the
Creator and become himself creative. If it was the duty of the Creator to fill
the universe with possibilities in the fruitful use of law, it is the duty of
man to master the laws. In a list of divine attributes we occasionally see God’s
"ownership" referred to. From the early days of life in Canaan the Israelites
made their Lord the Baal the owner of the land. This expression suggests nothing
beyond what has been said in connection with creation. An owner is responsible
for the way he uses his possession, but the "ownership" adds nothing to the
conception of moral responsibility set forth hi discussion of God as Creator.


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  CHAPTER 13: 01.11.     CHAPTER 11
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CHAPTER XI THE DIVINE KING FROM an early day men began to speak of God as King.
The race evidently began its conscious history in groups. From the notion of the
gods as by some peculiarly intimate tie related to clans or tribes it is easy to
advance, as civilization takes on more highly organized forms, to the notion of
God as the head of a kingdom. To-day we constantly speak of the kingdom of God.
Here, again, we are to summon our conceptions to the test of Christlikeness.

All that we have said about the divine responsibility could be said again in
discussing God as King. One of the marvels of human history is the tightness
with which the Hebrews welded together the ideas of kingly power and kingly
responsibility. When we read of the despotism of the empires which were the
neighbors of Israel, we ’cannot help wondering how a little people, just off the
world-roads which connected Egypt and Babylon, could have attained such
conviction of responsible kingship. Yet so it was, and one of the shaping
instruments in the world’s religious thought was and is Israel’s doctrine that a
king must be the servant of the people. It would be farfetched and artificial to
discuss ancient Israel in terms of modern democracy, but the difference between
the idea of kingship in Israel and that of kingship in Europe until
comparatively recent times can never cease to astonish us. The divine right of
kings, which for hundreds of years went without effective challenge in European
history, never received more than qualified acceptance in Israel.

It may be contended that Israel was a theocracy and that the king was merely a
human servant of the Divine King. All the more reason for us to marvel at the
ideals which determined the thinking about the Divine King, ideals which had to
do with the moral worth of the chosen people and with the moral rights of even
the least of the individuals in Israel. To be sure, Israel first thought of God
as in a covenant that is to say, in a moral agreement to lead the people as a
nation, but nevertheless the individual had rights inconceivable in a despotism
of the Oriental type.

One of the glories of the Old Testament is the assumption as commonplace that
individuals with a grievance can make direct appeal to God. Centuries of
Christian teaching have accustomed us to practice in prayer of direct approach,
to God, but how surprising it must have been in the old days when God was
thought of more exclusively as Ruler, to read that Abraham launched the
challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"; that Jonah voiced
to God himself his resentment at the divine kindliness with a Nineveh hostile to
Israel; that Job almost defied God in attacking the ordinary theology of his day
as to God’s sending suffering upon men.

Now, the Christian Church has always hailed Jesus as Lord, and has sought to
rally Christian conceptions of the larger social duties around the doctrine of
the kingdom of God. Central principles have been worked out concerning the
divine rulership over the larger and smaller groups of men and on humanity as a
whole, which we may profitably examine. The old challenge of the tribes of
Israel to their king was: "Wilt thou be a king to us after the manner of a
servant of the people?" The church has fastened on kingship as one of the titles
of Christ. If we are to take Christianity seriously, we must ask whether we can
think of the kingship of God in terms of Christliness. Inasmuch as the wisest
statesmanship seldom knows how to onduct in detail the course of a small social
group for any considerable length of time, we may well be excused from the
attempt to block out a concrete policy for the divine kingship over the whole
human race. In the region of general considerations, however, the path is open
enough. To begin with, the responsibility assumed by a Christlike God is to
treat kingdoms of persons as ends-in-themselves and not as instruments or means
to ends. If God were an exaggerated Napoleon, the expectations might be
different, for the Napoleon treats the group as the end, and the individuals
merely as nation-stuff, or cannonfodder. So with all philosophies of the state
which erect the state into a superpersonality, or even into an ideal to be made
real at the cost of the persons composing the state. The only substantial
realities in a group are the individuals who compose the group. There is no soul
in the group apart from the souls of the individuals. We may well admit that a
race grasped as a unity, with organ adjusted to organ, would be a spectacle
inspiring even to the Divine King himself, but even such a race would have its
significance only for the persons who gazed upon it.

Let us remind ourselves of the need of keeping close grasp on the significance
of personality in our estimates of social values. There is, as we all know,
widespread denial at all times of the existence of the substantial self. We
recognize how this denial comes about. The self gets loosened into thoughts or
feelings, and drops out of ’its primacy. If abstract thought becomes the
underlying power and thinkers are lost sight of, it is easy to arrive at the
notion of a group over-soul beyond the individuals of the group. The current
talk, too, about merging oneself into other selves tends in a like direction.
One of the most serious obstacles to setting persons forth as the end of all
worthy effort is, of course, a doubt as to the substantial reality of persons.
Does not my contention, however, imply extreme individualism, with persons taken
separately as the ends toward which the Divine King works? I do not think so.
There is no use of speaking of a kingdom unless persons are taken in what we
call their togetherness. The individual would not even be an individual if he
were not set in society. The greatest instrument the individual can employ for
the development of distinctiveness is language, and language is a social
product. The central aim of man’s duty as laid upon us in the gospel is that of
aiding our fellow men. That aid, however, results in the uplift of the helper
himself toward the good and the true and the beautiful. An individual taken by
himself is not what he is in a group.

There are fine powers of the soul which may get their chance only in solitude,
but there are other fine powers which indubitably unfold only hi the social
relationship. It is these social powers which we have in mind in speaking of the
kingdom of God. We seek the utilization of all the social relationships for the
development of the individuals. Not that the persons are finally to be set off
by themselves. The Kingdom is to endure forever, if Christ means anything, as a
kingdom in these social relationships. Of course the Kingdom itself is to be a
spectacle enchaining the rapt gaze of all intelligences of the skies, from the
Divine King down to the least man, but the significance of the spectacle is in
the value of the persons thus knit together. The purpose of the kingdom must be
to build men up into Christlikeness. Naturally, only the King himself can know
what such an aim involves. We are hearing much today about democracy, and are
even speaking of the democratic God. An age which can thus speak has traveled a
long, long journey from the sovereignty of God conceived of as autocracy. Three
or four hundred years ago the sovereignty of God was a thoroughly intelligible
conception. If it pleased God to call some persons to eternal life and some
other persons to eternal death by sovereign decree, well and good. No human
being had any right to file objection. The practical outcome was that in too
many cases those who thought themselves called to eternal life and those
presumably indicated for eternal doom could have changed places without much
upset to the theory, since it was all a matter of decree. We are far, far beyond
that.

We are so far that some talk as if we ought almost to have an elected God, which
absurd saying does suggest that God ought so to deal with men that by the
sanction of their lives they will continually ratify his purposes. As thus
understood the modern phrasing points toward an ideal, but there is, of course,
involved the .consideration that it is the people themselves who must advance
more and more toward the realization of the teaching of Christ. The dogma that
the voice of the people is the voice of God has a fraction of truth, but only a
fraction. Admittedly, in the great general controversies which concern the mass
of men, the conviction of the people is likely to gravitate toward the larger
human values, and the people are likely so to seize these values as to attain an
approximately substantial justice and righteousness. It would be folly, however,
to affirm, that this is always so. Moreover, when we decide as to moral issues
that cannot be disposed of by a "yes" or "no" we ought not yield to public
opinion as some of the democratic doctrinaires would have us. This holds of all
issues where the range of knowledge required is beyond the people’s reach. We
have to rely upon those who know. The trend of the time is to select popular
rulers who can be trusted to keep the interests of the people to the front, and
then to hold the rulers responsible for the best they can do. In any government
the actual procedure is loose and ramshackle enough, but the procedure may be
the best available.

Now, there is no expedient for deposing or recalling the divine Ruler of the
universe, and no method of proving that he will act according to human
interests. If, however, we are to accept him as like unto Christ, we have a
right to believe that he orders the affairs of men with the ideal of a truly
Christly kingdom before him. To come back to the word "democrat," we are
discerning more and more that the best democrat is not necessarily the leader
most quickly responsive to a popular vote. If, indeed, a ruler has been put in
power to carry out a policy, and then has refused to carry out that policy, the
only honorable course is for the leader to resign. The situation, however, is
not often quite as simple as this. Leaders are given power to do their best for
the people. To do this they must be trusted to disregard a popular mood or
behest if to their large judgment such a disregard seems wise. In the old days
when the doctrine of the divine right of kings was new, a great deal could be
said for it. It was not by any means the absurdity it seems now. We require only
a superficial recollection of history to recognize that the doctrine took its
start in protest against the pretensions of a church scheming toward world-wide
ecclesiastical despotism. No doubt it was to the church leaders blasphemy to
hint that any other institution than the church could legitimately claim for
itself divinity. The church assumed divine right because she thought of herself
as holding a supernatural commission. She was the vicegerent of God on earth, no
matter what she might actually do. The divinity rested in the commission. Now,
when this doctrine began to work itself out into disregard of social justice and
righteousness, men began to remark that divinity must show itself in results,
and that a king striving for the welfare of his people was fundamentally more
divine than a pope claiming supernatural authority while acting with most
unnatural selfishness. The divine right of kings was at bottom better for
society than the divine right of popes, for the king could not fall back upon a
supernatural commission, but could only justify his divinity by human results.
In time kingship showed its weakness. A movement toward secular kingly control
which at first promised much went to pieces on the frailty of men when trusted
with power without check. If a king could have been found who could have been
trusted to work only for the largest and best welfare of his people, that king
would have been a democrat in the finest sense. It is interesting to note that
when men attempt to justify the career of a despot like Napoleon Bonaparte, they
try to make out that the despot was democratic. In a character like that of
Napoleon the argument seems humorous, but often it has pertinence in that
supreme care for the highest and best good of the masses of men is of the
essence of the democratic temper. In defending Napoleon, or any dictator who
pays as little heed to what the people say as did Napoleon, it is customary to
argue that perhaps without their realizing their own discernment, such despots
sense the policies which make for the largest good of the greatest number, that
in spite of their selfishness they are, after a rough fashion, incarnations of a
popular mood, that they set out upon courses which are dictated by an instinct
toward national greatness, that their power is in the last analysis due to this
seizure of the deep-moving public mood. Such men have often known what the
people have needed, and have known also how to meet the need. When they have
thus understood the need, and have had the skilled expertness to meet it, they
have won the popular approval which in the end has to be granted to experts.
What are experts, anyhow, but kings in their several realms? There are kings in
science, in art, in industry. The divineness of the right of these kings to rule
is always to be found in their betterment of human conditions. If an all-wise,
all-devoted king should appear, he might well be allowed to reign as long as he
remained all-wise and all-devoted. Now, when some of the present-day writers
talk about a democratic God, this ideal of devotion to and responsibility for
the welfare of men is what they seem to have in mind, together with the further
realization that the highest society of which we can conceive would be one in
which the will of God would be continually ratified by men. This double
conception would seem to meet all the legitimate demands of those who talk of
the democracy of the kingdom of God.

Next we encounter the criticism of those who avow that such argument introduces
paternalism into God’s relation to human society. Men in groups have a right to
selfdetermination. They must be allowed to make their own mistakes. All of which
I grant, and indeed insist upon, but let us get this point as to paternalism
straight. What men resent in paternalism is the condescending and patronizing
spirit. A God like unto the Christ who never patronized anybody is not likely to
found a kingdom on condescension. For the rest, paternalism is sometimes
confused with service rendered out of superior knowledge. Nobody in his sound
mind objects to helpful treatment from one who knows.

Still, the objector insists that men must be allowed to make social mistakes
themselves. This looks promising until we begin to reflect upon the closeness
with which men in groups are knitted together, with the innocent suffering from
the rashness of experimenters in selfdetermination. Moreover, actual observation
seems to indicate that men in social relations have always made mistakes in
plenty. A decade which has seen wrong national policies bring civilization to
the verge of disaster cannot say much about modern society’s having too little
chance for experiment in self-determination.

If any charge at all is to be brought against the divine government over
society, it is more plausible to ask if groups have not had too much freedom.
There come moments, indeed, of glorious cooperation among great nations when
some common peril threatens society, to give us foretastes and gleams of what
the ideal cooperative society may be when men master and obey the laws of God.
The havoc which men wreak by the wrong use of social powers is at least
suggestive of the good which they may achieve by a right use. Up to date,
however, the historic outcome seems dubious, when the whole story of the whole
race is taken into sweep of examination. The social policies of nations have not
been such as to suggest that men are morally equal to greater freedom than they
have had. Take the predicament of the nations to-day, with the most important
peoples racing with each other for new instruments of war, with war prepared for
as struggles not between armies, but between the peoples themselves, the avowed
intention of war being through economic and psychological pressure to break down
the will of an opposing nation. This is not all. Through the physical losses of
nations in war, and through the physical changes which war brings about, the
scientific gains in knowledge of the means for the betterment of human
conditions won through a hundred years of patient experiment can be off-set and
neutralized in one brief span of a few months. When nations employ their
liberties to forge chains of new slaveries, we may well pause with the query as
to whether the nations have not received too much liberty.

I have not been hesitant about facing the question as to the responsibility of
God, and that for the reason that Christianity is a religion of faith. There is
no path to mental peace through ignoring the divine responsibility; and yet I
urge that the mistakes which groups national groups especially make in the use
of freedom are a hint by contrast of what might be done if the liberty were
directed toward a nobler purpose. God is, indeed, responsible for the freedom of
the national groups, but is it to be doubted that many of the mistakes of that
freedom come out of the deliberate choices of the groups? For example, there is
a cult of nationalism abroad to-day which purposely seeks to make the idea of
God serve a nationalistic purpose working directly toward ends which are the
denial of Christlikeness. The nationalism to which I refer is comparatively new.
It sets up as the object of group-endeavor so-called "cultural" aims which are
to have right-ofway over all other aims whatsoever, either inside or outside of
a nation. Up to a few years ago Germany was the foremost exponent of such
policy. The German thought and feeling and practice of life were looked upon by
Germans as superior to all other cultures. Acceptance of the German ideals was
not conceived of as incumbent merely upon Germans. Free choice was even more
important than birth, but whether by free choice or by compulsion the peoples of
the world were to be brought to acknowledge and accept the superiority of the
Germanic civilization. The feature to which I wish to call especial attention
was the function of the ideal of God in all this. I do not intend to cast
reflection upon the millions of devout Christians in Germany previous to the
World War, but so far as official Germany was concerned, God was conceived of as
of a German type. There was practical repudiation of the Christlike in God. I
say "practical" repudiation, for I am speaking of attitudes and gestures in
actual policies.

If the World War made it any easier for the nations to turn away from force for
propagandist purposes, we may as well be thankful for the net gain; but, waiving
the question of force, it is enough to detect that at the present hour various
nations are preaching the cult of nationalism. Insofar as this is a protest
against a vague and misty internationalism which would empty out all the
distinctiveness from national individuality, the cult has its justification.
Justified, too, are all attempts to make the most of national peculiarities for
the sake of contribution to the common stock of the world’s culture. Paradoxical
as it may sound, the finest contributions to common cultures often come as
individuals and groups seek to make the most of themselves. Making the most of
themselves, however, means making the best of themselves, and making the best of
themselves means good will toward one another.

What I started to speak of was the effect of all this nationalism on the idea of
God. Critics of religion always have hugely enjoyed themselves when ridiculing
the tendency of men toward anthropomorphism. One of the old Greeks made merry
with the idea of God by declaring that if oxen were to theorize about God, they
would picture him as with horns like themselves. Now, anthropomorphism is never
more absurd or dangerous than when it conceives of God as having a partiality
for this or that particular nation, ’to the disadvantage of all other nations.
That is the theology that justifies the Greek criticism and gives God horns. It
makes God a partner with the militarists of all nations, and lends color to the
remark of a European statesman that nationalism can never do without religion,
for religion must be preserved to bless nationalistic war. It would be a serious
count against the character of God that he endowed men with group-freedom, when
we look upon the actual slaughters of historic groups, if the more excellent way
were not so obvious, though confessedly this raises the question why God gives
man so much freedom and so little sense. The more excellent way of cooperation
of groups on the basis of mutual respect has lain out in full view from the
beginning. If men can capture and harness the forces which make for death, they
can do likewise with those that make for life. Perhaps one of the most important
lessons of history thus far has been the ease with which men could have found
the better way if they had only opened their eyes and looked. It has been
visible for a long time. So widely has it been true that groups have used their
conceptions of God as weapons in social struggle that possibly we have here
explanation of the growth of the idea that all that God is, in the field of
history, is merely the idealization of the ambitions of the national groups. It
is almost impossible to get men to fight for a selfishness which is naked and
not ashamed, so that it is necessary to idealize the social policy into a
defense of something sacred. There swarm upon us, then, as many different Gods
as there are national ideals, though all are called by the one name. With social
progress the idea of God becomes nobler and nobler, but, we are told, it never
can be more than idea. The doctrine of God is not as repellent as that of tribal
gods mingling in the battles beside their worshipers; it represents the best
that each group can do in shaping and declaring its ideals. The shortcomings of
the conception lie in the inadequacy of the conceivers. They have not yet built
an idea big enough to take in the races of men imagined as a brotherhood. The
notion of the larger God seems obvious as soon as we get it, but we cannot get
it till we make it. Anything may be obvious enough after we have seen it, but it
cannot be seen until it is there. The idea of a king over all men has not been
seized earlier because it is nothing but idea, and ideas appear only as there
appear idea-makers. I do not claim that this is the explanation of God offered
by Durkheim and liis school, but the Durkheim exposition is measurably similar
to the above.

Some object to the expression, "nothing but idea," on the ground that in the
social realms, as in other realms, nothing is nobler than the pursuit of ideals
for their own sake. We are told that the scholar does not need a personal
embodiment of truth as the object of his devotion. He seeks truth on its own
account. Why should a friend of mankind require the actual existence of a Divine
King over all men, when the idealization of social purposes will perform the
same function? In serving our fellow men we are not shut in to the realistic
study of the actual cases of suffering men, women, and children before us. We
can see each sufferer as the bearer of an ideal of humanity, and that ideal may
be the compelling force with us. When men die for England or America they may
not be thinking of an actual England or America at all, but of a nation that has
never been, is not now, and perhaps never will be. Why, then, may we not think
of God as the sum of the noblest social ideals, ever growing nobler? Is there
not something more worthy in such worship than in the adoration of a personal
God, even though that God be the embodiment and the realization of the highest
ideals?

We have dealt with all this before. It is another instance of the cart before
the horse. Abstraction is made from personal activity, the abstraction is
recognized as impersonal; finally the impersonal shifts around in front of the
personal, and the personal becomes an embodiment of or specification of the
impersonal, possessing the weakness which we identify with the personal in the
human forms which we know. It will not do. Abstraction may be a process by which
we attain to a knowledge of the God who is the Ruler of all society; but if we
are manipulating abstractions in themselves, we are far removed from that
atmosphere of reality which clothed the teaching of Jesus.

If we are to hold to the kingship of a Christlike God over society, however, we
must face all the consequences and implications of such a belief, consequences
from which the impersonal conceptions seek to free us. Above all we must never
slacken our grip on the divine responsibility. If the groups are free, God is
responsible for the granting of a freedom which is morally justifiable only on
condition that in the knowledge of all possible results of such freedom the
grant is worth while. If we are to believe in a Christlike God, let us be
fearless in our utilization of the belief. Christianity is in any event a poor
half-way house. The only safety is in traveling the full distance. At periods
throughout Christian, history there has been strong impulse to regard the social
career of the race as so subject to the Divine Will that the social changes are
thought to take place by divine choice alone, without regard to the attitude of
groups themselves. Now and again this view is denounced as savoring of old-time
apocalyptic which made the coming of the kingdom of God wholly a matter of God’s
good time. Apocalyptic does, indeed, harmfully minimize the forces which are
within the grasp of human freedom, but there is about Jewish apocalyptic
especially an admirable facing of the responsibility of God for human history .
Without at all subscribing to the concrete content of such apocalyptic, we may,
in the light of our modern knowledge, admit divine responsibility in some realms
where human freedom has little or no scope. For instance, the God of nature is
obviously responsible for physical circumstances affecting the life of the race
in those large regions where human will cannot avail at all. To take an extreme
illustration, we cannot by the boldest flight of imagination fancy mankind as
able to affect the orbit of the earth, or the position of the earth among
planets and stars. Man might adjust himself to an ice age resulting from a
lengthening of the earth’s orbit, or by the tilting of the earth’s pole though
it is doubtful if any social organization yet devised could in such event stand
the strain of the race’s rush toward the warmer lands but man could not affect
the orbit itself. Before such a change all men could do would be to hold fast
their confidence in God. This is but one illustration of conceivable
circumstances in which the controlling factors would be beyond human control. A
slight change in the amount of heat received by the earth from the sun, a change
to either more or less, would bring about a similar crisis. So also would any
extensive alteration of any features of the physical order which we consider
fixed. In this dependence on the physical, faith repeats the old miracle of
believing that things will stick together long enough for the working out of
some moral and spiritual results, insisting that the transitoriness of the
present order is no more incompatible with the seizure of eternal moral values
by the race than is the decay of the individual human organism incompatible with
the seizure of eternal human values by a person. The sense of moral mastery here
rests down upon confidence in the responsibility of God, and that confidence is
at its greatest as we catch the spirit of Christ. The divine responsibility must
be our stay also before those sweeping tides of emotion which now and again
carry everything before them in societies. I am not now thinking of the social
disturbances brought about by propaganda, but by sentiments the outcome of
mysterious subtle processes which we do not understand. We need not be tied to a
doctrine of the unconscious to discern the power in individual and social life
of psychical elements which seem to surge upon us from realms usually below the
threshold of consciousness. Or at times whole peoples seem excitable or
suggestible beyond the ability of any individuals or small groups to check the
storm of feeling. Hence come crazes and delusions on the one hand, and, it may
be, revivals of enthusiasm for learning an art or religion on the other. Take a
historic phenomenon which is not wholly good and not wholly bad the crusades. No
doubt scores of influences played into the crusades for which men were
responsible as agitators and managers, though it is impossible to tell at this
distance how far a Peter the Hermit or a Richard the Lion-Hearted was personally
an effective cause. Make all allowance, however, for the effect of human choices
it is not possible to say that the crusades were in controlling degree the
expression of human freedom. Men were too much swayed by illusions over which
they had no mastery. The outcome was both good and bad, speaking now of the
actual consequences. With all reverence it may be said that the Divine Ruler of
all has the heavy share of the responsibility. If this seems irreverent, let us
ask ourselves if it is any more reverent to say that he was not responsible. The
same judgment must be passed upon national and international and racial
stirrings and strivings upon which so much of history depends. Let the radius of
the play of the individual and social wills be ever so great, we nevertheless
come to a field where the result depends upon an interlacing of factors, to
which the human will is not as yet adequate. Perhaps the rarest form of human
genius is superlative administrative skill, which consists in so weaving forces
together as to make them cooperate toward a desired end. So far as our
intelligence comprehends these larger affairs no matter how much of good will
may spread among the peoples of the earth, and no matter how far international
and inter-racial organization may go for as long a time as we can see ahead the
social future lies beyond the reach of human administrative skill. Here God is
responsible. In the light of the teaching of Christ there can be the utmost
frankness and freedom in thus acknowledging the divine responsibility. In these
mighty realms the control is beyond us. Our plight is similar to that in our
relation to the mechanical forces of the world. We are sure that mathematical
formulas rule every stir from suns to atoms, and we are sure that our minds are
capable of reading the separate formulas. The interrelations and interworkings
of the processes, however, we cannot master because of their intricacy and
immensity. If this is true in the realm of mathematics, much more is it true
elsewhere; but just as we have confidence in the sway of the mathematical
principle in its own realms, so also do we have confidence in the sway of moral
principle in universe-wide processes whose secrets we do not profess to be able
to read.

How can we speak thus of the responsibility of God without seeming to encourage
fatalism? If the responsibility is God’s why worry? What can we do to help or
hinder? In these larger spaces probably nothing but that does not minimize the
importance of freedom in the limits within which we are placed. Granted that the
world in which we move has meanings and purposes beyond us, nevertheless the
fact remains that we are in this world, and that we can make enough use of this
world to build ourselves into increasing freedom. The conviction of the
responsibility of God for the events over which we have no control ought to
increase and release human energies rather than to check and slow them down.
Certainly, the Christlikeness of God ought to beget that calmness of spirit
without which effective labor is impossible.

Here I wish to digress long enough to say a word about the missionary as an
agent in hastening the coming of the larger kingdom of God. It does not fall
within my purpose to discuss the so-called secular agencies through which the
Divine Huler brings men into closer relationships, but a word is perhaps in
order as to the significance of the spread of the idea of the Christlikeness of
God as a factor in bringing the new kingdom. One of the tragic features of
existence in non-Christian lands is the prevalence of fatalism. In India the
people seem to think themselves at the mercy of the gods who work through
nature. In China a social spirit has stiffened the minds of the people into the
notion that in the presence of the group the individual , is nothing. If Indian
and Chinese peoples can be brought to a realization that a Christlike God, and
not fate, is back of the forces of the world, the first step can be taken toward
nation-wide and race-wide relief, for the fundamental trouble with both China
and India is a wrong idea of God. There are, indeed, some forces, as we have
said, which are altogether beyond human control, but there are others which for
ages have seemed beyond human control but which can measurably be utilized for
the betterment of human conditions. The Indian feels that famine comes because
fate wills it through blowing of a dry and rainless wind, but within limits men
can foresee and provide for famine. The Chinese feels that the belief of his
people in the right of way of the mass over the individual is from the gods, but
nevertheless the social spirit can be controlled into a different channel. So
that in spite of what I have said about great natural and social forces as
beyond human control, there are some such agencies which are in a degree within
our control. Moreover, it is possible to make happier adjustment to the most
inexorable necessities once we get the Christ-idea of God. No greater service
can be rendered than the preaching of the missionary that God hath indeed made
of one blood all nations of the earth, that all may dwell together in a
brotherhood of peoples, with each people preserving its own distinctiveness and
at the same time united to eveiy other.

It is fortunate that at the present hour the recognition of the sanctity of all
varieties of national and racial life is taking the form of emphasis on the
worth of the cultural systems of all peoples. There is nothing but harm in
seeking to rob groups of their distinctiveness. The only union worth while rests
on the basis of the diversity of the uniting factors. Saint Paul’s picture of
the variety of organs and functions in the Body of Christ applies directly to an
organized humanity. Still, even this important truth can be wrongly stressed. I
once knew a distinguished social student who protested against teaching the
Christian idea of God to a non- Christian tribe because, he said, it was
important for the total culture of the world to have that tribe’s idea of God
persist in its purity. That is to say, this student wished the interesting but
inadequate idea of God which the tribe held, to be an instructive theme for the
study of those outside the tribe, while he did not wish those inside the tribe
to get a larger and better idea from outside. The selfishness of this attitude
needs no comment a selfishness illustrated often enough in current exhortation
not to disturb "native" customs and ideas.


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  CHAPTER 14: 01.12.     CHAPTER 12
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CHAPTER XII THE DIVINE FATHER

SOME teachers of Christianity tell us that fatherhood is the fundamental word in
our interpretation of God that all the divine attributes have to be approached
as attributes of a father. Those who write thus are mostly taking the Christian
idea of fatherhood for granted, and no harm is done. It is well for us to remind
ourselves, however, that Christlikeness is more basal for Christianity than
fatherhood, for "God the Father" depends for its significance upon the quality
of fatherhood. It is essential to Christianity that we conceive of the Divine
Fatherhood as Christlike. As soon as we pass from the study of God as King to
God as Father some conclude that we have moved out of the sphere of the social
relationships to that of the individual as an individual. Repeatedly it has been
said that Divine Fatherhood makes the individual stand solitary in the presence
of his God. The substance of this truth we shall always have to admit, but it is
not possible to step decisively away from the social conception of the kingdom
of God by speaking of God as Father, for Fatherhood so implies the relations of
brotherhood and of Christian contacts as to make the social conception even more
important than does Kingship.

Important as is the doctrine of fatherhood for the significance of the
individual, we cannot think of individuals as existing primarily on their own
account and then as woven into the family relationship. The family and the
individuals that compose it necessarily coexist. The family would, of course, be
nonexistent apart from its members, but the members would be almost nonentities
apart from the family relationship. An important task, then, for the Christian
idea of the divine Fatherhood is to inquire as to the nature of the family of
God as a group.

All we are concerned about is to see whither the assumption of the
Christlikeness of God will lead us if carried out to the full length. If, then,
God the Father has the Christ-spirit we are not to think of him as doing the
best he can with men already here, or as calling men into existence by
haphazard, by the workings of irrepressible fullness of life, or out of
impulsive affection. If God is a Father after the mind of Christ, men are here
because the wise and holy love of God calls them here. The race is not, from the
Christview, "on hand" for God to deal with just as he can or may. Nor can we
believe that God the Father creates men as individuals and then adjusts them to
one another as best he may. The idea of the family is necessarily prior to the
idea of the individuals as such, even if we concede, as we do, that the aim of
all creative effort is to build the individuals into the largest and best life.
That is to say, what one individual is to be depends upon what all the other
individuals are to be. To put it crudely, what one person is to be depends upon
the number and kind of other persons there are to be, and the possible relations
among them. In the creation of the divinely fathered family the purpose
necessarily works inward from the encompassing general conception to the
particular individual. A first legitimate expectation is the negative one that
in the family it will not be the divine purpose that any individuals be used
merely for the benefit of other individuals, or for the benefit of society,
without regard to the rights of such utilized individuals. A person may well
take other persons as the aim of his own endeavor, but that is different from
saying that anyone else can use him as instrument for the ends of any third
person or persons.

I may look upon myself as an instrument to be developed into fineness for the
service of any ideals I choose, but that is quite another matter from someone
else’s using me as an instrument. The first requirement, then, if we are to have
a family based on the Fatherhood of God is justice in the Father’s dealing with
the family. The late Dr. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard, once uttered a profoundly
wise opinion which at first sounded cold. He declared that it is much better for
the children in a family to think of the father as just, and as entitled to
respect because of justice, than for them to think of the father as
affectionate, as "affectionate" is ordinarily used. In reflecting on God the
Father the first requisite is that we think of him as just.

Here someone objects that the less we poor humans speak of God as justice the
better for ourselves, for in the course of justice none of us would see
salvation. This reminder ought to keep us from any spiritual conceit, but let us
not forget that if we do not build on justice in thinking about God, it does not
make much difference what we build. The responsibility for the founding of that
family which is the race of men is with God. Let us keep that straight always.
We are not clamorous for knowledge, for God’s reasons which are beyond our
grasp. We are willing to wait till we are able to understand, even if we wait
for ages, but we are not willing to live without protest in a universe governed
by irresponsible injustice. Of course if the universe were unjust, or
indifferent to justice, our protests would not do any good except to relieve
ourselves, but that would be something. Justice, however, is not to be defined
merely in the negative sense that the needs of the family shall be so met that
the members do not harm one another. There is the positive requirement that the
whole family relationship be such as to benefit each individual member. While we
cannot specify a single concrete item of the moral demand as to the just dealing
of God with men, we can see some general obligations which must freely express
the divine nature if that nature is Christlike. There must be, first of all. the
inescapable moral obligation to build men into the likeness of Christ. After
that is the duty to put into the hands of men themselves power which will make
for the upbuilding of the family just as fast as that responsibility can safely
be assumed by men, regard being had for all the interests of the Kingdom. In
other words, light and power must be given man. Light without power adds to the
resentment against frustration, and power without light spells disaster. The
task before a Divine Father accepting him as Christlike is to educate or train
men into Christlikeness. Anyone will concede that this means training in loyalty
to the highest Christian ideals. Perhaps not everyone will concede what I next
say, but I do not see how we can deny that loyalty to the highest Christian
ideals involves the constant intellectual search for light on the application of
Christian principles to all the situations in which men find themselves. When we
avow the divineness of what is called to-day the scientific method we seem to
some to have said too much, but the scientific method is the ordered,
consecrated search for God’s truth. There are readers of the Scriptures who
suppose that all we have to consider in a problem of conduct is to ask what
Jesus would do, and then to turn to the New Testament and find what Jesus would
do. My whole argument in this essay turns around the duty of Christlikeness of
conduct, but my readers will bear witness that I have not asked what the
Christlikeness of God calls for in a single concrete detail, though the demands
in general become increasingly clear. So with going to the gospel for light on a
particular human duty. Jesus did not proclaim codified rules. He applied
principles to the concrete, but those principles have to be reapplied to duties
of our own time in the light of all the information available. I do not think it
is too much to say that, once the human will is turned in selfsurrender to the
divine will, the chief duty of man thereafter is to seek to find how to work out
that will into daily life by search with the intellect. If, now, the scientific
method, putting the best construction on the term, is not divine, where is any
method which is divine? As it is the religious duty and privilege of man to
search for light, it is the duty and the privilege of God to grant light to
men’s eyes just as fast as the eyes can stand the light. Religious education
may, indeed, sometimes be a superficial manifestation of pedagogical mechanic,
but, after all, the responsibility is upon God to help in the religious training
of men.

If we believe that we are members of the family of a Christlike God, we can be
confident that God deals with each of us in entire knowledge of what we are. We
are mysterious enough to ourselves, and we are mysteries to one another. There
are depths in human nature out of which strange impulses are constantly
springing, to our vast astonishment, but these impulses are known to the Father
of all long before they become articulate to us. In the light of his full
knowledge we may be confident that in training men God will not put upon them
burdens that are too heavy. If men break under burdens for which they are not
responsible, the obvious conclusion is that the question of moral desert does
not arise in such collapse. The problem is not, then, one of guilt, but of the
exercise of the divine resources of strengthening and healing. There is no
reason why a member of the family of God should bear the stings and lashings of
conscience over failures for which he is not responsible. In all this field,
however, we must walk with great circumspection of thinking. It is true that we
should not whip ourselves with blame for falling short of an ideal when we are
not to blame, but there is no excuse for willing acquiescence in a low ideal.
The situation here is somewhat like the plight of the wise man in the presence
of an intellectual ideal. The wise man may be entirely conscious that, as far as
he has gone in his study, he has made no voluntary mistake, but he may, with
every increase of knowledge, feel increasingly ashamed of his own ignorance.

There is a paradox here. The wisest man deplores most his own ignorance, and the
saint feels most deeply the shortcomings of his own moral conduct. This,
however, is different from feeling unjustly self -condemned for evils we have
not committed. Speaking paradoxically again, the saint comes to feel that the
progressive revelation of the moral ideal which ever reproves what he has
attained with the beckoning glimpses of heights still further on, is not
condemnation but favor. Once the ideal is discerned, the will becomes evil if it
does not set itself toward the ideal.

If the life growing in sonship in the family of God is not to be burdened with
tasks too heavy, it is equally clear that such a life can cherish a confidence
that the tasks will not be too light. There is no teaching about God less true
to Christianity than that which would make him so help men as to weaken them.
God is a helper, not a doer of everything for men. Consider for a moment a
current debate on the method of the divine revelation. The fundamental
difficulty with the theological party which calls itself fundamentalist is that
it seeks to make revelation too easy with its doctrine of an infallibly dictated
book. In actual experience, if we take the Book as thus dictated, it is not
easy, because of the contradictions in the dictations; but if we had such a
dictated book, sun-clear to the last syllable, we should lose the invaluable
benefit of learning how to search out eternal principles from transient
circumstances, how to show our loyalty to principles when we have to apply them
in the dark, or at most in a half-light, how to make ventures with moral truth
out upon uncharted seas of change. The trouble with infallibility of detailed
revelation would be that it could not develop robust saintliness. The family of
God is not ruled by rules. The letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life. How
one can conceive of God as like Christ and hold to a mechanically dictated
revelation from God is a mystery. The bottom objection to such a method is that
it is not fair not fair to men, not fair to God. It is too easy and too hard,
too hard as emptying the zest and adventure out of the life in the divine
family.

Kant once said that the wisdom of God is shown quite as much in what is withheld
from us as in what is revealed to us. We cannot well gain moral development in
total darkness or in total light. We read to-day that the noblest ideal for man
is to live according to a correct moral standard, aware that the universe itself
is blind, hostile to, or indifferent to all moral interests whatsoever. The
genuine morality, we are told, is to confront this hostile universe with
unconquerable heroism and to go down fighting. Whereas men have at some periods
of the world’s history been so optimistic as to believe that everything will
come out right in the end, no matter how bad men are, the modern subscriber to
the creed I am considering will have it that everything will come out wrong in
the end, no matter how good men may be. Now, this is well enough for certain
moods, or for men who have never themselves felt the sharp slap of the world’s
rough hand. If a moralist has enough of this world’s goods to be physically
comfortable he can, at his ease, counsel men to struggle unyieldingly against
black fate. Confronted by that fate, however, the masses of men are likely to
let go of high moral purpose, and to help themselves as best they can,
ordinarily finding peace in the stupor of moral indifference. When men do hold
fast to lofty morality there is usually an implicit hope which the holder
himself may deny. On the other hand, too much light is bad. If modern pedagogy
has taught us anything, it is the desirability of gradualness in the revelation
of truth. In most realms there is no way of turning on the light all at once.

Just what would it mean to have all the light of mathematics turned on at once?
It would mean nothing, for we can attain to mathematical knowledge only by
mastering a step at a time. In the kingdom of moral ends the successive glimpses
of understanding must be earned if they are to be genuinely moral. Evolutionary
method as having to do with the creation of the worlds may merit all the
objurgations that some theologians urge against it; but, taking human beings as
they are, evolutionary method as the dependence of each stage of knowledge on
those that precede it, fits in well with the needs of men. He who exhorts us to
follow the moral ideal even to inevitable defeat has the right of it so far as
the worth of the ideal itself is concerned. If a final glorious triumph of the
moral throughout the universe could be uncovered to the gaze of men and it could
only be so revealed if somehow the triumph affected material conditions the
attention of the imperfectly moralized minds would be fixed on the material
results, to the loss of moral development. What we need is confidence in the
Father above, and light enough freely to take the next step. Knowledge is,
indeed, an end in itself, but it is also a tool, or a power. On the power side
it is important that it get into the hands of children, or of childlike
intelligences, only as far as they can use it. The members of the family,
however, must be given the power as fast as they can use it. The most difficult
task in the training of children is to respect their growing independence. Let
us look at an ideal family or one as nearly ideal as we are likely to find under
earthly conditions. The father does not regard his children as any sort of
investment, to bring any sort of return to himself. He does not gaze upon them
with the doting fondness which would keep them always children. He does not
harbor any purposes concerning them except such as have to do with their
development into manhood or womanhood. Now, there comes a period when he begins
to allow a child to make his own choices, even if a wrong choice brings pain to
the child. Of course there is a watchful eye on all. A wise father will hardly
encourage a boy to touch a live electric wire to show him that electricity will
kill, yet the father does insist on a boy’s having a chance to make his own
mistakes. He gives the boy some money to spend on himself, for which he is
expected to render account. He gives him some money to spend without rendering
account. He allows the son to form his own opinions, and sometimes seeks to set
them right. At other times he encourages the son to opinions with which he
himself does not agree, and does not seek in the slightest to modify those
opinions.

All this implies patience, patience, and still more patience. If we are to read
at all seriously the New Testament teaching as to the character of God, we may
well believe that in the eyes of the Father men are estimated, so far as favor
and disfavor go, by intention rather than performance. There is a mass of
confused thinking as to this aspect of the divine attitude toward men. For
example, the certainty with which a painful consequence follows a wrong choice
in the material world of cause and effect is now and again taken as an
illustration of the swiftness of the divine punishment of sin. Such consequences
may have nothing to do with sin. We can readily see that if ours is to be a
universe of law, like consequences must follow like antecedents. Just why
consequences so often work out disastrously for individuals we do not know, but
our lack of knowledge is no proof that the problem is insoluble. We do know or
men ought to have known all these centuries since the book of Job was written
that the suffering of painful consequences may befall an innocent man who has
taken no false steps whatever. Final understanding will no doubt reveal that
there are some pains we must suffer from the very fact that we live in a
universe at all, though, as we have repeatedly said, we may not be able to take
advantage of this consideration as concrete explanation of a particular crisis.
To get back to the main track, the belief in a Christlike God warrants us in
assuming that the actual results following mistaken choices, which we have made
in all good faith, are not to be viewed as tokens of divine impatience.

We are warranted also in believing that the divine patience covers those
mistakes in which motives are mixed, or in which men may be wrongly influenced,
without being conscious of the influence. It is easy for an onlooker to pass
severe judgment on the selfishness of a fellowman when that selfishness seems
obvious. The onlooker may declare that if the selfish man is not aware of his
own selfishness he has befooled himself. Now, human nature is such that we can
act selfishly without intending to do so, without being aware that we are doing
so, without deceiving ourselves. What often seems to be selfishness and what,
indeed, may be selfishness may be the operation of a kind of instinct of
self-preservation. This is especially true when what we call class interests are
involved. It is often evident to a bystander that the conduct of certain persons
is dictated by the instinct of self-preservation of their political, or
industrial, or social class. The action of the members of a threatened group or
the reaction, as we say in these psychological days takes place spontaneously,
but seems to be deliberately dictated by class interest. Now, it is not possible
for any but the thousandth, or the ten-thousandth man, to be at all aware of the
pressure of this int erest in himself. He thinks of himself as wholly sincere.
When it comes to standing against the interest of one’s own class the man who
can do this is rare indeed. While it is easy for those of us on the outside to
charge men with selfishness, the Divine Father confronts a demand for patience
which, we may be confident, is met, and fully met.

While the moral demand upon man is that at least for a time he work in the half
light, the demand is equally imperative that God work in the full light. We can
trust him not to bring souls into a world like ours unless he knows them through
and through to their last possibility. We can discern that human beings are not
animals on the one hand, or completely moralized wills on the other. The
peculiarity of the human condition is that it is the passage over from a state
in which the animal impulses rule to a state in which these impulses are to be
ruled in the name of the Christ ideal. The Christian need is control; the
natural impulses not stamped out, or brought to heel, but controlled for an
ideal. The world has tried out the surrender to animal impulses, and we all know
the disasters. The church has tried out the downright subjugation and extinction
of the natural, and we know the ruin along that path. Now, the control of
impulses, impulses that we ourselves only vaguely understand, is almost
insuperably difficult. We may well count upon the patience of the Christlike God
as we strive to work our way through.

Here is as good an opportunity as any to speak of the obligation upon a Divine
Father to reveal his purpose toward his children as soon as the children can
grasp that purpose. In this essay I am trying to keep away from formal and
technical theology, but I am sure I do not violate my own purpose in insisting
that it is upon moral bases like those I have been trying to sketch out that all
adequate technical theology must be built. In my introductory chapter I tried to
show that through the doctrines of incarnation and atonement the church has from
the beginning been trying to express her conviction that in Christ God has done
all he possibly can to show his purpose for men. If it is imperative for us to
show to God what Christ, as the realization of the highest moral and spiritual
values, is to us, it is imperative also for God to show us what those values are
to him. The charge cannot be urged that God has delayed too long in proclaiming
Ms purpose to men. A more pertinent query would be as to whether God has not
revealed his purpose in Christ sooner than we can make much of that revelation.
The sensitiveness to responsibility revealed in Christ a responsibility holding
for the Divine Father calls for the assurance to men as to the divine intentions
toward them. The revelation in Christ, so to speak, outflanks our perplexities.
It does not meet them by direct answer. It rather gives us a Father whom we can
trust when we cannot understand him. It is altogether impossible for us at
present to get an answer to many detailed questions. The ramifications reach too
far for our intellects. We can, however* see in Christ the revelation of a
spirit in the Father which we can trust. As long as the church remains loyal to
essential Christianity she will be insistent upon phrasings of incarnation and
atonement which will make Christ mean most to God as well as to men. This will
involve change of theological statement in the direction of enlargement,
provided the church is living an enlarging life. The difficulty with many
theories of such matters is, not that they are heretical, but that they are not
big enough. They are sound enough as far as they go, but they do not go far.
There are various systems which are formally good enough, but Christian
consciousness in church and individual will have to decide whether they are
adequate or not. Here, by the way, is a challenge for the exercise of charity
among believers. As long as the believer finds in a theory about Christ a
statement which makes Christ and God mean most to him, he should not be overkeen
to charge another believer with heresy for holding to a different view which,
for that other believer, meets the like test of spiritual adequacy. It can
hardly be maintained, however, that any theory about Christ will finally satisfy
the Church’s conception of God as like unto Christ which does not make Christ of
the utmost significance for God. Two extremes should be avoided. Christ as just
a masked divinity acting a part upon the earth, with no substantial entrance
into human life, does not make him significant enough. Christ as merely a man
with no special uniqueness of relation to the Father in heaven does not make him
significant enough. At any and all tunes the Lordship of Christ must be made to
contain all that we can rationally and morally pour into the term. On the basis
of this essay we may think of him as the self-expression of God. Language has a
double aim the communication of thought to another than the revealer himself,
and the self-satisfaction or self-realization of the revealer. The revelation in
Christ may well be taken as moral revelation on the part of God, and likewise as
God’s moral self-expression. Without seeking to delve into mysteries too deep
for us it may be suggested that probably the profoundest significance of the
work of Christ is its satisfaction of the moral impulses of the Divine Father.

Here too is as appropriate a place as any to speak a word about God as Judge.
The judgeship of God and the Fatherhood of God should be taken together. Let us
rid our minds at once of the notion that, in the judgments which we have a right
to expect from a Christlike God, impartiality would be any especial virtue. In
our human contacts one with another impartiality is, indeed, somewhat of a
virtue, simply because, human nature being what it is, partiality is almost
certain to result in injustice. When, however, we are thinking of the Divine
Judge we have to remember that he is also the Divine Father. Abstract impersonal
law is an instrumental creation of our own, of considerable use in the control
of society. The justice of the Divine Judge and the mercy of the Divine Father
can also be set over against one another as an academic exercise in theology,
or, rather, in the shuffling of theological phrases, but how can anyone who sees
in Jesus a revelation of the Spirit of God suppose that there is the possibility
of any such separation in reality? One of the saddest travesties in the history
of religion has been the extent to which the whole theme of judgment has been
pulled out of the atmosphere of a family relationship and transferred to the
atmosphere of the courtroom, the atmosphere which more than all others in
dealing with human relationships, makes for the mechanical and artificial.
Whatever else we may or may not believe about the temper of Jesus, we can be
sure that his temper was not that of a lawyer. The judgment of the Father is not
except possibly as a last resort after men have had the chance which to all
moral intelligences throughout the universe would seem adequate chiefly a
passing of final sentence upon souls before a bar. It is an attitude more like
that of a friendly critic who is seeking, not for faults to condemn, but for
excellences on which to build. It may be that when we get the light of the upper
skies on the divine handling of men, one of the remarkable features of that
handling will be the extent to which the Father-Judge has ignored the mistakes
for the sake of bringing out the good. Recall what has been said about
conceiving the divine knowledge of man’s inner life as insight based on
sympathy. A law court has to give central place to what is called objective
fact. Did or did not an accused do this or that? though, to be sure, motive has
to be considered in a legal finding. The divine judgment of men, however, is
chiefly inner, different from that of accusation and penalty on the basis of
outer deed. The task is discipline, correction, reproof, and praise also. The
late Borden Parker Bowne once made a profound remark about the Fatherhood of
God. He declared that the transgressions of men must be considered, first of
all, from the point of view of membership in the divine family; that the wrong
choices of men have at least at the outset to be taken as are offenses of
children against parental control, and that the possibility of a child’s finding
himself forthwith outside of the family because of disobedience or heedlessness,
is not to be thought of. The free and easy finality with which, in other days
especially, church leaders presumed to say what persons were inside the divine
family and what persons outside, was a travesty on the very idea of the family.
There are sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit. By sins of the flesh I mean
all those slips which come out of the physical conditions and entanglements in
which we live on earth. The designation can properly include much more than
ordinary fleshly indulgences. It embraces all the weaknesses coming out of our
being enmeshed in a material world. On the other hand are the deliberate
resolves which make choice of evil, the purposeful rejection of fatherhood.
Bowne himself looked upon this as the darkest possibility before the soul, and
did not draw back from the conclusion that a will can seal itself to evil
forever. Still, rigorous insistence upon this possibility only makes the
stronger the contention that men must not pass hasty judgment as to who is
inside the family and who outside. Here, as elsewhere, we can hold fast the
general principle without the slightest intention to pass sentence on a given
individual. No man alive is wise enough or good enough to draw the line in
actual human groups in any manner suggestive of judgment. That is the province
of the Father-Judge.

Once more, we cannot close this section on the divine fatherhood without at
least a glance in the direction of immortality. Here again, I do not wish to
enter the lists with formal arguments. The ground for our belief in immortality
is our conviction that God is a Father that God is like unto Christ.

There is no formal argument, anyhow, that will of itself here bring deep
certainty. It is quite generally conceded that no logic avails conclusively
against immortality. The inherent dependence of spiritual processes upon
physical processes has never been established. Thinking, for example, may take
place only when particles of nerve substance are in a particular . relation to
one another, but no movement or relation of nerve substance accounts for the
unity and persistence necessary in the thinking agent. Let the dependence of
thought on brain be ever so close, that does not forbid us from concluding that
thinking might be of finer quality if the mental activity were brought into
relation to a finer quality of substance in some other sphere than this. As for
there being no reason why man’s life should continue into some other sphere,
what reason is there for its being in this sphere? The argument that it is
absurd that creatures of no more intrinsic worth than human beings should live
after physical death is a hazardous one. It keeps suggesting the question as to
why some of us exist at all. Yet here we are! No, on the basis of formal
argument alone it would require an endless existence itself to supply adequate
time to establish a convincing case one way or the other. The attitude we take
toward immortality depends on our idea of God. If God is like unto Christ, if
God feels toward men as Christ felt, we simply ask ourselves whether such a God
could conceivably call men into an existence like human life, and then let them
pass out into nothingness after a career like that on earth. Let us put only a
scant minimum of suggestion from the earthly family into our interpretation of
the divine family. Let fatherhood for God imply the least conceivable. How can
it be reconciled with a willingness on God’s part to have men cease to exist at
physical death? Nor can immortality on such basis of fatherhood be merely an
immortality of good influences, or a conservation of spiritual forces with the
personal identity lost. Any earthly father who has sto’od at the grave of a dead
son knows what a mockery it would be to say that the boy lives on in that the
good influences set going by his life persist. An earthly father will naturally
grasp at that straw of comfort if nothing more is possible, but it is indeed a
poverty-stricken straw. So with all talk about the absorption of the finite into
the infinite with the personal identity destroyed. That is worse than nothing to
fatherhood. No, if persistence of personal identity beyond death is not
possible, let us stop talking about the Fatherhood of God, for if this life is
all the divine fatherhood is only a pleasant figure of speech. This subject is
not disposed of by declaring that multitudes of persons are not interested in
immortality they would as willingly cease to be as not. We, however, are quite
as much interested in where this entire problem of immortality leaves God as in
where it leaves men. We need not believe in God at all unless we choose to, but
if we are to believe in him as moral, we can fairly and reverently say that he
must face the judgment of all righteous intelligence as to how he treats men. It
may be true that, as a cynic once said, no human being would care to go back and
live over a single month of his life if he were just repeating a particular
month. All the more reason why men should be given a chance at a deeper meaning
than that of a life like ours. Better believe in no God at all than in one not
fully just. Of course, if God is not the God of Christ, eternal life would not
be desirable. If the good and the true and the beautiful are not of the warp and
woof of the universe, we can now get our fill of life. If God is like Christ, we
can believe in immortality. If he is not like Christ, who desires immortality?


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  CHAPTER 15: 01.13.     CHAPTER 13
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CHAPTER VII. THE DIVINE COWORKER

I HAVE called this chapter the "coworker" because I wish to linger for a little
around the claim that the deepest companionship between God and men comes at
last to a working together. There is scant warrant in the scriptural
representations of God for the notion that men are always to regard themselves
as children of God in what might be called a nursery significance. There do,
indeed, come moments when we feel as weak as infants before the mysteries of the
universe. In such moments we need the assurance that underneath us are the
everlasting arms. Sonship, however, is more than this. In a home at all
approximating the ideal, children do not cease to be interesting when they
become adult. The ideal is more nearly realized in a home where the love between
father and sons deepens as they all work together in a common task.

Christianity is a religion of activity. There is no profounder characterization
in the New Testament of the intimacy between Jesus and the Father in heaven than
the declaration, "The Father worketh hitherto and I work." The final Christian
intimacy between God and men is an intimacy of laboring together. The conclusion
at which I think the Christian revelation arrives is that the friendship of men
and God arises not out of direct contemplation of God by men, but out of inner
understanding attained by men as they labor for the objects of concern to God.

Far be it from me even to guess at the chief objects of the Divine Purpose, but
look at the possibility of coming to a realization of the divine nearness in
what seems to be Civilization’s supreme task at the present hour. Religion has
long been regarded as the province of the individual soul in its relation to
God. This has been preached so persistently and so long that the responsibility
for making all the social relations Christian has been thrust to one side.
Suppose that all men everywhere, in what we call the individual relation to God,
could be converted to the service of God. Would that solve all our problems? It
would not. If the more social obligations, of the kind I now have in mind, could
be accepted by everybody as of sole importance, would all our problems be
solved? Certainly not. As historic fact, however, the emphasis has been laid so
exclusively on the inner, subjective, individual phases of religion that all
civilization is now in peril because of the un-Christianized contacts between
groups. So well have the teachers of the limitation of religion to the personal
wrought, that one who tries to get any emphasis on the larger duties between men
is often charged with preaching a so-called social gospel of doubtful standing,
emphasizing "environmental" rather than spiritual factors.

If we are to have a pod at all, we may as well have one of the widest interests.
The idea that the Holy Spirit wells up in the individual consciousness, doing
the essential work there, and then by an after-thought tying individuals
together, has incredibly slight basis in the Scriptures. I have been trying to
say all along that society exists only in the persons that compose it; but, for
the sake of the persons themselves, the movement must be from the circumference
toward the center, as well as from within outward. The most is made of the
individual when we think of him as essential in a system. Men arrive at their
best as individuals through the social contacts. So that the time has come to
preach the conversion of the wider relationships between men, or, if that sounds
impersonal, the conversion of individuals in their social relationships of the
wider order, all for the welfare of the individuals themselves.

It may be well for the ardent Protestant in particular to remind himself that
the work of Protestantism is not yet complete. Protestantism has not yet
supplied effective substitutes for some agencies it destroyed. In those Middle
Ages which we now see were not Dark Ages by any means, the church brought all
social relations under its sway. The church intervened between warring nations
and quarreling nobles, between feudal lords and serfs, between employers and
employed, between wrangling individuals. That the church was herself at times
part and parcel of an oppressive rule, that she fell far, far short of her
opportunities no one doubts; but nevertheless the ideal of the church was
evident. It was to touch all phases of life with a redeeming impulse.
Protestantism was a justified revolt against an ecclesiasticism which tried to
redeem men by fiat, by arbitrary official authority, by force. When
Protestantism, however, laid stress exclusively on justification by faith it
opened the door to an extreme individualism which neglected the social contacts.
While the Protestant leaders have tried to correct this tendency in the name of
infallibilities of one sort and another quite as rigorous as infallibility of
the church, the tendency still persists, to the abandonment of vast spaces of
social life to secularism. The field of international contacts has become
secularized to such an extent that only by the accident of a Christian’s now and
again seeking on his own account as a statesman to guide a nation toward
justice, have there been any notable attempts to make international dealings
Christian. Only recently has there been any strenuous effort to create an
international public opinion definitely and avowedly based on Christian
principles. Lowes Dickinson is probably correct in his judgment that the conduct
of all the nations alike in the quarter-century preceding the Great War was not
conduct at all, but a drift toward international anarchy. The international
relations have been a no man’s land.

How much effort has there been, or is there now in this day of assumption of
Nordic superiority, to make Christian the racial contacts? Say all we please
about the duty of converting individuals to the kingdom of God, the obvious fact
is that the color of the skin of millions of persons on earth at the present
hour prevents their getting a chance to hear any effective preaching of the
gospel. When we come to industrial relationships we hear that the church has no
right even to an opinion as to economic righteousness. Now, if we stop an
instant to ask how much preaching of the purely individualistic gospel it will
take to offset wars between nations and clashes between races and quarrels
between industrial groups, the reply is that no amount of such preaching will
avail, for the individualistic message does not get to grips with these issues.
It does not even come within sight of the issues. The task before Protestantism
is to replace the old-time authority of the Roman Church over all phases of
human conduct with a spiritual influence which will touch all the phases. The
time is not likely soon to come when this social emphasis will be overdone. When
such a day does come, enough discerning spirits will be on hand to restore the
balance. At the present moment the supreme Christian need is an emphasis on the
wide circumference from which one should look in toward the lives of
individuals. We do not make the most of the conception of a moral universe
otherwise, for a moral universe is a morally organized system.

I have singled out this one task for its own surpassing importance and also for
illustrative purpose. If God is like Christ, if men are sons of God, what could
possibly be the desire of such a God for his children except that they join with
him in the world-wide redemptive task? What better basis can there be for
companionship than laboring together? No doubt if we are to look upon God just
as an efficient worker, managing the universe, we can easily ask ourselves why
he should choose to work through poor tools like men. If, however, we think of
God as a Father, we can well ask ourselves as to what better medium of communion
there could possibly be than copartnership in the tasks supreme in the sight of
God. In any working together of God and men it is to be taken for granted that
men will strive increasingly to lift themselves up to the divine expectation.
That goes without saying. It ought also to go without saying that God will
accommodate himself to the speed of men. He will not forget his obligation to
adjust his stride to man’s stride. When, however, these mutual adjustments have
been made it is to be expected that God and men together will find their thought
and their strength absorbed in the task which confronts them together. In our
remaining pages we shall consider the Christlike God as the Friend of men. The
friendship which amounts to most is the friendship born of a labor in a common
task. Friendship which comes out of direct gaze of men toward one another is not
so deep or so worthy as that which spontaneously arises through working together
in a noble duty.


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  CHAPTER 16: 01.14.     CHAPTER 14
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CHAPTER XIV THE DIVINE FRIEND

WE come, then, finally to God as the Friend of men, the highest conception to
which we can attain. All other relationships, including that of sons working
together with a Father, fall short of the best if they do not reach a climax in
friendship. We pass to consider the attainment of that knowledge of God which
crowns itself in friendship. Our knowledge of God bases itself on doing the will
of God. Friendship apart, and the requirements of justice alone considered, this
doing of the will is the only fair condition for entrance into a kingdom of God
composed of men as we know them. For a man’s will is the one instrument of his
spiritual equipment normally under his own control. If the kingdom of God were
only for the acute intellects, able to master intellectual mysteries, many
worthy people would have to remain outside. They would not have the requisite
understanding. If the doors were to open only to those capable of fine seizures
of beauty, or talented with the religious genius of the mystic, only a few could
enter. When, however, the condition is only that a man shall set his will toward
the will of God, that makes possible a kingdom of multitudes of men who do not
indeed do the same things, or actually follow the same courses, but who walk in
the same spirit. On such basis men reveal themselves, not as all in the same
place, but as all facing in the same direction. The child and the mature man,
the learned and the unlearned, the gifted and the commonplace, all have enough
power over themselves to lopk toward the will of God, and to seek to catch his
spirit.

Someone protests, however, that there is no use trying to do the will of God
without knowing about him, and that it is deep-seated religious beliefs which
give value to the doing in accordance with the divine will. How can a man be a
friend of God without right ideas about God? This seems quite conclusive when
urged by a believer with a passion of creedal orthodoxy.

Correctness of theological dogma as a sign of friendship with God must, of
course, be considered. Is it possible, with the character of God as revealed in
Christ before us, to say that friendship with the divine means formal rightness
of theological conceptions? Many of us had predicted that such a question as
this would not be raised again in our generation, but much current religious
debate shows that our conclusion was premature. If we keep our theology close to
life, we may well ask ourselves what basis for friendship there is in identity
or similarity of authorized doctrines. This is not to minimize the importance of
the formal creeds. Friendship deepens with deepening knowledge, but to make
friendship depend too much on knowledge would be to empty religious experience
of much of its content. Surely the intimacies of family life do not depend
primarily upon such knowledge. The son’s knowledge of his father can no doubt
grow gloriously through the years, but it would be astonishingly farfetched to
say that any formal correctness of information is the basis of communion between
a father and his son. The like-mindedness which is worth everything to the
family feeling is a like-mindedness in fundamental aims. Doing the will of God
is voluntary and free surrender to the highest spiritual ideals within one’s
reach. The better theories we have about God the better we shall carry out the
purpose of God, but, surely, we can have full devotion to the divine will
without being formally correct in our thought of God, judged by the authorized
theological standards. Suppose a lover of men so consecrated that he is willing,
if need be, to die for men. This is the very stuff of which the Kingdom is made;
this is the kind of soul in whom God delights; and yet the devotion may or may
not be toward an established orthodoxy.

Considerations like this, however, are not final. We cannot dispense with
earnest and sincere thinking in religious experience. A distinguished
philosopher of the last generation declared that reasoning in abstract
conceptions is a veritable experiencing of the Deity. Not all truth is on the
same plane, and there must needs be honest search for a basis of selection among
truths. I know that this arouses the ire of a certain type of truthseekers who
will have it that truth is truth, and that all truth-seeking is on the same
level. Yet there must be some standard. Some truths are productive and some
trifling. A botanist might put in his time counting the separate trees of a
forest, but he would hardly win much honor as a truth-seeker by so doing. By one
means or another all thinkers try to make their utterances or their discoveries
seem the most worth while. They make distinctions between mere catalogues of
facts and vital principles, and between judgments of existence and judgments of
value.

Now, when all is said and done we weigh truths by their value for human minds. I
do not by this accept an uncritical pragmatism as a path to divine knowledge.
John Dewey has done well to remind us that the foremost founder of pragmatism in
this country, William James, never intended to set up what the world calls
success as the standard of judgment for truth, but pragmatism has too often lent
itself to a low scale of values as a test of truth. The modern emphasis on
socalled efficiency in much religious effort may be well and good as increasing
congregations and collections, but it surely cannot be an avenue of approach to
intimacy with a Christlike God. The aim of Christian knowledge must be moral as
making for the highest and best in human life, even when no immediate practical
results are visible. The contemplation of astronomical truth, or the higher
mathematics, may not have the slightest utilitarian consequence, and yet may
possess the noblest value for the rare delight such contemplation brings on its
own account to human minds. .Without trying to elaborate the ideal in detail, we
are all fast coming to ’ agree that Christianity is for the enlargement and
refinement of human life. The more rich j and full the humanity of men, the more
irresistible is our belief in the efficacious presence of the divine. The more
genuinely human a man is, the more surely has he grasped the divine.

There must, then, be high moral and spiritual quality in the pursuit of
knowledge which leads to friendship with the Divine. There must be a venture of
faith in such learning, a positive pursuit of the deliberately chosen best. When
I say "best" I do not mean the truth that is easiest or pleasantest. Anyone who
has had experience with an educational elective system is familiar with the
youth who treats such a system as a quick road to easy courses, and he knows the
sad consequences which await such a youth. He is also familiar with that other
type of student who sees in an elective system a chance to get at the courses
which will do most for a student, courses, some of which challenge as a call to
mountain climbing. So with the choice of the ideals toward which the
truth-seeker turns his effort.

There cannot be any short summary of what knowledge will count most for the
largest and finest human life. So that one thinker impatiently tells us that we
would better be content just to seek truth. That aim seems plain enough. Let us
free ourselves from all presuppositions whatever, and try to find the
truth-in-itself regardless of where it may lead us. An instant’s reflection,
however, ought to show us that this is not at all how the search for truth
proceeds. The most matter-of-fact scientist carries into his laboratory complex
interlaced assumptions which are quite as much determinative of what he will see
as is his microscope. Conceptions of natural law, hypotheses of various orders
of plausibility, the spirit which we call the scientific temper all these and
swarms of other presuppositions too numerous to mention, help or hinder the
study of the scientist. Very often the most effective force in leading to a
discovery is the unshakeable conviction that what the seeker seeks must be
there. This conviction does not put the fact there, but it mightily aids in
discovery, sometimes to the oversight of other facts which might seriously
modify the significance of the one discovered. We are always hearing about the
exceeding morality of the scientific temper, its modesty and humility, its
patience in work and waiting. All of this is splendidly just. One of the world’s
best spiritual gains of the last three hundred years has been the scientific
temper. Still, there is this one point at which the scientific temper falls
short. The scientist is not often enough willing to scrutinize his own
assumptions. He cannot escape assumptions no matter how closely he watches
against them, but once aware of the assumptions he should become even more
modest, and more charitable toward workers whose assumptions are more openly
expressed. If the scientist is told that he is studying with a utilitarian aim,
he may justifiably resent the charge. If, however, he begins to suspect that the
object of his search has and can have no significance if it is inconsequential,
or trifling he will turn to something else. Which implies that some standard is
determining the value of his studies. Value means value to somebody, value to
the seeker himself, value to other scientists, value to that universe which,
according to the scientist himself, is an expression of law throughout. In the
search for the Divine Source of Truth, and for friendship with God on the basis
of truth, the thinker is admittedly in danger of assuming the worth for human
and divine ideals of what fits in most tightly to his accustomed notions, and
thus of missing the appeal of truth for truth’s own sake. One of the foremost
theologians of the past generation justified the attitude of the Roman Church
toward Galileo on the ground that the ecclesiastical authorities had to
consider, not science in itself, but the effects of scientific announcement on
the millions of worshipers whose faith might be shattered by such announcement.
We do not have to go back to the time of Galileo for other instances of such
ecclesiastical solicitude. Because of the organized resistance to newer
discoveries and theories the skeptic, the critic, even the scoffer, have their
divinely appointed functions in the progress of the divine revelation. Still,
this does not make less the importance of the thinking that seeks to put the
best possible construction on the universe. The especially Christian reasoning
is based upon the will-to-believe and upon the practical life which comes out of
the will-to-believe. There is to-day considerable emphasis on the
will-not-to-believe, and, it must be admitted, considerable justification for
such emphasis. Some features of religion must be met with a will-not-to-believe.
The priests of Baal in Old Testament times no doubt were altogether anxious to
encourage the will-to-believe, and the prophets attacked them with the will
not-to-believe. We touch here a region of inner motive where we cannot pass
judgment, so far as any individual is concerned. We can say, however, that in
treating of friendship with a Christlike God the ideal must be a IChristlike
fullness and fineness of life. A man may doubt everything in order to learn
something. His sincere intent may be the advancement of the frontiers of the
kingdom of truth. It has often happened in the course of philosophic history
that those who have discovered the blindness of blind alleys have served as
truly as the men who have found the road through. The exploration of the world
in the old days of search for passages to the Far East was at times immensely
furthered by the sailors who pushed into bays and inlets and rivers only to find
the passage closed. It is occasionally quite as important to find where a road
is not as to find where it is. Now, if we are dealing with those who doubt with
this constructive aim, if we have before us those who show a will-not-to-believe
for the sake of finding something worthy of the will-to-believe, we have a
different problem from that of the doubter whose chronic mood is cynical
rejoicing at the frailty and failure of the human spirit. Just what pleasure
such cynicism would find in a companionship with that divine which centers all
upon the good we cannot pretend to say. At the present hour also there are those
who preach that the communion of the soul with the divine is best sought in
aesthetic delight.

Storied windows richly dight, music reverberating through long-drawn aisles, the
cathedral or temple standing forth in architectural glory all this ministers to
the religious instinct with an unspeakable efficacy that I, for one, shall not
attempt to gainsay. How anyone, however, with the grasp on the ethical nature of
God which comes out of the idea of Jesus, can put this sestheticism before the
devotion to moral purpose is beyond us. With Jesus (the ethical in God stands
first. After that all the resources of art may well be employed to set on high
and to adorn the doctrine of God. This is not the opportunity for a lecture,
certainly not for a sermon, on the moral basis of art, but it may be just as
well to remark that the periods which have taken most seriously the
Christ-revelation of God have been those which, on the whole, have soared to
grandest heights of artistic achievement, this too without any direct teaching
of a dependence of art on Christianity. The explanation seems to be that, with
Christianity doing its utmost to enlarge and refine human life, the artistic
faculties have shared in the uplift. We have mentioned the Middle Ages in a
reference to the former control of the church over trade and industry. We do
well to remember that in mediaeval centuries Christianity wrought powerfully
upon art as well as upon industry. I do not mean that the church purposely or
deliberately controlled artistic expression, but that Christianity looked upon
human life as a whole, and that this wholeness of view made for a soundness of
’mental and moral health which revealed itself in such artistic qualities as
symmetry of design, proper subordination of parts to whole, and perspective. The
Gothic cathedral is the consummate climax of an age that saw life steadily and
saw it whole. Whatever else we may say about a Gothic cathedral, we cannot hold
that it savors of the aberrant or the abnormal. If the builders of a cathedral
felt any tendency to freakishness they vented the impulse on the gargoyles, or
they stuck an impish figure in here and there as a detail which those on the
lookout for such imps might find if they could. With the working out of the
implications of the Reformation more and more provinces of human activity were
taken over into what has been called the secular sphere, and the direct
influence of religion has been more and more narrowed down. Behold what a
result! Instead of treating the massive moral activities of life as themes for
interpretation, the artistic impulse to-day works itself out only too often into
the portrayal of the diseased and crazy. Progress no doubt comes to human
society with the study of the pathological, provided such study aims at the
discovery of the secrets of health. Not much advance would result from rummaging
around in hospitals and madhouses just to gloat over sickness and lunacy. Our
artistic plight is somewhat as if the Gothic builders had put their main effort,
not on solving the mechanical principles by which the weight of the roof could
be shifted off the walls and carried to buttressed pillars by the diagonal ribs,
not on correctly proportioning floor-space and height, not on impressing stone
with intellectual and spiritual suggestiveness, but on the imps with this
immense difference, that the imps of the Gothic cathedral could not have been
other than signs of a likeable roguishness. They would not have been expressions
of the morbid cynicism that abounds in art to-day. Art for art’s sake depends on
our definition of art. Art should be art for life’s sake.

Artistic considerations, indeed, lie off to one side of my main purpose, but
nevertheless the reference to art is pertinent because of the current emphasis
on sincerity as the key to all knowledge worth having; and it seems that any
eccentric artist can to-day win praise for sincerity. It is not the duty of any
human judge to declare whose sincerity stands justified in the eyes of the
Source of all truth, artistic or other; but if we are looking for paths to the
Center of all truth, we may as well make the most of that all-around wholeness
of life which reveals itself in wholesomeness of temper and deed. The so-called
"temperamental" is not a key to the divine, in spite of the claims of a type of
nervous mysticism. The higher the mind arises in the scale of development the
less temperamental it becomes. One reason why we have such difficulty in finding
interesting personal records of an artist like Shakespeare may be due to the
absence in him of those temperamental peculiarities which lay the foundation for
good stories, authentic or legendary, about a famous character. I do not
suppose, either, that there is a widespread tendency to contest the standing of
Leonardo da Vinci as an artistic genius, but not much in the records of Da
Vinci’s career suggests the temperamental. Study of all available principles of
mechanics, and of all varieties of living organisms, attaining to insights far
ahead of the science of the time, does not betoken emotional flightiness or
unsteadiness. So far has the common expectation as to the eccentricity of the
aesthetic temperament reached to-day, however, that we no longer count on the
ordinary codes of ethics, which guide the conduct of the plain man, as to be
observed by the pronouncedly artistic souls. As for all this talk about
sincerity, let us reflect that sincerity depends for its moral worth upon the
underlying conception as to what in life is worth while, or upon the general
ideals of life. It is possible for a drunkard to be altogether sincere in his
devotion to his cups. Does not this suspicion of the value of emotionalism,
however, pertinent though it may be in this immediate context, open the door to
dangerous skepticism about those states of religious feeling which have in all
the history of the church been looked upon as a special avenue to the
understanding of the Divine, and a high token of favor of the Divine?
Conversion, of which Christianity makes so much, mysticism, uplift in prayer,
all have resounding emotional accompaniments. If we strike sharply at the
emotional stresses of the artistically temperamental constitution, what is to
hinder like summary blows against the religiously temperamental constitution?
Have we not again and again heard that some persons have gifts that amount to
religious genius, and that in the progress of religion, as in all other phases
of progress, the genius plays an invaluable role?

Let us remind ourselves, as we heed this question, that Christianity did not
invent or discover conversion, or mysticism, or prayer. All these experiences
were common to practically all religions at the time Christ was born, and had
been common to them for centuries. What Jesus did was to introduce into them the
idea of an ethical God whose requirements had to do with righteousness. In
evangelical circles weight has always been laid upon conversion as the essential
in approach to the divine favor. It was almost inevitable that in such emphasis
the emotional upheaval of the experience itself would get into the position of
first importance. In Christianity’s stress upon a moral God, conversion takes
its start in sorrow over sin, and issues in a determination to lead a new life
following the commandments of God. The moral state which results from conversion
is the all-essential. A friend for whose power to describe his own mental states
I have respect has told me that he experienced two definite conversions in his
religious career. One was a conversion out of conventional, traditional
acceptance of customary religious practices into materialism. The second was a
conversion from the materialism to vital belief in Christ. Emotionally speaking,
the first conversion was even more sharply defined than the second. It was in a
biological laboratory that my friend, then a college student, was watching
through a microscope the changes actually taking place in the tissues of a
living organism. Suddenly a seemingly irresistible conviction seized him that
these processes were all-sufficient in themselves, that there was no effective
spiritual reality in the universe. This experience seemed just as vividly
self-evident as did the later crisis which brought this youth back to belief in
God. During the time that the spell persisted it witnessed to him of atheism.

Now, incidents like this may not happen often, but they do occur often enough to
put us on our guard against taking a conversional crisis as evidence of its own
worth. Every student of religious revivals knows that the converts in
evangelistic campaigns have to be guided carefully if their conversion results
in that changed moral attitude and conduct which fits in with the life which we
call Christlike. So likewise with the experiences of mysticism. Just now there
is renewed emphasis on the mystical as preeminently an indication of the actual
presence of the divine. The mystics are hailed as the friends of God. Any
careful student of mysticism will at once admit that some of what passes for
mysticism is not predominantly spiritual. The closeness of dependence of spirit
on matter, or of mind on nervous organization, the susceptibility of the
physical organism to the general conditions in which it is placed, the
responsiveness of the imagination to all varieties of stimulus, the
oversuggestibility of some types of mind all such factors and many, many others
the well-informed of mysticism will readily recognize and discount.
Nevertheless, considerable numbers of trained students speak of mysticism as of
value apart from whether it is Christlike or not. I have heard mysticism used as
a basis for putting Mohammed, Buddha, and Jesus on about the same level, as all
alike having discovered the true road to intimacy with God. Distinguished
Christian teachers have given us to understand that the mystic experience stands
in its own right; and occasionally they tell us that in such experience the soul
is lifted beyond all our moral considerations. "Beyond good and evil" is the
phrase sometimes used in this connection.

It must be understood at the outset that there ought not to be any objection to
trying out all promising paths to an experience of the divine. I have no protest
to file against making the utmost of abnormal states of consciousness to
discover what human faculties promise most for susceptibilities to the divine.
It may be that there is a psychological technique to be followed in fixing the
attention on the spiritual values, and that fastings and vigils do have
something of the efficacy that Middle Ages saints seemed to find in them.
Especially might an age given to self-indulgence seek by stern self-denial to
find a door to the temple of the Spirit.

Nevertheless, mysticism to be Christian must be fitted into a system at the
center of which stands the Christlike God. If the followers of such a God have
visions, they ought to see something worth seeing. The more closely we study
those prophets of the Old Testament on whose work Jesus built, the less dogmatic
we become as to the nature of the prophetic illumination in its psychological
aspects. There is no reason to declare that the visions of the prophets were
only pictorial symbolism used by them to illustrate spiritual truths. The
visions were, as far as we can understand the records, actual supernormal crises
ito which the routine of ordinary everyday life would not give the key. Yet the
visions meant something. The emotional stir lent reenforcement to the definite
moral purposes and ideals. One of the noticeable features of Old Testament
history is the stress laid upon the necessity of moral content in any experience
that claimed to bring a message from the Lord of Israel. Israel’s vision of the
glory of the Lord which like smoke filled the Temple, Amos’ basket of summer
fruit, even the stupendous dramas which rose before the gaze of Ezekiel, all had
a moral meaning. They issued in messages of a righteousness to be worked into
conduct in market places and temple courts and council chambers.

Let now some student of non-Christian religion discourse to us of visions and
trances of Hindu saints and we forthwith grant the validity of the experiences
as testifying to deep and genuine religious instinct. We do not doubt or
disparage. When, however, the student proceeds to inform us that the Hindu
mystic belongs in the same grade of religious importance and significance as the
Christian mystic we demur. I once heard an expert in Oriental religion dilating
on the worth of some Hindu utterances of mystic ecstasy which were calculated to
convey a fresh sense of the awful majesty of the physical universe, of the
immensity of the void. If a sense of the awfulness of spatial distances were
religiously important, a gaze at the stars, or a perusal of a treatise on
astronomy ought to be much more effective. In this glad day of desire for better
understanding among the followers of all varieties of religions one voices a
criticism of a non-Christian belief at one’s peril. It is at considerable risk,
then, that I ask as to the value of Hindu mysticism. I urge the question with
all proper hesitancy, because I think I am aware of the danger of judging Hindu
mysticism by superficial appearances. Still, what does the mysticism amount to,
hi terms of the enlargement and betterment of human life? To stare at the sun,
or at one’s own navel, till all rational thought sinks toward unconsciousness
what does it amount to? We waive the significance of the ashes and the dirt in
which the seer sits, also the stunted and dwarfed muscles that reveal long
humiliations of the flesh. What ideas, or ideals, come out of all this? To raise
the question at all is to the Hindu a complete missing of the point. He replies
to us that the absence of ideas and ideals, and of all specifically intellectual
content, is itself the justification of the experience. Mysticism, in its very
sinking toward the void, gives a hint of the process by which the soul which has
let go of earth falls into the bosom of the^infinite, the infinite being
characterized as plenitude, but practically treated as emptiness.

Again, what of it? Well, indifference to human misery, inability to better the
human lot, callousness to all appeals to pursue the humanly good and beautiful
these are what of it. He would, indeed, be hasty who would deny that Western
life would gain something from the reposefulness of the Hindu, for much Western
life is forced and distorted. Any relaxation would to some souls be relief, but
I doubt if Hindu or other non-Christian mysticism can be rated anywhere near
Christian mysticism as tending to the welfare of human life. Let us not forget
that Christianity judges everything by the outcome for larger and better
humanity, that humanity being of distinctive worth on its own account .and not
for absorption into anything else.

There has been some stir of discussion in recent years as to whether Paul and
Jesus were not mystics after the order of the nervously unstable. Whereas the
type of student I first mentioned classifies Christian mysticism with
non-Christian mysticism, with all forms alike noble, another school puts
Christian mysticism on the same level with all other mysticisms as all alike
symptoms of disordered or unhealthy nerves. So there has been debate about the
mental health of Paul and Jesus. The discussion has gone on, for the most part,
on a professedly psychological line without any historical sense whatever. Paul
saw a vision on the road to Damascus; and to some specialists the symptoms
suggest, sunstroke, or epilepsy. Paul heard a voice, thus betraying that he was
subject to the "auditions" of the nervously overwrought. All the experts ignore
the feature of the Damascus experience which Paul himself said was of prime
consequence, namely, the command to break with his old life outright, and to
preach the gospel of Jesus to the Gentiles. Considering the immeasurable
benefits for the race flowing from the Damascus crisis, we have to remark,
paraphrasing Bowne, that, if the experience was sunstroke or epilepsy, we have
before us the most remarkable instance of utilizing a personal affliction for
the good of humanity in all history. Epilepsy which leaves its victim better and
greater after the fits than before differs from epilepsy as we know it. A
peculiarity of Christian mysticism seems to be that the faculties of the mystic
are exalted into an intensity of activity which preserves the identity of the
person but which gives his faculties wider range and keener acuteness. It may be
fine to sink out of a troubled world toward a void, but it is better to rise
above that world to intellectual and spiritual mastery. The Christian mystic
sees sharply and reports clearly. What he sees is worth seeing and worth
telling. His visions bear directly upon moral attitude and moral conduct. In the
narratives concerning Jesus it is not easy for the biblical critic to get hold
of material suggestive of nervous disturbance. A favorite device is to avow that
experiences like the Temptation are self-evideutly mystic visions. Let it be
granted. Is there anything indicative of mental disorder in a crisis that seizes
upon all the essentials of a true method for the spiritual redemption of Israel,
and compresses them in immortal utterance within the compass of a few score
words? Or is it declared that the mind of Jesus was colored by the apocalyptic
of his time? Critics are by no means agreed upon the extent of this coloring,
but let it be granted to the specialist to make the most of his case against
Jesus. Apocalyptic is obviously a form of thinking foreign to our day, but there
is nothing necessarily crazy or mentally unbalanced about it. If we wished an
outstanding illustration of the power of Jesus to deal with popular systems from
the point of view of the ethical, we might find such illustration in the vigor
with which he insisted upon ethical principles as binding for that kingdom of
God toward which Jewish apocalyptic looked. The critics are never weary of
reminding us how little we know of the historical Jesus. What little we do know,
however, is consistent with itself, in the essentials of the portraiture. Every
great character shows a tendency to marshal around it elements like itself, and
thus it happens that a historic movement takes distinctiveness from its central
leader, a distinctiveness often resulting in one-sidedness. Christianity has
revealed through the ages a tendency toward balancing part against part so that
the total movement grows more and more steadily centered. Making all possible
allowance for the fragment of soundness in the claim that a mistake thoroughly
believed in is as potent as a truth, we must be excused for exercising our
will-to-believe that the experiences of Jesus which helped lay the well-balanced
foundations of Christianity were above the normal, rather than off the normal or
below the normal. We shall not, merely because of some expert’s guess, believe
that a balanced system came from an unbalanced founder.

Christian mysticism at its best appears to be that keen awareness of divine
realities which comes out of persistent doing of the divine will it is the
awareness of the practiced soul. Just as training of any faculty brings at last
to that faculty a directness of perception and of execution which seems
altogether mysterious to an uninstructed onlooker, so constant exercise of the
whole life in righteousness brings an awareness of spiritual values, keener than
eyesight, swifter than formal reasoning, and more instantaneous than deliberate
resolution. Obedience leads to spiritual adjustment, and out of the adjustment
arise those moral insights which are the best of Christianity.

We are not quite through with mysticism however. The mystics have perhaps too
often and too readily assumed that what they call the direct gaze upon God, or
direct communion with God, is the essential. If mysticism is communion in
friendship, we may well ask whether communion is at its noblest in such direct
gaze. Does not friendship, as we know it, come to its finest as each party to
the friendship loses himself in a cause to which both are devoted? Which is
better, to look directly at God, or at the objects to which God is devoted? If
we could but learn the object of the divine thought, the sure road to friendship
would necessarily be the contemplation of that object. Now, the Christrevelation
leaves us in no doubt as to the object of divine contemplation and effort,
namely, a race of men, an organized humanity, redeemed into likeness to Christ.
If by some ineffable transport of emotion we could be swept up into a vision of
all things in God, the surest testimony that we had actually been with God would
be that we had not only seen God more clearly, but had seen the object of his
thought and love more clearly. In the friendships which mean most, each party to
the friendship finds the other most completely in losing himself in the purposes
to which that other is giving himself. So that there is a world of significance
for friendship with the Divine in the organic bond which links together in
Jesus* word the second commandment with the first as "like unto the first." In
service for men we attain to the vision of God. We see God by looking in the
direction in which God fixes his gaze. We meet him at the far end of his sweep
of vision.

It is from the importance of what God views for our view of God that we must
build our doctrine of prayer, if we are to accept God as Christlike. Worshipers
frequently declare that the most difficult aspect of the prayer life is
intercession, and yet that aspect fits in most harmoniously to any
interpretation of the Divine as like unto Christ. Using a somewhat geometrical
figure of speech, the expositors of prayer tell us that the closer we come to
God the closer we come to one another, and the converse is usually valid. The
more earnest the prayer on behalf of others the firmer the seizure of divine
values. The more social the prayer the more personal its effects for the praying
soul, for the men prayed for, and for God. The prayer that we find hardest to
comprehend, namely, the intercessory, Jesus took most easily and naturally for
granted. If God is a Father and Friend like unto Christ, the whole conception of
prayer suggests the atmosphere of a family, in which the common aim is to deepen
the spiritual intimacies of the entire group. Intercession as a means of our
getting God to do something for men on our account which he would not do on his
own account, simply fades out in the presence of Jesus. Intercession as the
strengthening in prayer of that family spirit, of that sympathy which should
rule in a family group, may well be among the most potent dynamics in the
universe. Here, again, let us remember that the means on which a Christlike God
relies are spiritual. Such a God does not transform men by making metaphysical
changes in the substance of their souls. He could no doubt wipe out the freedom
of men, but that would not be worthy of God. It may be that praying souls
themselves loosen influences which the Divine Friend can use on the souls of
those prayed for. It has been objected by at least one writer on the attributes
of God, that the generation of this social power through intercessory prayer
would of itself overpower the freedom of men. This is a strange conclusion- to
maintain that when my sympathy for a fellow man becomes so intense that it
prompts prayer for that fellow man, or that when nay interest in another’s
welfare prompts prayer for that welfare, the man prayed for is so helped that he
loses his freedom! To affirm that the Father of the human family cannot send
some blessings upon individuals in the family until what we might call the
family spirit is roused in behalf of those blessings, is simply to say that
social law acts here as elsewhere, but the blessings of the revelation of a
kindly friendliness in which God and men join hardly overpower free will.
Blessings must be freely accepted to be of spiritual avail. No, intercession to
a Christlike God does not call for any overpowering of human freedom. It
provides for the release of that freedom in a social atmosphere in which the
Father and the sons together show forth good will, till that good will becomes
appealing and convincing to the slow or stubborn. Once men have freely come
within the circle of the divine friendship, the powers released upon them may
indeed seem overwhelming, but even here the forces are freely yielded to. It is
as if we surrendered ourselves to a trade wind, or a gulf stream, or to the
aroused public opinion of a vast host.

Throughout my entire discussion it may be that some readers have missed what has
seemed to them the one thing needful in all sound discussion of the friendship
of man with God namely, that solitariness of soul with which each of us must
think of himself as standing before God. Concede all we please to the social in
religion its power in shaping the individual into distinctiveness, its worth as
a field of service of God yet when we concede all this we still have the
individual, worth what he is on his own account as a son of God. We have .agreed
that it is the function of all social organization and organisms to bring out
the distinctiveness of the individual. Must we not by our own argument come at
the end to the admission and avowal that the Christian himself, alone before
God, is the end before all others worthy? Must not this individual good man seek
some virtues wholly on their own account? To take the old reference to the good,
the true, and the beautiful, must not these in their Christian aspects be sought
on their own account? Must not they fill the whole field of the gazer’s view?
The truth in this I am as eager as anyone to exalt. The individual good man is
the end of all worthy moral effort. Does a man become good, however, by taking
his own perfection as the object of his own striving? The critic replies that he
does not mean this, but, rather, that a man becomes good by gazing as directly
as he can upon God, that he develops toward the morally good, true, and
beautiful by directing himself toward these objects themselves. The questioner
becomes a little impatient when we rejoin that the lover of the good, the true,
and the beautiful attains a firmer grasp on all these excellences when he tries
to share them with others. This appears like a quibble, but quibble or not, our
possession of some goods increases in sureness of grasp with every effort to let
others share them. There is a giving that does not impoverish. I may fancy that
I have by myself thoroughly mastered an idea, but I find that my understanding
of the idea increases with my attempts to explain it to another. So true is this
that some pedagogues tell us that we do not ourselves understand an idea till we
can communicate it. As to the life lived in solitude before God, let us not
forget that at the instants when we feel most distinctive and peculiar we are
probably most like other people, that we should understand ourselves better if
we understood other people better, that we could serve other people better if we
let them into our understanding of the deeper phases of experience that seem to
us most personal. This last consideration, by the way, accounts for our interest
in the diaries of others and intimate records of the personal experience of
others than ourselves.

This, however, does not seem to the objector to dig deep enough. The social
effect of inner experience seems to him incidental. All that is left for us to
say is that the contemplation of God as God without regard to the objects of
God’s thought does seem most strange! I do not see how we can escape the idea of
men as members of a family if we are to accept Christ’s teaching about God. All
utterance about the deepening of the personal life by communion with God alone
is worth while, but in the light of the Christ-teaching, even such experiences
are best when they are shared. Those who remind us of the worth of the men who
contemplate the higher values on account of those values themselves end by
suggesting to us that a good life in itself, that is, a life that contemplates
such values, is among the richest of society’s assets. With this we all agree,
but this brings back the social reference. The soundest advice we can give to
some men is to tell them to lose themselves in their work, but in this advice we
have in mind the welfare of other men also. No doubt some moral exhortation
which tells us to think of all men in our work is distracting. We would better
think of the work itself. Thinking of the work, however, is vastly different
from thinking of oneself. Once a fundamental aim of service is adopted, the
worker need not necessarily be always trying to visualize human beings and their
needs. It is more important for his social service to press attention on the
task itself. This is quite other, however, than the search for the delight of an
approach to a value with oneself in mind.

It is time to draw this essay to a close. Much of what I have written may seem
dogmatic and overconfident. May I add, then, in closing, that I have not desired
to exhibit dogmatism and overconfidence as proper ternpers in which to approach
the Divine. If this approach is in that spirit of friendship which, I think, is
all-important, we may discern that a reverence which is not anxious to profess
much about intimacy with God is, deep-down, a requisite for close sympathy with
the Divine Mind. God’s love for men is based on respect for men. On the basis of
the mutual respect of God and men the finest friendship can be built up. The
ministry of silence may mean not only that God speaks to. us in the silences,
but that he speaks to us about matters concerning which we keep silent, allowing
the revelation which comes from God’s speech to work its way out into life. I
have used such strong terms as those in which I have spoken of God as being
under bonds, of his being obligated, and the like, in a fashion likely to
suggest a sterner Deity than the Father of Christ. This has been simply for the
sake of calling attention to the moral aspects. What right calls for, God gladly
does. We should not care to follow a God who held fast to righteousness through
cold duty. Neither should we care for a God who loved us without a zest for
righteousness. In the Christlike God righteousness is so truly love, and love so
truly righteousness, that the two, down in the depths, are one and the same.

It has not seemed necessary in this essay to discuss the "idea of the holy" as
the basis from which all religious experience is by some alleged to take its
start, the holy being conceived of as the "numinous," or that which causes awe,
or dread. The sturdiest advocates of the "numinous" admit that it must be
rationalized and moralized. I may be permitted merely to remark that in genuine
Christianity the feeling of awe before the vaguely "numinous" must be
transformed into respect and reverence for the divine attributes which are
revealed to us from one angle as righteousness, and from another angle as love,
and which are merged together inseparably in the Christ.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 17: 02.00. UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES
========================================================================

THE MENDENHALL LECTURES, THIRD SERIES DELIVERED AT DEPAUW UNIVERSITY
UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES BY FRANCIS J. McCONNELL Bishop of the Methodist
Episcopal Church

CONTENTS

FORWARD

I. PRELIMINARY II. THE BOOK OF LIFE III. THE BOOK OF HUMANITY IV. THE BOOK OF
GOD V. THE BOOK OF CHRIST VI. THE BOOK OF THE CROSS

FOREWORD The Mendenhall Lectures, founded by Rev. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, D.D.,
of the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, are delivered
annually in De Pauw University to the public without any charge for admission.
The object of the donor was "to found a perpetual lectureship on the evidences
of the Divine Origin of Christianity and the inspiration and authority of the
Holy Scriptures. The lecturers must be persons of high and wide repute, of broad
and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere to the evangelical system of Christian
faith. The selection of lecturers may be made from the world of Christian
scholarship, without regard to denominational divisions. Each course of lectures
is to be published in book form by an eminent publishing house and sold at cost
to the faculty and students of the University."

Lectures previously published: 1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes;
1914, The Literary Primacy of the Bible, George Peck Eckman.

GEORGE R. GROSE, President De Pauw University.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 18: 02.01.     PRELIMINARY
========================================================================

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY The problem as to the understanding of the Scriptures is with some
no problem at all. All we have to do is to take the narratives at their face
meaning. The Book is written in plain English, and all that is necessary for its
comprehension is a knowledge of what the words mean. If we have any doubts, we
can consult the dictionary. The plain man ought to have no difficulty in
understanding the Bible.

Nobody can deny the clearness of the English of the Scriptures. Nevertheless,
the plain man does have trouble. How far would the ordinary intelligence have to
read from the first chapter of Genesis before finding itself in difficulties?
There are accounts of events utterly unlike anything which we see happening in
the life around us, events which seem to us to contradict the course of nature’s
procedure. There are points of view foreign to our way of looking at things.
More than that, there seem to be actual contradictions between various portions
of the books. And, above all, the way of life marked out in the Book seems to
lead off toward mystery. To save our lives we have to lose them. All the
precepts of common sense seem set at defiance by some passages of the Book. How
can we explain the hold of such a book on the world’s life? When once the
problem of the understanding of the Scriptures is raised, various solutions are
offered, all of which contribute a measure of help, but most of which do not
greatly get us ahead. For example, we are told that the Book is translated
literature, and that if we could get back to the original narratives in the
original languages, we would find our perplexities vanishing. There is no
question that a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew does aid us in an understanding of
the Scriptures, but this aid commonly extends only to the meaning of particular
words. One who knows enough of Greek or Hebrew to enter sympathetically into the
life of which those languages were the expression is prepared to sense the
scriptural atmosphere better than one who has not such equipment. Very few
Scripture readers, however, are thus qualified to understand Greek and Hebrew.
Very few ministers of the gospel are so trained as to be able to pass upon
shades of meaning of Greek or Hebrew words against the judgment of those who
teach these languages in the schools. With graduation from theological school
most ministers put Hebrew to one side; and many pay no further attention to
Greek. Even a trained biblical student is very careful not to question the
authority of the professional linguistic experts. Apart from sidelights upon the
meaning of this or that passage, there is very little that the biblical student
can get from Greek or Hebrew which is not available in important translations.
We cannot solve the greater difficulties in biblical study by carrying our
investigations back to the study of the original languages as such. The fact is
that emphasis upon the importance of mastery of Greek and Hebrew for an insight
into scriptural meanings rests largely upon a theory of literal inspiration of
the biblical narratives. It requires only a cursory reading to see that the
narratives in English cannot claim to be strictly inerrant, so that the upholder
of inerrancy is driven to the position that the inerrancy is in the documents as
originally written. No doctrine of inerrancy, however, can explain away the
puzzles which confront us, for example, in the accounts of the creation as given
us in the early chapters of Genesis, or throw light upon the possibility of a
soul’s passing from moral death to life.

Great help is promised us by those who maintain that the modern methods of
critical biblical study give us the key to scriptural meanings. There is no
doubt that many doors have been opened by critical methods. Now that the
flurries of misunderstanding which attended the first application of such
methods to biblical study have passed on, we see that some solid results have
been gained. In so far as our difficulties arise from questions of authorship
and date of writing, the critical methods have brought much relief. Even very
orthodox biblicists no longer insist that it is necessary to oppose the teaching
that the first five books of the Bible were written at different times and by
different men. In fact, there is no reason to quarrel with the theory that many
parts of these books are not merely anonymous, but are documents produced by the
united effort of narrators and correlators reaching through generations--the
narratives often being transmitted orally from fathers to sons. There is no
reason for longer arguing against the claim that the book of Isaiah as it stands
in our Scriptures is composed of documents written at widely separated periods.
It is permissible even from the standpoint of orthodoxy to assign a late date to
the book of Daniel. No harm is wrought when we insist that the book of Mark must
have priority in date among the Gospels, and that Matthew and Luke are built in
part from Mark as a foundation. It is not dangerous to face the facts which
cause the prolonged debate over the authorship of the fourth Gospel. It is not
heresy to teach that the dates of the epistles must be rearranged through the
findings of modern scholarship. There is not only no danger in a hospitable
attitude toward modern scholarship, but many difficulties disappear through
adjusting ourselves to present-day methods. If contradictions appear in a
document hitherto considered a unit, the contradictions are at least measurably
done away with when the document is seen to be a composite report from the
points of view of different authors. The critical method has been of immense
value in enforcing upon us that the scriptural books were written each with a
distinctive intention, apart from the purpose to represent the facts in the
method of a newspaper reporter or of a scientific investigator. In a sense many
of the more important scriptural documents were of the nature of pamphlets or
tracts for the times in which they were written. The author was combating a
heresy, or supplementing a previous statement which seemed to him to be
inadequate, or seeking to adjust a religious conception to enlarging demands.
The biblical writers are commentators on or interpreters of the truth which they
conceive to be essential.

Making most generous allowances, however, for the advantages of the critical
methods, we must use them with considerable care. Results like those suggested
above seem to be well established, but there is always possibility of the
critic’s becoming a mere specialist with the purely technical point of view.
Suppose the critic holds so to the passion for analysis that for him analysis
becomes everything. We may then have a single verse cut into three or four
pieces, each assigned to a different author, the authors separated by long
periods. Even if the older narratives are composite, the process of welding or
compression was so thorough that detailed analyses are now out of the question.
Apart from its broader contentions, the method of the critical school must be
used tentatively and without dogmatism. Moreover, we must always remember that
the critical student comes to his task with assumptions which are oftentimes
more potent with him from his very blindness to their existence. Assumption in
scientific investigation is inevitable. Suppose a critic to be markedly under
the influence of some evolutionary hypothesis. Suppose him to believe that the
formula which makes progress a movement from the simple to the complex can be
traced in detail in the advance of society. He is prepared to believe that in
practically every case the simple has preceded the complex. He will forthwith
untangle the biblical narrative to get at the ideal evolutionary arrangement,
ignoring the truth that except in the most general fashion progress cannot thus
be traced. In the actual life of societies the progress, especially of ideas, is
often from the complex to the simple. Many evolutionists maintain that movement
is now forward, now backward, now diagonal, and now by a "short cut"; but if the
evolutionary critic sticks closely to his preconceived formula about progress as
always from the simple to the complex, he can lead us astray. Again, almost all
great prophetic announcements are ahead of their time. They seem out of place at
the date of their first utterance--interruptions, interjections hard to fit into
an orderly historic scheme. Or suppose the critic to be a student of the
scientific school which will not allow for the play of any forces excepting as
they openly reveal themselves, the school that will not allow for backgrounds of
thought or for atmospheres which surround conceptions. Such a student is very
apt to maintain, for example, that Paul knew only so much of the life of Jesus
as he mentions in the epistles. Such a student cannot assume that Paul ever took
anything for granted. We can see at once that a method so professedly exact as
this may be dangerously out of touch with the human processes of the life of
individuals and of societies. Or suppose still further that the biblical student
holds a set of scientific assumptions which are extremely naturalistic; that is
to say, suppose that he assumes that nothing has ever happened which in any way
departs from the natural order. We have only to remind ourselves that the
natural order of a particular time is the order as that time conceives it; but
it is manifestly hazardous to limit events in the world of matter to the
scientific conceptions of any one day. To take a single illustration, the
radical student of the life of Jesus of a generation ago cast out forthwith from
the Gospel accounts everything which suggested the miraculous. The conceptions
of the order of nature which obtained a generation ago did not allow even for
works of healing of the sort recorded in the Gospels. At the present time
radical biblical criticism makes considerable allowance for such works.
Discovery of the power of mental suggestion and of the influence of mind over
body has opened the door to the return of some of the wonders wrought by Jesus
to a place among historic facts. This does not mean that the radical student is
any more friendly to miracles than before. We are not here raising the question
of miracles as such, but we do insist that an assumption as to what the natural
order may or may not allow can be fraught with peril in the hands of critical
students of the Scriptures. We say again that while, in general, the larger
contentions of the biblical school can be looked upon as established beyond
reasonable doubt; and while, in general, the methods of the school are
productive of good, yet, because of the part that assumption plays in the
fashioning of all critical tools, the assumptions must be scrutinized with all
possible care. A good practical rule is to read widely from the critics, to
accept what they generally agree upon, to hold very loosely anything that seems
"striking" or "brilliant." This is a field in which originality must be
discounted. There is so little check upon the imagination.

It is but a step from the consideration of the critical methods in biblical
study to that of the historical methods in the broader sense. Many students who
are out of patience with the more narrowly critical processes maintain that the
broader historical methods are of vast value in biblical discussion. Here,
again, we must admit the large measure of justice in the claim. We can see at
once that the same reservations must be made as in the case of the critical
methods. The assumptions play a determining part. If we are on our guard against
any tricks that assumptions may play, we can eagerly expect the historical
methods to aid us greatly.

We have come to see that any revelation to be really a revelation must speak in
the language of a particular time. But speaking in the language of a particular
time implies at the outset very decided limitations. The prophets who arise to
proclaim any kind of truth must clothe their ideas in the thought terms of a
particular day and can accomplish their aims only as they succeed in leading the
spiritual life of their day onward and upward. Such a prophet will accommodate
himself to the mental and moral and religious limitations of the time in which
he speaks. Only thus can he get a start. It is inevitable, then, that along with
the higher truth of his message there will appear the marks of the limitations
of the mold in which the message is cast. The prophet must take what materials
he finds at hand, and with these materials direct the people to something higher
and better. Furthermore, in the successive stages through which the idea grows
we must expect to find it affected by all the important factors which in any
degree determine its unfolding. The first stage in understanding the Scriptures
is to learn what a writer intended to say, what he meant for the people of his
day. To do this we must rely upon the methods which we use in any historical
investigation. The Christian student of the Scriptures believes that the Bible
contains eternal truths for all time, truths which are above time in their
spiritual values. Even so, however, the truth must first be written for a
particular time and that time the period in which the prophet lived. When the
Christian speaks of the Scriptures as containing a revelation for all time, he
refers to their essential spiritual value. The best way to make that essential
spiritual value effective for the after times is to sink it deep into the
consciousness of a particular time. This gives it leverage, or focus for the
outworking of its forces. No matter how limited the conceptions in which the
spiritual richness first took form, those conceptions can be understood by the
students who look back through the ages, while the spiritual value itself shines
out with perennial freshness. Paradoxical as it may sound, the truths which are
of most value for all time are those which first get themselves most thoroughly
into the thought and feeling of some one particular time. Let us look at the
opening chapters of Genesis for illustration. The historical student points out
to us that the science of the first chapters of Genesis is not peculiar to the
Hebrew people, that substantially similar views of the stages through which
creation moved are to be found in the literatures of surrounding peoples. A
well-known type of student would therefore seek at one stroke to bring the first
chapters of Genesis down to the level of the scriptures of the neighbors of the
Hebrews. He would then discount all these narratives alike by reference to
modern astronomy, geology, and biology. But the difference between the Hebrew
account and the other accounts lies in this, that in the Hebrew statement the
science of a particular time is made the vehicle of eternally superb moral and
spiritual conceptions concerning man and concerning man’s relation to the Power
that brought him into being. The worth of these conceptions even in that early
statement few of us would be inclined to question. Assuming that any man or set
of men became in the old days alive to the value of such religious ideas, how
could they speak them forth except in the language of their own day? They had to
speak in their own tongue, and speaking in that tongue they had to use the
thought terms expressed by that tongue. They accepted the science of their day
as true, and they utilized that science for the sake of bodying forth the moral
and spiritual insights to which they had attained. The inadequacy of early
Hebrew science and its likeness to Babylonian and Chaldean science do not
invalidate the worth of the spiritual conceptions of Genesis. This ought to be
apparent even to the proverbial wayfaring man. The loftiest spiritual utterances
are often clad in the poorest scientific draperies. Who would dare deny the
worth of the great moral insights of Dante? And who, on the other hand, would
insist upon the lasting value of the science in which his deep penetrations are
uttered? And so with Milton. Dr. W. F. Warren has shown the nature of the
material universe as pictured in Milton’s "Paradise Lost." In passing from
heaven to hell one would descend from an upper to a lower region of a sphere,
passing through openings at the centers of other concentric spheres on the way
down. Nothing more foreign to modern science can be imagined; yet we do not cast
aside "Paradise Lost" because of the crudity of its view of the physical system.

Assuming that the biblical prophets were to have any effect whatever, in what
language could they speak except that of their own time? Their position was very
similar to that of the modern preacher who uses present-day ideas of the
physical universe as instruments to proclaim moral and spiritual values. Nobody
can claim that modern scientific theories are ultimate, and nobody can deny, on
the other hand, that vast good is done in the utilization of these conceptions
for high religious purposes. A minister once sought in a sermon on the marvels
of man’s constitution to enforce his conceptions by speaking of the
instantaneousness with which a message flashed to the brain through the nervous
system is heeded and acted upon. He said that the touch of red-hot iron upon a
finger-tip makes a disturbance which is instantly reported to the brain for
action. A scientific hearer was infinitely disgusted. He said that all such
disturbances are acted upon in the spinal cord. He could see no value,
therefore, even in the main point of the minister’s sermon because of the
minister’s mistaken conception of nervous processes. I suppose very few of us
know whether this scientific objection was well taken or not. Very few of us,
however, would reject the entire sermon because of an erroneous illustration;
and yet sometimes all the essentials of the Scriptures are discounted because of
flaws no more consequential than that suggested in this illustration. The
Scriptures aim to declare a certain idea of God, a certain idea of man, and a
certain idea of the relations between God and man. Those ideas are clothed in
the garments of successive ages. The change in the fashions and adequacy of the
garments does not make worthless the living truth which the garments clothe.
Jesus himself lived deeply in his own time and spoke his own language and worked
through the thought terms which were part of the life of his time. Some biblical
readers have been greatly disturbed in recent years by the discovery of the part
which so-called apocalyptic thought-forms play in the teaching of Jesus. The
fact is that these conceptions were the commonest element in all later Jewish
thinking. Jesus could not have lived when he did without making apocalyptic
terms the vehicle for his doctrines. We have come to see that the manner of the
coming of the kingdom of Jesus is not so important as the character of that
kingdom. Not only must a prophet speak in the language of a definite time, but
he must speak to men as he finds them. This being so, we must expect that
revelations will in a sense be accommodated to the apprehension of the day of
their utterance. The minds of men are in constant movement. If the prophet were
to have before him minds altogether at a standstill, he might well despair of
accomplishing great results by his message. He would be forced to think of the
intelligence of this day as a sort of vessel which he could fill with so much
and no more. But whether the prophets have through the ages had any theoretic
understanding of human intelligence as an organism or not, they have acted upon
the assumption that they were dealing with such organisms. So they have
conceived of their truth as a seed cast into the ground, passing through
successive stages. Jesus himself spoke of the kingdom of God as moving out of
the stage of the blade into that of the ear and finally into that of the full
corn in the ear. This illustration is our warrant for insisting that in the
enforcing of truth all manner of factors come into play and that the truth
passes through successive epochs, some of which may seem to later believers very
unpromising and unworthy. The test of the worth of an idea is not so much any
opinion as to the unseemliness of the stages through which it has passed as it
is the value of the idea when once it has come to ripeness. The test of the
grain is its final value for food. The scriptural truths are to be judged by no
other test than that of their worth for life. In the light of the teaching of
Jesus himself there is no reason why we should shrink from stating that the
revelation of biblical truth is influenced by even the moral limitations of men.
Jesus said that an important revelation to man was halted at an imperfect stage
because of the hardness of men’s hearts. The Mosaic law of divorce was looked
upon by Jesus as inadequate. The law represented the best that could be done
with hardened hearts. The author of the Practice of Christianity, a book
published anonymously some years ago, has shown conclusively how the hardness of
men’s hearts limits any sort of moral and spiritual revelation. It will be
remembered that William James in discussing the openness of minds to truth
divided men into the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." James was not
thinking of moral distinctions: he was merely emphasizing the fact that
tough-minded men require a different order of intellectual approach than do the
tender-minded. If we put into tough-mindedness the element of moral hardness and
unresponsiveness which the prophet must meet, we can see how such an element
would condition and limit the prophet.

Again, Jesus said to his disciples that he had many things to say to them, but
that they could not bear them at the time at which he spoke. Some revelations
must wait for moral strength on the part of the people to whom they are to come.
Suppose, for example, in this year of our Lord 1917, some scientist should
discover a method of touching off explosives from a great distance by wireless
telegraphy without the need of a specially prepared receiver at the end where
the explosion is desired. Suppose it were possible for him simply to press a
button and blow up all the ships of the British Navy, or all the stores of
munitions in Germany. What would be the first duty of such an inventor? Very
likely it would be his immediate duty to keep the secret closely locked in his
own mind. If such a discovery were made known to European combatants in their
present temper, it is a question what would he left on earth at the end of the
next twenty-four hours. With European minds in their present moral and spiritual
plight it would not be safe to trust them with any such revelation. And this
illustration has significance for more than the physical order of revelation.
There are principles for individual and social conduct that may well be put into
effect one hundred years from now. Men are not now morally fit to receive some
revelations. All of which means that any revealing movement is a progressive
movement in that it depends upon not merely the utterances of the revealing
mind, but upon the response of the receiving mind. In the play back and forth
between giver and receiver all sorts of factors come into power. The study of
the interplay of these factors is entirely worthy as an object of Christian
research. We may well be thankful for any advance thus far made in such study
and we may look for greater advances in the future. For example, the historic
students thus far have put in most of their effort laying stress upon
similarities between the biblical conceptions and the conceptions of the peoples
outside the current of biblical revelation. The work has been of great value.
Nevertheless it would seem to be about time for larger emphasis on the
differences between the biblical revelations and the conceptions outside.

Still when all is said the mastery of historical methods of study is but
preliminary to the real understanding of the Scriptures. If we come close to the
revealing movement itself, we find that before we get far into the stream there
must be sympathetic responsiveness to biblical teaching. The difficulties in
understanding the Scriptures are, as of old, not so much of the intellect as
they are of conscience and will-- the difficulties, in a word, that arise from
the hardness of men’s hearts.


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  CHAPTER 19: 02.02.     THE BOOK OF LIFE
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CHAPTER II THE BOOK OF LIFE The approaches to an understanding of the Scriptures
which we suggested in the first chapter are those which have to do merely with
intellectual investigation. Any student with normal intelligence can appreciate
the methods and results of the critical scrutiny of the biblical documents, but
will require something more for an adequate mastery of the scriptural
revelations. There is need of sympathetic realization that the Book itself did
not in any large degree come out of the exercise of the merely intellectual
faculties. In the scriptural revelation we are dealing with a current of life
which flowed for centuries through the minds of masses of people. To be sure of
insight into the meanings of this revelation there must be an approach to the
Bible as a Book of Life in the sense that its teachings came out of life and
that they were perennially used to play back into life. Its hold on life to-day
can be explained only by the fact that it was thus born out of life, and has its
chief significance for the experiences of actual life.

Even the most superficial perusal of the Scriptures shows that they came of
practical contact with men and things. There is comparatively little in the
entire content of our Sacred Book to suggest the speculations of abstract
philosophy. The writers deal with the concrete. They tell of men and of peoples
who had to face facts and who achieved comprehensions and convictions through
grappling with facts. There is about the Scriptures what some one has called a
sort of "out-of-doors-ness." There is very little hint of withdrawal from the
push and pressure of daily living. If the prophets ever withdrew to solitude,
they did not retire to closets, but rather to deserts or to mountains. We must
not allow our modern familiarity with bookmaking as an affair of library
research and tranquil meditation in seclusion to mislead us into thinking that
the Christian Bible was wrought out in similar fashion. The Book is full of the
tingle and even the roar of the life out of which it was born. Jesus gathered up
in a single sentence the process by which the scriptural revelation can be
apprehended by man when he said, "He that doeth the will shall know of the
truth." The entire scriptural unfolding is one vast commentary on this utterance
of Jesus.

It is impossible for us in this series of studies to attempt any detailed survey
of the revealing movement of which our Scriptures are the outcome. It is
important, however, that we should see clearly that the revelation came to those
who opened themselves to the light in an obedient spirit. While it is not in
accord with our modern knowledge of psychology to assort and divide human
activities too sharply, it is nevertheless permissible to insist that the
biblical revelation was in a sense primarily to the will. As Frederick W.
Robertson used to say, obedience is the organ of spiritual knowledge. The first
men to whom illuminations came evidently received these gifts out of some purity
of intention and moral excellence. These early leaders gathered others around
them and set them on the path of determined striving toward a definite goal. As
the idea of the seer or the prophet found general acceptance it gradually
hardened into law, law meant for scrupulous observance. If a singer felt stirred
to write a psalm, he voiced his experiences or his aspirations in the midst of a
throbbing world. If a statesman drew a wide survey of God’s dealings with the
nations of the earth, he did so at some mighty crisis in Israel’s relations to
Egypt or Assyria or Babylon. When we reach New Testament times we find that even
the Gospels seem to have been books struck out of immediate practical urgencies
rather than composed tranquilly with a scholar’s interest merely in doing a fine
piece of professional work. The early Christians were anxious to hold the
believers to the strait and narrow way. To do this they repeated often the words
of the Lord Jesus. When, however, the older members of the first circles began
to fall away, the words were written down, not because some scholar felt moved
thus to improve his leisure, but because it was absolutely necessary to preserve
the words. Moreover, conflicts were arising between the growing church and the
forces of the world round about. Some scriptures were written to supply
instruments with which to carry on the warfare. Always the fundamental aim was
to keep the people acting according to the teachings which lay at the heart of
the Christian system. The object of the biblical revelation was from the
beginning just what it is to-day in the hands of Christian believers--the object
of using the Scriptures as an instrument for practicing the Christian spirit
into all the phases of life.

We would by no means deny that there are imposing philosophies or, rather, hints
toward such philosophies, in the Scriptures, but we insist that these did not
come out of a purely philosophizing temper. They came as men tried to put into
some form or order the understandings at which they had arrived as they wrestled
with the tough facts of a world which they were trying to subject to the rule of
their religion. As we have said in the previous chapter, the Scriptures bear
scars of all such conflicts. The revelation was knocked into its shape in the
rough-and-tumble of an attempt to convert the world. And this is not to claim
for the Bible any difference in method of creation from that which obtains in
the shaping of any vitally effective piece of literature. The world-shaking
conceptions have always been won in profound experience. This chapter is not
written with the principles of the modern school of pragmatism as a guide, and
yet pragmatism can be so stated as to phrase an essentially Christian doctrine
that spiritual ideas result from spiritual practices and are of worth as they
prove themselves aids in further experience. Take some of the expressions of
Paul. The fundamental fact in Paul’s experience was his vision on the Damascus
road and his determination to be obedient to that vision. To make his own view
of the Christian religion attractive to those whom he was trying to win, it
became necessary for him to speak in terms of the Judaism of his time. In fact,
he could not have spoken in any other terms, though some of his reasonings seem
to us to be remote from actual life. But when he left argument and came back to
experience he was most effective. His terribly compelling utterances are those
which were born of driving necessity. The theology started with the vision and
unfolded in obedience to the vision, "What wilt thou have me to do?" Everywhere
upon Paul’s epistles there are the marks of practical compulsion. A letter was
dispatched to convince stubborn Jews in Galatia or to persuade questioning
Gentiles in Rome. Some of the profoundest phrasings of Pauline belief were
uttered first as appeals for generous collections to starving saints. The
example of Paul as a receiver and giver of spiritual light is very significant.
Even if we should make the largest allowances to the biblical critics who would
cut down the number of epistles known to be genuinely Pauline, we would have
enough left to make on our minds the impression of enormous personal activity.
One passage does, indeed, tell us of a period of months of withdrawal for
reflection in Arabia. For the most part, however, Paul’s life was spent in
ceaselessly going to and fro throughout the Roman empire; even in the days of
imprisonment he seems to have been burdened with the administration of churches.
It was out of such multifarious activities that the theology of Paul was born,
and therein lies its value. No interpretation is likely to bring the separate
deliverances into anything like formal, logical consistency. Very likely Paul
was of a markedly logical frame of mind, but he did not attempt to rid his
message of contradictions in detail. The unity and consistency are found in the
fundamental life purpose to get men to accept Jesus Christ as the Chosen of God.
If Paul had ever heard that much of his theology might be out-dated with the
passage of the years, he would probably have responded that he was perfectly
willing that the instrument should be cast aside if it had served its spiritual
purpose of bringing men to obedience to the law of God.

It is not intended to make this a book of sermons or exhortations. We must say,
however, that in a series of studies on how to understand the Scriptures stress
must be laid upon the maxim that the Scriptures can be understood only by those
who seek to recognize and obey the spirit of life breathing from the Scriptures.
Nothing could be more hopeless than to attempt to get to the heart of Christian
truth without attempting to build that truth into life. The formal reasonings of
the theologian are no doubt of value, but they throw little light upon the
essentials of Christianity except as they deal with data which have been
supplied by Christian experience. It would, indeed, be well for any study of the
Bible to begin with a recognition of the part played by distinctly scholarly
research. We cannot go far, however, until we recognize that sympathy with
Christian truth is necessary before we can come upon vital knowledge. And this,
after all, is but the way we learn to understand any piece of life-literature. A
vast amount of material is at hand in the form of commentaries upon the work of
Shakespeare. We know much about the circumstances under which the plays of
Shakespeare were written; we know somewhat of the sources from which Shakespeare
drew his historical materials; we are familiar with the chronology of the plays;
but all this is knowledge about Shakespeare. To know Shakespeare there must be
something of a deliberate attempt to surrender sympathetically to the
Shakespearean point of view. We get "inside of" any classic work of literature
only by this spirit of surrender. The aim of Shakespeare is simply to picture
life as he sees it, but even to appreciate the picture men must enter into
sympathy with the painter. The Scriptures aim not merely to paint life, but to
quicken and reproduce life. How much more, then, is needed a surrender of the
will before there can be adequate appreciation of the Scriptures? If the
Scriptures are the results primarily of will-activities, how can they finally be
mastered except by minds quickened by doing the will revealed in the Scriptures?
The book of Christianity must be interpreted by the disciples of Christianity.
Judged merely by bookish standards, there is no satisfactory explanation of the
power of the Bible. But lift the whole problem out of the realm of books as
such! The glimpses into any high truth that are worth while--how do they come?
They come out of experience. Even when they are repeated from one mind to
another they become the property of that second mind only as they reproduce
themselves in experience. Otherwise the whole transaction is of words, words,
words. The Scriptures have to do with deeds, not words.

All this is offensive to the dogmatic reasoner. For him the intellect as such is
the organ of religious truth. He insists on speaking of the Scriptures in
formally theological terms. That the Scripture writers employed theological
terms there can be no doubt, but they did not speak as systematic theologians.
And always they brought their theology to the test of actual life. The writer of
these lines once knew a student who had read enough of psychology to enable him
to reason himself into a belief that he was the only person in existence; that
is to say, he declared that he himself was the only one of whose existence he
was infallibly certain. Does not all knowledge of an external world come as a
report through a sensation aroused by stimulus? If the appropriate stimulus
could be kept up an external world might fall away and I would still think it
was there. The bell might ring at the door and might be nobody there. And so on
and on, through steps familiar enough to the student of philosophy. When a
friend made a quick appeal to life with the question: "If you are the only one
alive, why do you bring your troubles to me?" the amateur philosopher came to
earth with a sense of jar. But the jar is no greater than that when we pass from
the plane of dogmatic theology to that of reading the Scriptures for their own
sake. The old scholastics said that in God there are three substances, one
essence, and two processions. How does this sound as compared with the statement
of Jesus that he and his Father are one, and that he would send the Comforter?
This is not to decry theology; but is nevertheless to discriminate between
theology and scripture.

Some one will object, however, that the scriptural truths take their start in
large part from the visions of mystics--of men who brood long and patiently
until they behold realities not otherwise discernible. Some students will urge
upon us that such mystic revelations are granted peculiarly to the mystic
temperament as such, and they often come regardless of the quality of life that
the seers themselves may be living.

There have, indeed, been in all ages of the world temperaments of supernormal or
abnormal responsiveness to influences which seem to make little or no impression
upon the ordinary mind. In all periods natures of this type have been looked
upon as organs of religious revelation. So valuable have abnormal experiences
seemed that all manner of expedients have been utilized to beget unusual mental
states. A certain tribe of Indians, for example, in the southwest of our country
are accustomed at set times to send their religious leaders into the desert to
find and partake of a peculiar plant which has an opiate or narcotic effect. In
the belief of the Indians this plant opens the door to visions. The visions, as
reported by those who have recovered from the influence of the narcotic, are not
of any considerable value. Similar attempts have been made by hypnotic
experimenters among other peoples, the hypnosis sometimes being self-induced.
From some Old Testament passages especially we may well believe that this sort
of extraordinary mental condition was sought for in the so-called schools of the
prophets in the olden days of Israel. The astonishing peculiarity about the
Scriptures, however, is not that there is so much reliance on this trance
experience as that there is so little. The Hebrew Scriptures were the expression
of a people living in the midst of heathen surroundings; and heathenism always
has laid stress upon the virtue of these abnormal experiences. Granting all
allowances for mental states induced by eating an opiate, or by whirling like
the dervish, or by fasting like the Hindu, the fact remains that in the main,
the visions of the writers of our Scriptures came out of attempts to realize in
conduct the moral will of God. When we think of the surroundings even of the
early church; when we reflect upon the force of suggestion for uncritical minds;
when we consider the sway of superstition at all periods during the Hebrew
revealing movement, the wonder is that the Scriptures lay such stress as they do
upon the type of vision which arises from faithfulness in doing the revealed
will.

If we may characterize scriptural mysticism, it seems very much akin to mental
abilities which we meet frequently in our ordinary intercourse. Take, for
example, the prescience of a skilled business man. Nothing is more inadequate
than the rules for success laid down by many a man who has himself succeeded in
business. Mastery of his rules will not help another to win business success.
The reason is that there comes out of prolonged business practice a keen sense
of what is likely to happen in the industrial or financial world. The sharpened
wits foresee without being able to assign reasons or grounds for the prophecies.
So it is with intellects trained to any superior skill. The Duke of Wellington
once remarked that he had spent all his life wondering what was on the other
side of the hills in front of him, yet the Duke himself came to marvelous skill
in guessing what was on the other side. There is also a variety of scientific
mysticism, if such an expression may be permitted. The man long trained to the
reading of scientific processes develops a quick insight which runs far ahead of
reason or proof. The transcendent scientific discoveries have been glimpsed or,
rather, sensed before they so reported themselves that they could be seized by
formal proof. Now it is a far cry from business men, generals, and scientists to
the mysticism of the Scriptures, but when we see the emphasis which the
Scriptures place upon constancy in keeping the law and in acting according to
divine commandments, we cannot help feeling that biblical mysticism was and is
an awareness developed as the life becomes practiced to the doing of religious
duty. Think too of the emphasis placed in the Scriptures upon the consecration
of the whole life to the truth as cleansing the heart from evil. All this makes
for a power to seize truth beyond that possible to formal and systematic reason.
Mysticism of this sort is the very height of spiritual power. The Master’s word:
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," does not refer to
merely negative virtue. It means also the power of soul accumulated in the
positive doing of good. It means entrance into the life of quick spiritual
awareness through the adjustment of the whole nature to the single moral
purpose. In all promise of revelation the Scriptures insist upon the importance
of keeping upon the basis of solid obedience. The finer the instrument is to be,
the more massive must be the foundation. Professor Hocking, of Harvard
University, has used a remarkable illustration to enforce this very conception.
The scientific instrument, he says, which must be kept freest from distracting
influences so that it may make the finest registries must rest upon a foundation
broad and deep. So the soul that is to catch the finest stirrings of the divine
must rest upon the solidest stones of hard work for the moral purposes of the
scriptural Kingdom.

Still some one will insist that the Bible is a book built around great crises in
human experience; that it is a record of these crises; that the people in whose
history the crises occurred were a peculiar people, apparently arbitrarily
chosen as a medium for religious world-instruction; that the crises cast sudden
bursts of intense light upon the meaning of human life, but that they themselves
are far apart from ordinary experience. Here, again, we must insist that the
scriptural stress is always upon obedience to what is conceived of as revealed
truth. We have already said that Jesus regarded revelation as organic. In
everything organic we find instances of quick crisis following long and slow
periods of growth. The crisis or the climax of the sudden flowering-out would
never be possible were it not for the antecedent growth. The Hebrew nation,
developed through workaday righteousness, manifested wonderful power in sudden
crises. The inner forces of moral purpose which at times seemed hidden or dead
because of the riot of wickedness suddenly blossomed forth in mighty bursts of
prophecy; but the all-essential was the long-continued practice of righteousness
which made possible the sudden crisis; and this is in keeping with the teachings
of most commonplace human experience. The daily struggle prepares for the sharp,
quick strain or for the swift unfolding of a new moral purpose. There is nothing
more arbitrary in the crises in the scriptural movement than in the ordinary
ongoings of our lives. The student who has long been wrestling with a problem
finds the solution instantaneously bursting upon him in the midst of untoward
circumstances. The most insignificant trifle may finally turn the lock which
opens to the glorious revelation after prolonged brooding. The daily practice
may make men ready for the shock which leaps upon them altogether unexpected.

We summarize by saying that the essentials of biblical truth came in progressive
revelations to men who were putting forth their energies to live up to the
largest ideals they could reach; and that they sought these larger ideals for
use in their lives. It must be understood in all that we have said about acting
the revelation out into life that we do not mean merely the more matter-of-fact
activities. It should be noticed that whenever men speak of will-activities they
are apt to give the impression that they mean some putting forth of bodily
energy. The will to do scriptural righteousness did not manifest itself merely
in outside actions. It manifested itself just as thoroughly in bearings and
attitudes of the inner spirit; and the appeal was always to the will to hold
itself fast in the direction of the highest life, whatever the form of the
activity.

After this emphasis upon obedience as the organ of spiritual knowledge some one
may ask what provision we are making for infallibility and for inspiration. We
can only say that we are dealing with a Book which has come out of concrete
life, and that in concrete life not much consideration is given to abstract
infallibility. In daily experience the righteous soul becomes increasingly sure
of itself. To return for the moment to Paul, we may think of the certainty with
which he grasped the thought of the reward which would be his. The time of his
departure, or, of his unmooring, was at hand. He was perfectly confident that he
was to go on longer voyages of spiritual discovery and exploration. Can we say
that this splendid outburst came from devotion to an abstract formula? Did it
not, rather, spring from the sources of life within him-sources opened and
developed by the experiences through which he passed? The biblical heroes
wrought and suffered through living confidence in the forces which were bearing
them on and up. They would have answered questions about abstract infallibility
with emphatic avowals as to the firmness of their own belief. In other words,
they could have relied upon their life itself as its own best witness to itself.
They felt alive and ready to go whithersoever life might lead. And so with
inspiration. It is the merest commonplace to repeat that the inspiration of the
Scriptures must show itself in their power to inspire those who partake of their
life. Does a fresh moral and spiritual air blow through them? Is there in them
anything that men can breathe? Anything upon which men can build themselves into
moral strength? This is the final test of inspiration. Physical breathing is in
itself a mystery, but we know when the air invigorates us. Abstract doctrine of
inspiration apart from life and experience is a very stifling affair compared
with inspiration conceived of as a breath of life. The scriptural doctrine is
that the man who does the will finds himself able to breathe more deeply of the
truth of God; and that the very breath itself will satisfy him, and by
satisfying him convince him that it is the breath of life.

There is an old story of a student who decided to learn the meaning of a strange
religion which was taught and practiced by priests in a far-away corner of
India. The student thought to disguise himself, to go close to the doors of the
temple and to listen there for what he might overhear of the principles taught
by the priests. One day he was detected and captured by the priests and made
their slave. He was set to work performing to the utmost the duties for which
the temple called. His response was at first rebellious. In the long years that
followed the spell of the strange religion was cast upon him. He began to learn
not as an outsider, not as one merely studying writings and rituals, but as one
enthralled by the system itself. In this old story, inadequate as it is, we have
a suggestion of the way in which the biblical revelation lays its spell upon
man. The outside study is, indeed, worth much, but the true understanding comes
inside the temple to him who carries forward the work of the temple.


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  CHAPTER 20: 02.03.     THE BOOK OF HUMANITY
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CHAPTER III THE BOOK OF HUMANITY

We have seen that the understanding of the Scriptures presupposes at least a
sympathy with the rule of life contained in the Scriptures, and implies for its
largest results a practical surrender to that rule of life. He that doeth the
will revealed in the Scriptures cometh to a knowledge of the truth revealed in
the Scriptures. We must next note that an understanding of the Bible cannot
advance far until it realizes the emphasis on the human values set before us in
the scriptural books. We are to approach the distinctively religious teachings
of the Bible somewhat later. It is now in order to call attention to the truth
that the biblical movement is throughout the ages in the direction of increasing
regard for the distinctively human. The human ideal is not so much absolutely
stated as imposed in laws, in prophecies, in the policies of statesmen, in the
types of ideal erected on high before the chosen people as worthy of supreme
regard. And the place of the human ideal in the Bible helps determine the place
of the Bible in human life. Mankind makes much of the Book because the Book
makes much of mankind.

There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the Hebrews. One
characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a very early date--the
regard for human life as such and the aim to make human existence increasingly
worth while. It is a common quality of primitive religions that they are apt to
lay stress on merely ceremonial cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone
through for the sake of pleasing a deity. There are abundant indications of this
same purpose in the ceremonies of the early Hebrews, but there is even more
abundant indication that the ceremonies were aimed at a good result for the
worshiper himself. It is impossible to read through the Mosaic requirements
concerning bodily cleanliness, the sanitary arrangements of the camps, the
regulations for cooking the food, and the instructions for dealing with disease
without feeling that there is a wide difference between such requirements and
merely formal ceremonials. The Mosaic sanitary law aimed at the good of the
people. It sought to make men clean and decent and human. So it was also in many
of the rules governing the daily work, the regulations as to the use of land,
the prohibitions of usury, the relations of servants and masters--all these had
back of them the driving force of an enlarging human ideal. The trend was away
from everything unhuman and inhuman. It is not necessary for us to remark upon
the outbursts of the prophets against those who would put property interests
above human interests. It is a matter of commonplace that the call of the
prophets was for larger devotion to a genuinely human ideal: that the fires of
their wrath burned most fiercely against old-time monopolists who joined land to
land till there was "no place," and against old-time corrupters of the law who
sold the needy for a pair of shoes. Not only did the emphasis on the human ideal
show in laws, but in the training up of types of life which should in themselves
embody and illustrate the conceptions of the biblical leaders. At the heart of
the Christian religion is incarnation, or divine revelation through the human
organism. We are told that this incarnation came in the fullness of time. The
passage seems to refer not merely to the rounding out of historic periods, but
also to the fashioning of an ideal of human character, and at least a partial
realization of that ideal in Hebrew heroes. If the final ideal was to stand
incarnate before men, there must be approximations to that ideal before the
crowning incarnation could be appreciated. We look upon the character of Jesus
as the complete embodiment of human excellencies. Such a revelation, however,
would have been futile if there had not previously been glimpses of and
anticipations of the ideal in the lives of those who were forerunners of Jesus.
The Scriptures teach, or at least imply, that the life of a good man is in
itself a transcendent value. And yet it is perfectly clear that while the
Scriptures exalt the individual, they do not mean to wall individuals off in
impenetrable circles by themselves. It is true that the individual is the end
toward which the scriptural redemption and glorification aims, but individuals
find their own best selves not in isolation but in union with their fellows--a
union of mutual cooperation and service, a union so close that the persons thus
related come to be looked upon as a veritable Body of Christ, making together by
their impact upon the world the same sort of revelation that the living Christ
made in the days of his early life. The ideals as to the supremacy of human
values are realized, according to the Scriptures, not in any separateness of
individual existence, but in a closeness of social interdependence. So true is
this that it is hardly possible to see how one can make much of the scriptural
movement without immersing himself in the stream of human life with highest
regard for the values of that life.

It has been insisted from the beginning that the Christian consciousness is the
only adequate interpretation of the Scriptures. By Christian consciousness is
meant not the consciousness of the body of believers who are together trying to
serve Christ. The interpretation of the individual becomes final only as it is
accepted by the mass of the believers. Something of worth-while thought is
conceived of as going out from the life of every believer. The utterance of the
seer is not conceived of as complete until even he who sits in the seat of the
unlearned has said "Amen." The pronouncements which do not evoke this wide human
response fall by the wayside. For example, how was the canon of the New
Testament shaped? Was there a determination on the part of individual leaders
that such and such books should be included in the volume of Scriptures? Very
likely there was at the last such deliberate selection, but before the final
decision there must have been the practice of the congregations which amounted
in the end to the choice or rejection of sacred books. Very likely the New
Testament Scriptures were collected by a process of trying out the reading of
Epistles and Gospels and exhortations before the congregations. As passages met
or failed to meet the human needs, there was call for the repeated reading of
some works and no call for the rereading of others. In use some documents proved
their sacredness and other documents fell aside into disuse. Before the
concluding deliberate choice was this selection in use by the believers
themselves; and the selection turned round the question as to whether or not the
documents helped people. If each member of the body of believers is entitled to
interpret biblical literature, interpretation becomes a composite and
diversified activity. There is little warrant in the Scriptures for the notion
that the biblical revelation is to level men to any sort of sameness. There are
diversities of endowments and varieties of expression; but the united judgment
of the body of believers is the supreme authority in interpreting the scriptural
revelation. This is what we mean by saying that the church is to interpret the
Scriptures. We mean that no matter how brilliant or interesting the utterances
of any individual may be, they are not of great value until they have received
in some fashion the sanction of the main mass of believers. It is the function
of the spokesmen of the church to gather up into distinct expression what may
have been vaguely, but nevertheless really, in the thought or half-thought of
the people. Gladstone once said that it is the business of the orator to send
back upon his audience in showers what comes up to him from the audience in mist
or clouds; so it is with the voice of a biblical truth through any medium of
interpretation. The spokesman compresses or condenses into speech what has been
dimly in the consciousness of the people. Even in days less democratic than ours
this was abundantly true. It is the fashion to denounce some of the councils of
the old church which shaped the creeds. It is often said that these creedal
councils were moved by considerations of low-grade expediency. The councils,
however, knew what the people were thinking of, and managed to get the popular
thought into expression measurably satisfactory to the people themselves. In
this doctrine of the church as interpreter of scriptural truth we can be sure
that the emphasis will remain on the elements which make for enlarging human
life if the church keeps true to the spirit of the Bible itself. The aspirations
of humanity, the longings of masses of men, find utterance in the great popular
spiritual demands all the more effectively because such demands override and
nullify the insistence of an individualistic point of view which might easily
become selfish. We have said that this democratic interpretation is final so
long as it keeps itself in line with the biblical purpose. There are some
dangers, however, against which we must be on our guard. First is the danger of
identifying the church with those who actually belong to an organization. When
we think of the church we have in mind not merely formal organizations, but all
men who are really working in the spirit of the biblical ideals. There are many
persons who really act according to the biblical revelation without technically
uniting with a church. It may be that such persons do not accept the
intellectual puttings of biblical doctrine, but that they nevertheless live in
the spirit of that doctrine. It might be conceivably possible that a church
organization would stand for an interpretation of truth which would be rejected
by the general good sense of a larger community. In such a case the larger
community would be the interpreter. Another danger in an interpreting body is
that of traditionalism. The native conservatism of many minds stands against
innovation. If, however, the innovation is in the direction of enlarging human
life, it will in the end win its way. A third danger is that of
institutionalism, where the organization as such becomes an end in itself
without regard to the human interests involved. The Master’s fiercest
condemnations were for those who put any institution before the fulfillment of
the human ideals. In the parable of the good Samaritan it is noteworthy that it
was the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side. It is hard to
resist the feeling that the Master implied that the priest and Levite had been
institutionalized into a lack of humanity. Making allowance now for all these
dangers against which believers must guard, the chances are that interpretation
of a book so human as the Scriptures is not final until it has received the
real, though not necessarily formal, sanction of the body of believers. So
thoroughly does the biblical revelation turn around the supremacy of the
distinctively human values that we must insist that anything which would run
counter to these values is alien to the spirit of the revelation, and,
therefore, to comprehension of that revelation. We do not wish to be extreme,
but it is hard to see how, in our day, for example, any who fail to put human
rights in the first place can really master the scriptural revelation. We have
spoken of the Master’s rebukes of any form of institutionalism which stands in
the way of human rights. Institutions at best are instruments; they exist merely
for the purpose of bringing men to larger life; but these institutions sometimes
get petrified into custom and become glorified by long practice, and even made
sacred by adherents who look upon them as ends in themselves. Then there is no
recourse except to break the institutions in the name of larger human life. If
we could put ourselves back in the times of Jesus and feel something of the
sacredness with which the Jews regarded the Sabbath, we would know the
tremendous force of the Master’s daring when he declared that the Sabbath was
made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Master was also insistent upon the
priority of human rights as over against property rights. It is perfectly true
that Jesus did not encourage any propaganda for social reform. It is a mistake
to try to read any form of modern Socialism into his teaching. Socialism is the
theory of a particular time. Many of its outstanding features will no doubt one
day be adopted; and the world will then move forward toward something else. Very
likely three centuries from the present date the well-advanced communities of
the world will be living under systems which will make Socialism itself look
like the most hopeless and reactionary conservatism. The scriptural revelation,
however, has not to do with the details of any particular scheme. It aims,
rather, at the setting on high of the human ideal, an ideal which will, if given
a chance, work itself out into the concrete forms best suited to each age, and
which will not have exhausted its vitality when all that is good in the programs
of our particular day shall have been incorporated into social practice. But let
us linger for a moment around the blighting effect of placing property rights in
front of human rights. If anyone at this juncture becomes nervous and insists
that we are likely to introduce the new-fangled notions of the present day into
a discussion where they are out of place, let us remind such a one that the
danger of putting the material before the spiritual has always been the chief
stumbling stone in the path of the biblical revelation. It may be too much to
say with the old version that the love of money is the root of all evil, but the
Scriptures place the sin of greed in the forefront among the evils that block
the revealing process. Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." With God
a morally miraculous redemption is entirely possible; but Jesus declares that
there is no need of our trying to minimize the power of the present world to
blind us to visions of the spiritual world. For many forms of wrongdoing the
Master had a willingness to make allowances; for the sin of placing material
desires above human welfare he had unsparing condemnation. In the day of Jesus
the world had an opportunity such as it never had before confronted to learn
spiritual truth. What manner of opposition was it which prevented that truth
from running its full course? Largely the opposition of money interests. The
Pharisees had need to keep alliance with the temporal powers. It is not without
significance that Jesus was betrayed for money. It is not without significance
too that Jesus’s picture of the Judgment Scene concerns itself largely with the
rewards for those who discharge the tasks of simple human kindness. It means
much to find Jesus hinting at an unpardonable sin on the part of those who call
deeds of human relief works of Beelzebub. It is certainly food for reflection
that the fiercest condemnations in his parables are for those who miss the human
duties in their regard for the possessions of this world. We repeat that we
would not be extreme, but when we see the disregard of human life in modern
industrialism; when we behold the attempts of property interests to get control
of all channels for the shaping of public opinion; when we see rent, interest,
and dividends more highly rated than men, women, and children, we cannot help
feeling that the deeper penetration into the Scriptures cannot arrive except
through an emphasis upon fundamental human rights so mighty that all
institutional creations of industrialism or ecclesiasticism shall be put into
the secondary place and strictly kept there. This is not railing against wealth.
It is simply calling attention to the fact that the man who possesses the
wealth-tool cannot be allowed to use it or even to brandish it in such fashion
as to endanger the unfolding of human ideals. It is only through the enforcing
of these ideals that the Scriptures can be adequately apprehended. Until a
social kingdom of God comes on earth the light of revelation cannot shine in its
full brightness. Any social preacher of larger human rights is working for the
dawn of a new day of biblical understanding.

Some one will ask, however, why we single out one type of evil as especially
thwarting the understanding of a biblical revelation. Why not speak of the evils
of appetite and of envy and jealousy? The answer is that such evils, devastating
as they are toward the spiritual faculties, are so definitely personalized in
individuals that their nature is quickly recognized. The difference is that
under present organization the evils of materialism are preeminently social.
There is everywhere the heartiest condemnation for the man who personally is
conspicuously greedy. A social evil can manifest itself in outstanding
startlingness in a single person, but the plain fact is that under modern
industrial organization we are all caught in the same snare. We are all tarred
with the same stick. Great as is the improvement of our present system over
anything that has preceded it, nevertheless the distribution of this world’s
goods is so unequal that we walk in the presence of injustice on every hand. The
poor man often does not receive the product of his own work. Large material
prizes go to men who toil not. Now no one in particular is to blame for this
social plight. Nobody has yet arisen to show us the way out. We cannot act
except as we all act together; and it is doubtful even if one nation could act
alone. If, however, we should all recognize the evils of the present system, if
we should condemn the wrongs of that system instead of trying to justify them,
we would be on much better spiritual ground, for the attempts to justify the
system lead to uneasy consciences, and to the searing of those consciences, and
to the softening down of harsh truths, and finally to an inability to see things
as they are. Though we have come far along the path toward industrial justice,
there is still very much in the system under which we live that makes for an
inability to understand some of the most elementary phrasings of Christian
truth. The only way out is to see the system as it is and to take such steps
forward as can be taken now. Only thus can we keep our souls saved, and only
thus also can we follow the flashes from above.

Jesus preached the highest ideal for individual righteousness. Men are to strive
to be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. But the perfection is to
show itself in social impartiality in the use of material opportunities. God
sendeth the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the evil and the good. How many
Christians of the present day could be safely intrusted with the distribution of
rainfall and sunshine? Those of us who dwell in lands that must be irrigated
know that the type of Christianity that can be trusted to deal fairly with our
irrigation system is somewhat unusual.

We take the injustices of the present social order too much as a matter of
course. We ought to see them as making against humanity, and therefore against
the scriptural revelation. When these injustices culminate in a war like the
present, the only safety is thought that deals honestly with the inhumanity of
the war. Granted that war in self-defense is justifiable, we keep ourselves open
to divine revelations only as we refuse to glorify the inhuman. Only that nation
can succeed in war and remain open to revelation from above which recognizes the
inhumanity of war and refuses to glorify it.

Closely related to the blight of the spirit of this present world is the failure
to perceive the need of missionary spirit for a full grasp of scriptural truth.
Though the Bible was given to a peculiar people, self-centered and exclusive, it
nevertheless abounds in suggestions that its content can be appreciated the full
only by those whose sympathies run out to men at the very ends of the earth. In
the eyes of the Scriptures a human being is a human being anywhere. The
differences between men are as nothing compared to the likenesses. Every
revelation must begin somewhere and must attack its problems in proper sequence,
one after the other; but mere priority of approach does not mean that one
problem is inherently more important than another. Leaders among the Jews early
tried to impress this upon the Jewish mind. Considered in its historical
setting, the book of Jonah is one of the most spiritually daring books ever
written. Jonah stands as a type of Jew who would not admit anything of worth in
human beings outside of Judaism. Rather than carry the word of the Lord to
Nineveh he would leave his country and go to Tarshish; rather than turn back and
resume the journey to Nineveh, he would consent to be cast overboard in a storm.
Forced at last to deliver his message, he announced it with the grim
satisfaction of expecting to see Nineveh destroyed. And the final text of the
book is that Jonah must learn not merely to proclaim his message to the
Ninevites, but to proclaim his message with sympathy and genuine human interest.
The Jews were a long time learning the lesson, but not longer than other peoples
have been. Just because of the human interest involved, the missionary impulse
is necessary to a spiritual seizure of the biblical revelation.

It is important that we keep the missionary motive on the right basis. It is
true that the Scriptures will never be adequately appropriated until all
kindreds and peoples and tongues bring their contributions. Some phases of the
truth the Oriental mind must seize before the Occidental mind can be brought to
appreciate them. When the final revelation comes it will be adapted to the
understanding of any kindred under heaven. It is worth while to spread the
Christian revelation for the sake of the return which the Christianized peoples
will one day bring to our studies of the truth. But the better motive is deeper
than this--the passion for human beings as human beings. Any human being is
entitled to any truth which another human being can reveal to him. The approach
must be the human approach. We must speedily get away from the Jonah-like
conceptions of the biblical revelation as intended particularly for any one
nation. One great danger from the present war is the loss by the religious
nations involved of the ordinary New Testament point of view. Many of the
fighting nations have lapsed back into the pre-Jonah era. But the present war
aside, the thought of supreme truth as intended chiefly for a particular race or
nation, leads to a patronizing, condescending bearing toward other peoples which
thwarts the finer spiritual achievements. The contacts between the so-called
higher and so-called lower nations in military, diplomatic, and commercial
relations have thus far for the most part been abominable. Too often missionary
effort itself has based itself on these same assumptions of racial superiority.
A people may indeed receive blessings from the Scriptures in whatever spirit
they are bestowed, but damage is wrought in the souls of the bestowers by the
attitude of superiority. The only genuinely biblical approach is one of
respect--respect for the peoples as peoples, respect which will have regard for
their growing independence in spiritual development, respect which will not
force upon them particularistic interpretations of the universal Scriptures.

Now, all of this may seem like a long distance from a treatment of understanding
of the Scriptures in the ordinary sense. It would not have been worth while,
however, to discuss this problem merely from the point of view of exegesis or
professional commentary. The essentials about the Scriptures are their relations
to life, their views of human beings and teachings concerning the forces of the
spiritual kingdom. We shall proceed in the other chapters to speak of God, of
the revelation of God in Christ, and of the spirit of Christ as revealed in his
cross. Before we enter upon that study we must again remind ourselves that only
life in harmony with the point of view of the Scriptures and only an interest in
the same human problems that engross the attention of spiritual writers can
avail us for vital interpretation of the teachings concerning the Divine, or
make intelligible to us the hold of the Scriptures on the life of the world. The
Bible is conceived in a spirit of respect for men. Only those who enter into
that same spirit can hope to make much of the biblical revelation.


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  CHAPTER 21: 02.04.     THE BOOK OF GOD
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CHAPTER IV THE BOOK OF GOD

We have remarked upon some points of view from which the student must start in
order to reach a sound understanding of the Scriptures. It is time for us to ask
ourselves, however, as to the dominant notes of the Scriptures which make the
Book so dynamic. The purpose of this chapter is to show that the essentials of
the Book are, after all, its teachings about God. The Bible is the Book of God.
Due chiefly to the ideas about God are its uniqueness and its force.

Before advancing to the consideration of the Bible as a book about God it will
be well for us to glance for a moment at other grounds on which supremacy for
the Scriptures is sometimes claimed. There are those who maintain that the value
of the Bible lies in the wealth of information which it gives us concerning the
first days of the world’s life. The Bible helps us to regard sympathetically the
view of the universe by the ancient Hebrews. It is a repository of knowledge as
to early science and philosophy. Now, all this is true, but relatively
unimportant. Had it not been for the religious teachings of which the old-time
view of the world was the vehicle, that vehicle itself would long since have
been forgotten. Only archaeologists are to-day greatly interested in ancient
theories of the world as such.

There are, again, those who avow that the Bible deserves all praise because of
the literary excellence of its style. There are, indeed, sublime passages to be
forever cherished as entitled by their very sublimity of expression to permanent
place in the world’s literature. All this we most gladly admit. Oratory like
that of the book of Isaiah, some of the sentences of the patriarchs, passages
from the Psalms or from the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the thirteenth
chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, are sure of permanency in
literature no matter what may be anyone’s opinion of their religious content.
Nobility of conception is very apt to tend toward nobility of phrase. The
expression may be admired for its own apart from the substance; but to say that
the Bible holds its throne as the Book of books simply because of the
superiority of its artistic form is woefully aside from the mark. Lamentable as
it may be, masses of men do not rank artistic literary skill as highly as they
ought. While a lofty idea is not likely to make its full impression until
wrought into lofty beauty by a master of style, the worth must nevertheless
inhere in the substance rather than in the form if the statement is to make
lasting effect upon the passing generations. Moreover, it is very easy to
overemphasize the literary excellence of the Scriptures. There are scores of
passages which, as we say, "go through one," but this marvelous effectiveness is
quite as likely to belodged in the idea itself and in the associations which
that idea arouses as in the form of the passage. In some instances the literary
mold in the Authorized Version is such as to hinder rather than to help; so that
the prophet who seeks to add to the force of the idea breaks the mold for
literary recasting.

Still another may declare that the Scriptures are valuable because they abound
in hints which make for practical success--shrewd moral maxims which aid all
classes of men in avoiding pitfalls, axioms for daily conduct which ought to be
accepted by everybody, even by those who care not for the religion of the Bible.
All this, again, is true, but hardly sufficient to explain the grip of the Bible
on mankind. So far as the more conventional morality goes, men are likely to be
ruled by the sentiment of the community in which they move. They adapt
themselves to the demands of the situation at a particular time rather than to a
set of precepts.

Still others maintain that the human ideal itself which we sketched in a
previous chapter is the determining factor in giving the Bible power. The
greatest study of mankind is man. The erection of such an ideal as that of the
Scriptures for man cannot fail to secure for the Book mighty power through all
the ages. And yet it must be replied that if we take the Bible merely as
portraying a human ideal without reference to the idea of God involved in the
same process of revelation, we cut asunder two things which properly belong
together. We must not forget that in the history of Israel the prophets grasped
at every new insight concerning human character as at the same time a new
insight concerning the character of God. Attributing a profoundly moral trait to
God made it of more consequence forthwith for man, and thus the conceptions of
man and God went along together reenforcing each the other. To separate the
ideal of God from the ideal of man leaves everything at loose ends for the human
ideal. It is true that there are individuals here and there of intense
intelligence and of immense wealth of moral endowment who do not seem to require
any ideal of God to sustain and strengthen their ideal of man; but for the most
of us the ideal of man cannot grow to any considerable size without growth of
our notion as to the character of God. What man is now depends somewhat on our
thought of where man came from, and what his place in the universe essentially
is. One of our deepest yearnings is to know whether our exalted belief about man
has any validity before the larger ranges of the activity of the universe
itself. It is very common, for example, for those who go forth to social tasks
with a passion for humanity to lose that passion if they do not keep alive a
passion for God. Disappointment with some phases of human nature itself and
despair over the failures of men are apt to be so trying that the passion for
humanity dies down unless familiarity with actual human life is reenforced by
communion with an ideal which reaches up toward the Divine. We would ourselves
insist that the loftiest human ideal in all literature is that of the
Scriptures, but we must insist also that this ideal lacks driving force if it
does not keep back of it the biblical doctrine of God. From the very outset the
Hebrew Scriptures deal with God. "In the beginning God," at the end God, and God
at every step of the journey from the beginning to the end. There are other
scriptures besides the Hebrew Scriptures that deal with God, but the kind of God
set before us in the Hebrew revelation gives the Bible its supreme merit.

Since we often hear that there are other sources for the idea of God than the
Scriptures, it may be well for us to appraise the contributions from some of
those sources before we look at the kind of God drawn for us in the biblical
writings. After allowing as high excellence as is possible to the theologies
obtained outside the Scriptures, the moral and spiritual superiority of the
scriptural ideal shines forth unmistakably.

Many a scientist tells us that we do not further need the biblical idea of God
in view of the vast suggestions concerning the Divine which science places
before us. The world in which we live has broadened immeasurably since the days
of the Hebrew prophets and seers. The idea of God, broadening to correspond, has
to expand so overwhelmingly that we ought no longer pay heed to the imaginations
of the biblical writers. Large numbers of scientists to-day avow themselves
devout theists. Materialism is decidedly out of fashion, and agnosticism is less
in vogue than a decade or two ago. The reverent scientist affirms that he
believes in a God whose omniscience keeps track of every particle of matter in a
universe whose spaces are measured by billions of miles, a God whose
omnipresence implies the interlacing of forces whose sweep and fineness seen
through the telescope and microscope astonish us. Moreover, the modern doctrine
of evolution shows us that the entire material system is moving on and up from
lower to higher forms. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be," but we shall
clearly be something great and glorious.

Now, far be it from us to belittle the splendor of this scientific vision.
Modern scientific searchers are, indeed, finding innumerable illustrations of
the greatness of God. There is every reason why the scientific investigator
should rejoice in a calling which enables him to think God’s thoughts after him;
but when a scientist will have it that his belief in God arises only from his
technical investigations, we must declare our suspicion that he is employing his
findings to confirm a faith already held, though that faith may be part of his
unconscious spiritual possessions. Many times the scientist is determined that
the scientific discoveries shall look in theistic directions just to satisfy the
imperious though unconscious demands of his own soul. Some scientists are
theists just because they are bound to be so, for the close contemplation of the
entire situation in the material realm does not make for any adequate theistic
verdict. It is hard indeed to believe that the nice adjustments of matter and
force occur without the governance of a supervising intelligence. There are too
many facts which suggest skill to make it easy to believe that the natural world
is just the outcome of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Science itself very
likely establishes a presumption in favor of a governing mind, _but the deeper
question is as to the character of that mind_. Is it a moral mind? At this point
the hopeful evolutionist will break out that the progress is so definitely from
lower to higher that no one ought to doubt the benevolence of the Power moving
upward through all things. Evolution is, indeed, full of promises to one who
already trusts in the goodness of God; but the progress from lower to higher is
not always unmistakable. Often the survival of the fittest is just a survival of
those fittest to survive, and not the survival of those who ought to survive.
There are too many things which survive which ought to be killed off. Simple
good can give way to complex evil without at all violating the requirements of
the evolutionistic formula. But even if we concede all that the scientist claims
for his conception of God; if we grant that terms like "omnipresence" and
"omniscience" and "progress" clothe themselves with new force in the Copernican
and Newtonian and Darwinian terminology, we must nevertheless insist that none
of this rises to the moral height of the biblical teaching. Nor are we willing
to admit that the biblical doctrine is to be discounted because it grew up amid
small theories of the material universe. The old Hebrew views of the physical
system, outdated as they are now, are nevertheless full of sublimity on their
own account. But even if they were infinitesimal as compared with the vast
stretches of modern scientific measurements, the moral grandeur of the idea of
God of which they were the framework stands forth unmistakably. We must not
permit the quantitative bigness of modern scientific notions to obscure the
qualitative fineness of the biblical ideal of God. Modern philosophy comes also
and announces that it has a better God than that of the Scriptures. The most
imposing modern philosophical systems are those which proclaim some form of
idealism. The gist of the idealistic argument always is that the world itself is
nothing apart from thought; that thought-relationships rule in and through all
things; that there are no things-in-themselves; that there can be no
hard-and-fast stuff standing apart from God. Things must come within the range
of thought or go out of existence. There is no alternative. Now, thought implies
a thinker, and this implication carries us at once to God. Here, again, we have
no desire to question the cogency of the argument. We are ready to admit that
this is the strongest theistic argument that has thus far been built. To be
sure, there are some questions that inevitably suggest themselves: What is the
thinker? Is it impersonal thought, as some have maintained? Is it just the sum
of all forms of consciousness--our consciousnesses being organs or phases of the
Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker strictly personal, carrying on a
thought-world by the power of his will and calling into existence finite
thinkers in his own image? Assuming that the world is the expression of the
thought of a Personal Thinker who acts in the forces of nature and creates men
in his own image, the further question arises as to the character of that
Thinker. While returning the heartiest thanks to the idealist for his
argument--full as it is of aid for the Christian system--we have to protest that
the argument does not lift us to the full height of the ideal of God inculcated
in the Scriptures. And if this is true of the majestic systems of idealism, how
much more is it true of the other and less convincing systems which are just now
having their day! We have already spoken of pragmatism as possessing validity as
a method, but pragmatism can hardly cherish pretension of being itself a system
of religious philosophy.

Some very strenuous searchers after divine treasures have professed to discover
value in various non-Christian religions. They have patiently studied the great
Indian world-views, for example, which are admittedly the most important
religious creations outside of Christianity. These students come back to us with
fragments of doctrines, gems of ethical wisdom, traces of sublimity from the
Indian sacred books. It would be foolhardy not to receive any genuine treasures,
no matter what the mine from which they have been quarried. We are all eager to
admit the immeasurable possibilities of the Oriental type of thinking for the
development of Christianity, but Oriental systems thus far have been chiefly
significant as indicating what stupendous religious powers can do when they are
off the track. The Indian systems of religion have run loose in India. As a
result, nowhere in the world has religion been taken more seriously and more
sincerely than by the Indian peoples. It is simply impossible to bring the
charge against the Indian races that they have not made the most of their
religion. The final indictment to be passed upon the Indian systems is that
while the Indian peoples have made the most of those systems, the systems have
made least of the Indian peoples; and this because of the defects in the
conception of the Divine itself. It is doubtful whether the Indian could call
his highest gods personal. If he declares them personal, he can hardly make them
moral in the full sense; that is to say, in the sense of exerting their force on
the world in favor of justice and righteousness and love.

Now, it is just in the quality of moral force that the God of the Scriptures
shows his superiority. The entire revealing process can be looked upon as one
long story of the moralization of the idea of God. Let it be granted that the
biblical idea was at the beginning marked by the naive and the crude.
Personally, we have never been able to see the pertinency of the reasonings
which make the Hebrew Jehovah as imperfect as some students would have us
believe. Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument we will admit limitations in
the early Hebrew conception of God. Even with such concession, however, the
outstanding characteristics of that God were from the beginning moral. Suppose
that Jehovah was at the beginning just a tribal Deity. The difference between
Jehovah and other tribal deities was that the commandments which were conceived
of as coming from him looked in the direction of increasing moral life for the
people, and these moral demands upon the chosen people were conceived of as
arising out of the nature of Jehovah himself. To be sure, the early narratives
employ expressions like "the jealousy of God," but even a slightly sympathetic
reading of the Scriptures indicates that the jealousy was directed against
whatever would harm human life. In the mighty pictures of the patriarchs the
heroes speak to their God as if the same moral obligations rested upon God as
upon themselves. There is nothing finer in the Old Testament than Abraham’s
challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

We are not specially interested in the growth of the ideas as to the power of
God, though we repeat that it is difficult for us to believe that the early
Hebrews thought of their Deity as so narrowly limited in power as some modern
students seek to prove. The conception of the might of Jehovah grew through the
centuries and followed upon the extension of the knowledge of the Hebrews about
the world in which they lived. If tomorrow morning some revolutionary
astronomical discovery should convince us that the solar system is much vaster
than we have ever imagined, the theist would, of course, extend the thought of
the sway of God to all that solar system. If there were some method of becoming
aware that the bodies of the entire astronomical system are millions of times
more numerous than scientists ever have dreamed, the theist would, of course,
maintain that the righteous purpose of his God reaches to all of these bodies.
The growth of the Hebrew idea was somewhat parallel to this. Even when the
Hebrew thought of the outside peoples as having gods of their own; he believed
that as soon as his God came into conflict with the other gods, he would shatter
them with his might. By the time the first chapters of Genesis were written the
Hebrew conceived of God as creator of all things, and thereafter the growth of
the belief in the power of God kept pace with the enlarging view of the world.

We repeat that we are not much concerned with the growth of the idea of the
power of God. We are, however, interested in the manifest teaching or direct
implication of the Scriptures that from the beginning the Hebrews thought of God
as under obligation to use his power for moral ends. What the moral ends were
depended upon the growth of the moral ideal. At the very beginning it was
believed that since God had chosen the people of Israel to be his people, he
must fight their battles for them. It is from this point of view that we must
deal with the early idea of God as a God of battles. God was wielding his force
for a moral purpose. Moreover, if God had chosen a people to be the channel
through which he was to reveal himself to the world, he must be very patient
with that people. How sublime is the Old Testament belief in the patience of God
toward Israel! To use the phrase of our later days, God accommodated himself to
the progress which the people could make. When the prophets called upon the
people to walk with God, they implied a willingness on God’s part to walk with
the people. If they must lengthen their stride, he must shorten his; he must
bear with them in their inadequate notions; he must judge their efforts by the
direction in which they were tending rather than by any achievement in itself.

It is from the point of view of their growing apprehension of God as moral that
we can best understand the ferocity of the Israelite toward the so-called
heathen peoples. The boasting of the Israelites over the slaughter of outsiders
must be understood from the faith in the moral destiny which the prophets
conceived the God of Israel to hold in store for his people. The reason assigned
for cruelties and warfares upon heathen peoples was the abominations practiced
by those peoples. Of course it is possible for a student obsessed with the
modern doctrine of the economic determinism of history to say that we have in
the story of the Hebrew development just the play of economic forces with moral
aims assigned as their formal justification. Assuming that the narratives of the
conquest of Canaan are true, what the Hebrews desired--these economists tell
us--was the milk and the honey. They made their so-called advance in obedience
to God an excuse for taking possession of the milk and the honey. Now, he would
be blind indeed who would deny that economic values do play their part in wars
of conquest; he would be foolish who would deny that wars always do justify
themselves by appealing to lofty religious motives, but nevertheless the impact
of the Hebrew history upon the life of the world has been a moral impact, due to
the belief of the Hebrews that they were instruments in the hands of a moral
God. If we could behold the abominations in heathenism upon which the old
prophets looked, we would sympathize quite readily with an impulse which might
seem to call for outright destruction. A friend of mine, a man of the most
sensitive Christian feeling, once stood on the banks of the Ganges and watched
people by the hundreds and thousands going through religious ceremonials, some
of which were defiling and others silly. In the midst of the reeking vileness of
one scene in particular he said that he felt for the moment an impulse like that
of the old prophets to cry out for the destruction of the entire mass. The
situation seemed so dreadful and so hopeless! All this passed in an instant to
the loftier feeling of compassion, but the stirring of the more primitive
impulse was really moral in its foundation. In any case, the old Hebrew notion
was of a God who would put a growing moral ideal in the first place.

It is not necessary for us to attempt to trace the steps of the growth of the
moral ideal for God. As we have said, that ideal kept pace with the growth of
the ideal for man. We must call attention, however, to the fact that the growth
of the ideal was in the direction of increasing emphasis upon the
responsibilities that go with power. The Hebrew may not have definitely phrased
the responsibility, but he nevertheless shows his increasing realization of the
obligations resting upon God. When we reach the later prophets we discern that
his moral obligation upon God himself becomes more and more a determining
factor. There appear glimpses of belief that God must not only fight for his
people, but that he must suffer in their sufferings. It is of little consequence
for our present purpose whether the suffering servant of Jehovah of the later
Israelitish Scriptures is a group of persons or an individual. The implication
is that the suffering is a revelation of Jehovah himself. Moreover, there
appears a widening stream of emphasis on the tenderness of God’s care for his
people. The Hebrew writers comparatively early broke away from the thought of
God as merely philanthropically inclined toward Israel. They did not think of
him as bestowing gifts which were without cost to himself. They show him as
deeply involved in the life of the nation and as caring for his people with an
infinite compassion. This enlarging revelation was made clear to the people
through the utterances of prophets, the decrees of lawgivers, the songs of
psalmists, the interpretations of historians, and the warnings of statesmen.
Slowly and surely, moreover, the people attained grasp on the doctrine that the
greatest revelation of God is the revelation in human character itself. They
began to look forward to the coming of one who would in himself embody the
noblest and best in the divine life, who would gather up in himself all the
ideals and purposes toward which the law and the prophets had looked. New
Testament revelation as such we leave to the later chapters, but we have come
far enough, we think, to warrant us in saying that only he can understand the
Scriptures who sees that the chief fact about the Scriptures is the emphasis on
the moral nature of God. Other Scriptures besides that of the Hebrews--we might
say scientific, philosophical, extra-Christian Scriptures--have stood for the
existence of God; but none have stood for the existence of such a God as the God
of the Bible. The salient feature of the Bible is its thought of God.


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  CHAPTER 22: 02.05.     THE BOOK OF CHRIST
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CHAPTER V THE BOOK OF CHRIST

It is of course the merest commonplace to say that the revelation of God in the
Scriptures comes to its climax in Christ. The revelation in Christ gathers up
all that is loftiest in the utterances of the Old Testament and gives it
embodiment in a human life. It is legitimate to declare that there is little
either in the teaching of Christ or in his character that is not at least
foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The uniqueness of the Christ revelation
consists in the manner in which the separate streams of truth of the law and the
prophets and the seers and the poets are merged together in the Christ teaching,
and in the fine balance with which the ideal characteristics seen from afar by
the saints of the older day were realized in the living Christ. We might justly
say that a devout reader of the Old Testament could find rich elements of the
Christ revelation even if he should never see a page of the New Testament. The
virtue of the New Testament, however, is that all the elements revealed
throughout the course of the historic periods of Israel’s career are bound
together in the life and character of Christ. It is no mere epigram to say that
if the greatest fact about the Scriptures is God, the greatest fact about God is
Christ. Any thorough study of the Scriptures must revolve around Christ as its
center. If the Scriptures mean anything, they mean that in Christ we see God. Of
course it is open to the skeptic to reply that in all this the Scriptures are
completely mistaken; but he cannot maintain that this is not what the Scriptures
mean. The Book comes to its climax with an honest conviction that Christ is the
consummate revelation of God. The day when men could charge any sort of
manipulation of the material by Scripture writers for unworthy doctrinal
purposes is past. We have in another connection said that each of the New
Testament books was, indeed, written with a definite aim, but this does not mean
that facts and teachings were twisted out of their legitimate significance. That
Christ is the supreme gift of God to men is so thoroughly built into the
biblical revelation that there is no digging that idea out without wrecking the
entire revelation itself. To maintain anything else would be to do violence to
the entire scriptural teaching. The burden of the entire New Testament is that
God is like Christ. This may seem to some to be a reversal of present-day
approach to the study of the Christ. We may appear to be attacking the problem
from the divine angle rather than from the human. Why not ask what Christ was
rather than what God is? It is indeed far from our purpose to minimize the rich
significance of the humanity of Jesus, but we are trying now to get the
scriptural focus. We do not believe that we can secure that focus by looking
upon the character of Christ as a merely human ideal. The might of the
scriptural emphasis is that Christ is the revelation of God. We are well aware
that ordinary theological debate has centered on the question as to the extent
to which Christ is like God. The Bible is colored with the belief that God is
like Christ. This may seem at first glimpse to be a very fine discrimination,
but the importance of that discrimination appears when we reflect that mankind
is more eager to learn the character of God than to learn how far a man can
climb toward divinity. In all such discussions as this we proceed at peril of
being misunderstood, but we must repeatedly affirm that important as is the
problem as to the human ideal set forth in Christ, the divine ideal set forth in
him is more significant as explaining the hold of the Bible on men. Is it not
sufficient for us to behold a lofty human ideal in the portrait of Christ
without such emphasis on this ideal as also a revelation of the divine
character? The answer depends upon what we are most interested in. If we care
most for a perfect and symmetrical human life, we reply that we find that
perfection and symmetry in Christ. In our second chapter we laid such stress
upon the importance of the enlarging human ideal that we have committed
ourselves to the importance of the Christ ideal as a revelation of the
possibilities of human life. But if we take that ideal in itself without any
reference to the character of God, how much enlargement does it bring us? As
members of the human race we can indeed be proud that a human being has climbed
to such moral stature as did Jesus, but what promise does that give that any
other human being can attain to his stature? As a member of the human race I can
be profoundly thankful for a philosopher like Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate
myself to the study of the Kantian philosophy with some hope of mastering it. I
can seek to reproduce in my life all the conditions that surrounded the life of
the great metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make myself a Kant. Strive as I
may, such transformation is out of the question. I may attain great merit by my
struggle, but I cannot make myself a Kant. The more intensely I might struggle,
the more convinced I would become of the futility of my quest, and the genius of
the philosopher might tower up at the end as itself a grim mockery of my
ambition. So it is with the Christ if he is not a revelation of the God life at
the same time that he is an idealization of the human life. Viewed as a
revelation of God’s character the Christ life is the hope of all the ages.
Viewed only as a masterpiece of human life it might well be the despair of
mankind. Of course there are those who believe that it is impossible for Christ
to be a revelation of the human without also being a revelation of the Divine.
We have no desire to quarrel with this position, though we find it more
optimistic than convincing. Incredible as it may seem at first thought, the
universe might theoretically be regarded as a system ruled over by a Deity who
had brought forth a character like that of Christ just for the sake of seeing
what he could achieve in the way of a masterpiece, without being himself
fundamentally involved in self-revelation. Christ might conceivably be a sort of
poetic dream of the Almighty rather than a laying bare of the Almighty’s own
life. We find that human authors by an effort of great imagination fashion
creations in a sense completely different from themselves. It might be
theoretically urged that the character of Christ is different from the character
of God. If this seems very far-fetched, let us remind ourselves then that there
are those in the present world who conceive of Christ as the very highest peak
of human existence and yet deny that he has any sort of significance as a
revelation of the forces back of the world. Such thinkers maintain that Christ
is the best the race has to show, and yet affirm that the race is but an
insignificant item in the total massiveness of the universe. The Bible
establishes the faith of men against skepticism like this by making the
Christ-ideal for God himself so attractive and appealing.

There are those who proclaim that we do not need any revelations of God to make
then human ideal fully significant--the human ideal stands by itself. Some such
thinkers go consistently the full length of saying that they are willing to keep
their eyes open to the hopelessness of the universe. They can see nothing beyond
this life but total oblivion. Nevertheless, with their eyes open they will fight
on manfully to the end and take the final leap into the dark without flinching.
They are very apt to add that their philosophy is the only unselfish one; that
the desire of men for any sort of help from conceptions about the Divine is
selfishness where it is not sentimentalism. It is fair to say that such
doctrines seldom meet large response. The reason is not that men selfishly seek
out a God for the sake of material reward that may come to them, but that they
seek him for the sake of finding a resting place for their minds and souls, for
the sake of cherishing an end which seems in itself worth while, for the sake of
laying hold on a universe in which they can feel at home. If this is
selfishness, then the activities of the human soul in its highest ranges are
selfish. If it is selfish to long for a universe in which the heart can trust,
it is selfish also to enjoy the self-satisfaction with which some of these
thinkers profess to be ready to take their leap into the night. As we scan the
history of Christianity since the day of the Founder we are impressed that
religious organizations as such which arise within Christianity tend to survive
in proportion as they make central the significance of Christ as the revealer of
the character of God. We would not for a moment underestimate the importance of
those groups of Christians who take Christ merely as a prophet who lived the
noblest life and exalted his truth by the noblest death. Many such believers
manifest the very purest devotion to Christ. They are his disciples. But the
historic fact is that organizations founded on such doctrines alone do not win
sweeping triumphs. On their own statement the most they hope to do is to spread
the leaven of their doctrine into the thinking of other groups of Christians.
Their service in this respect is not to be disparaged, for at all times the more
orthodox opinion of Christ, so called, needs the leavening of emphasis on the
humanity of Christ. But after all these allowances it is just to affirm that
theology which sees only the human in Christ does not come to vast power, and
that clearly because the world is chiefly interested in the question with which
the entire biblical revealing movement deals, namely, what is the nature of God?
With that question answered we can best understand the nature of man and the
possibility of communion between man and God.

We may be permitted to pick up the thread of the argument in the last chapter
and ask again what moral purposes rule the forces of this world. It must indeed
be an odd type of mind that does not at least occasionally ask what this world
is for, and what all this cosmic commotion is about. It is well for all of us to
do the best we can without asking too many hard questions, but the queries will
at times come up and with the normal human being they are not likely easily to
down. We are in the midst of powers which defy our intellects. We do not go far
in the attempt to read the secrets of nature around us without discovering that
all we can hope to spell out is the stages by which things come to pass, and the
mechanisms by which they fit themselves together. Why they come to pass is
beyond us, except in a most limited sense. The purposes for which events occur
in this world are not self-evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make
matters worse; and at any moment this problem of the mystery of the universe may
take personal significance in the form of a blow upon the individual which seems
to mock all hope of anything worth while in human life. There is nothing more
futile than the attempts even of ministers to divine the meanings of afflictions
or of those inequalities of lot which attend the natural order. The preachers
can encourage us to make the most of a bad lot, but their guesses as to why
these things are ordinarily add to our burdens. No, the mind of itself just by
contemplation of the things as they are cannot find much light. This enigma has
always been before the philosophers in the form of the question as to physical
suffering. A number of plausible answers have been made as to the reasons for
pain in the present order. Leibnitz said that even the Almighty creating the
finite world had to adjust himself to some limitations for the good of the
whole; that if some forces are to run in one direction, there must be mutual
concession and compromise in the adjustment of manifold other activities; and
that all this involves at least apparent stress and injustice at particular
points. This sounds well enough, but why the afflictions of the individual who
happens to be one of the particular points should be just what they are is a
mystery. The upshot is that the ordinary man--the plain man, as we call
him--must either give up the whole problem by seeking to forget it, or must
rebel against it, or he must find relief in a God whom he can trust without
being able to fathom his plans. The tragedy of physical affliction is light as
compared to the tragedies which arise in any conscience which seeks to take
moral duties seriously. To be sure, we live at present in a rather complacent
age so far as the struggles of conscience are concerned. The advice of the world
is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to take ourselves too
seriously. But the long moral advances of the race have come through those who
have taken the voices of conscience seriously. Now, what can a sensitive
conscience make of moral duty? Assume that we have before us the exalted Christ
ideal, and accept this as the guide of our lives--assume that we even have hope
of some day attaining to that ideal--the distracting question is bound to jump
at us: Are we doing enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight
than ourselves? And what about our past mistakes? Shall we go back and try to
undo these? At the very best that might be like unraveling through the night
what we have spun through the day. It will not do to dismiss this as
unhealthiness or morbidness of mind. William James has shown pretty conclusively
that the so-called normal or healthy-minded moral life is apt to be shallow. The
great moral tragedy of the race is the distance between the ideal and any
possible attainment. We can console ourselves by saying that noble discontent is
the glory of man; but that does not get us far. There is only one way out, and
that is to trust that we are dealing with a Christlike God, that his attitude
toward us is the attitude of Jesus toward men. It is impossible to feel that in
discipleship with Jesus men were complacent about their own moral perfections on
the one hand, or harassed with self-reproaches on the other. They were advancing
toward the realization of an ideal in companionship with One who not only in
himself realized the human ideal, but who taught them that all the forces of the
world would work together with them in their climb toward perfection, and that
God would be patient with their blunders. The question as to the character of
God becomes more vital the longer we reflect. The growing conscience of our time
demands that two conceptions be kept together--that of power and that of moral
responsibility. We cannot hold a person responsible unless he has power; we
cannot give a person power unless he is willing to act under responsibility.
This realization is fast modifying all our relations to politics, to finance, to
industry, even to private duties. We are swiftly moving toward the day when
society will insist that any measure of power which has an outreach beyond the
circle of the holder’s personal affairs shall be acquiesced in by society only
on condition that the holder of that power be willing definitely to assume
responsibility to society. What we demand of men we demand also of God, and we
have the scriptural warrant for believing that these human demands are
themselves hints concerning the nature of God. Now, no one doubts the power of
God. All scientific and philosophic trends are toward the centralization of
power in some unitary source. All our study of nature and of society convinces
us that there is a unity of power somewhere. If this be true, there must be
raised with increasing persistence the question as to whether the World-Power is
acting under a sense of moral responsibility. There were days when this problem
was not raised as it is now. Men assumed for centuries that the king could do no
wrong; that he could order his people about in the most arbitrary fashion. In
our own time we have seen advocacy of the doctrine that the man of wealth is a
law unto himself in the handling of the power that comes with wealth. Such
mistakes never were really a part of the biblical idea. In shaping the threefold
notion of priest and prophet and king to make the people familiar with the
functions of God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the
responsibility of the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost to
himself, of the priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office, and of the
king to rule in righteousness. These demands were inevitably carried up to God:
and in Christ the supreme effort is made to convince us that we can trust in the
God of Christ, though we may not be able to understand him. This is not the
place for an attempt at determining the essentials of the Christ career. Some
features of that life, however, as illustrating responsibility in the use of
power can be hinted at here. Take the story of the temptation. We are not
concerned now with the historic form in which the temptation occurred. After the
historians have made all the changes in the drapery of the story they choose,
the fact remains that the temptation narrative deals with the essential problems
of any leader confronted with a task like that of Christ. The Messianic
consciousness was a consciousness of power. How should the power be used? Should
it be used to minister to human needs like those of hunger? That would promise a
quick solution of a sort. The peoples would eagerly rally around the new
deliverer. Should there be an attempt to utilize the political machinery of the
time? There could be no doubt of the effectiveness of this plan. Should the
exalted lofty spiritual state of the Master be relied upon to carry him through
spectacular displays of extraordinary might that would capture the popular mind?
Each of these suggestions presented its advantages. Each might have been
rightfully followed by some one with less power than Jesus had; but for him any
one of them would have involved a misuse of power, and hence he cast them all
aside. The miracles reported of Christ have this for their peculiarity, that
they show a power conceived of as divine used for a righteous purpose. It is
significant that practically all the miracles described are those of healing or
of relief. The kind of miracle that an irresponsible leader would have wrought
is suggested by the advice of James and John to Jesus to call down fire on an
inhospitable Samaritan village. The reported reply of Jesus, "Ye know not what
spirit you are of," is the final comment on such use of power. Now, after we
have made the most of the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them
seem just as extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary
feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand, if we
strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural law and make
them just revelations of super-normal control over nature through laws like
those whose existence and significance we are beginning to glimpse to-day, still
we cannot empty these narratives of their significance as revealing a morally
responsible use of force. Let us be just as orthodox as we can, the purpose of
the use of the forces is the supreme miracle; let us be just as destructively
radical as we please, we cannot eliminate from the Scriptures this impression of
Christ as one who used power with a sense of responsibility. This revelation is
one which the ages have always desired.

We must be careful to keep in mind the connection of the Christ life with what
came before it and what has proceeded from it. Here we have the advantage which
comes of regarding the Bible as the result of a process running through the
centuries. If the Bible were not a library, but only a single book, written at a
particular time, we might well be attracted by the nobility of its teachings,
but might despair of ever making the teachings effective. There is no proving in
syllogistic fashion that Jesus was what he claimed to be, or that he was what
his disciples thought of him as being; but when we see a massive revealing
movement centering on the idea of God as revealed in Christ, when we see the
acceptance of the spirit of Christ opening the path to communion with the
Divine, and when we find increasing hosts of persons finding larger life in that
approach to the Divine, we begin to discern the vast significance of the
scriptural doctrine that in Christ we have the revelation of the Christlike God.
In this discussion we have been careful to avoid the terms of formal and creedal
orthodoxy. This is not because the present writer is out of sympathy with these
terms, but because he is trying to keep to the main impression produced by the
New Testament. The fundamental scriptural fact is that in Jesus the early
believers saw God; they came to rest in God as revealed in Christ. This is true
of the picture of Christ in the earliest New Testament writings. Modern
scholarship has not been able to find any documents of a time when the disciples
did not think of Jesus as the revealer of God. If the disciples had not thought
of Jesus thus, they would have found little reason to write of him. Now the
scriptural authors employ various terms to declare the unique intimacy of Christ
with God. In these expositions Jewish and Greek and even Roman thought terms
play their part. Passages like the opening sentences of the fourth Gospel, or
like the great chapter in the Philippians, are always profoundly satisfying and
suggestive in their interpretation of the fundamental fact, but that fundamental
fact itself is the all-essential--that in Christ the New Testament writers
thought of themselves as having seen God, and as having gazed into the very
depths of the spirit of the Father in heaven. Believing as we do, moreover, in
the helpfulness of the creedal statements of the church, we must nevertheless
avow that such statements are secondary to the impression made upon the biblical
writers by actual contact with the Christ. We must not lose sight of the primacy
of that impression as we study our Scriptures. We must not limit the glory of
the impression itself by the limitations of some of the explanations which we
undertake. Much harm has been done the understanding the Scriptures by speaking
as if some of our creedal statements concerning Christ are themselves
Scriptures! The scriptural Christ is greater than any creedal characterization
of Christ thus far undertaken. Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove
that no such person as Jesus ever existed. The attempt has proved futile, but it
has had a significance altogether different from what the propounders of the
theory intended. The original aim was to show the contradictions of the
testimony concerning Jesus and the inadequacies of the testimony to his
existence as an historical Person. The result has been to show that the real
significance of the Christ life is not to be found in any particular utterance,
or in any specific deed, but in the total impact that he made upon the
consciousness of man as suggesting the immediate presence of the Divine. The
quality of the Christ life satisfies us in the inner depths as bearing witness
to the quality of the God life. We have no sympathy with the views of the
critics just mentioned; but we must say that no matter how the thought of God in
Christ got abroad, no matter how mistaken our thought of the historical facts at
the beginning of the Christian era, the belief in the Christlike God
nevertheless did get abroad. There is no effacing that conception from the New
Testament. No matter what detailed changes in the narrative itself radical
criticism may think itself capable of making, the door was opened wide enough in
the Christ for the divine light to stream through. We said in the last chapter
that the most important feature of the biblical revelation is God himself. We
must now say that the supreme fact about God is Christ.


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  CHAPTER 23: 02.06.     THE BOOK OF THE CROSS
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CHAPTER VI THE BOOK OF THE CROSS

If the central feature of the Scriptures is their idea of God, and if the climax
of the biblical revelation is Christ, the greatest fact about Christ from the
point of view of the Bible is his cross. We say _fact_ advisedly, for we are not
dealing with the theories that have sprung up to interpret the meaning of the
cross. We are trying to deal solely with the direct impressions which seem to
have been made upon the scriptural writers as to the place of the cross in the
revealing movement.

We said in the last chapter that the Scriptures reach their climax in the
doctrine that God is in Christ. The cross of Christ carries to most effective
revelation the Christlike character of God. While we are not treating now the
various creedal dogmas as to the person of Christ, we must not forget that those
dogmas have essayed as part of their task the bringing of God close to men. The
truth embodied in the text that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the
world is essential to knowing the Scriptures. We have seen that even as a
warrior Jehovah was thought of as willing to bear his part of the burdens of the
chosen people. We have seen growing the idea that Jehovah was under moral
obligation to carry through the uplifting work which he had begun. We have seen
prophets attain to glimpses of the meaning of suffering for the divine life, and
we have beheld the culmination in the suffering of Christ. In those perplexing
phrases of the creeds like, "Very God of very God," the aim of the church has
been perfectly clear--to guard the scriptural idea that God was so truly in
Christ that the sufferings of Christ were the sufferings of God. Even when least
intelligible the pain of men becomes more easily borne if men can believe that
in some real sense their pain is also the pain of God. That God is Christlike in
capacity to suffer is in itself a revelation of no small consequence. In the
cross of Christ we see exalted with surpassing power the belief that God acts
out of righteousness in his relation to the universe and to men. It must needs
be that Christ suffer. The writers seem unable to escape the conviction that
they are beholding the working of divinely inevitable moral necessities. These
moral obligations are not to be conceived of as external to God or imposed on
him from outside of himself. In the Scriptures they seem, rather, to be
expressions of his own nature. When the writers of theories about the cross lay
stress on those profound obligations of God toward moral law which must be
discharged in the work of redemption, the Scriptural basis underneath such
theories is the implication that God, by the very fact of what he is, must act
righteously. His power is not his own in such sense that he can act from
arbitrary or self-centered motives. The Judge of all the earth must do right, at
whatever cost to himself. The Scriptures keep close to the thought of God as a
supremely powerful Being under supreme responsibility in the use of his power.
If we can believe the Scripture that in Christ we see God, and that the bearing,
of Christ during his suffering reveals really and uniquely the bearing of God
himself, we have a revelation of the grasp with which moral responsibility holds
the Almighty against even any momentary slip into arbitrariness. Sometimes we
hear the sufferings of Christ preached as a pattern of nonresistance for men. It
is permissible thus to interpret the cross within limitations; but this is not
the essential aspect of the cross, as explaining its hold on men. The
all-important doctrine as to the use of power is hinted at in the Master’s word
that he had but to call for legions of angels if he so chose. Under most extreme
provocation the forces of the Almighty held to their appointed task. If the
Almighty had been conceived of as a Despot or an Egotist, he would have been
expected to resort at once to revengeful violence in the presence of such
insults as those of the persecutors of the Son of God. The Source of all
activity can hardly be conceived of as passive; but the passivity of the Christ
of the cross suggests that no outrage by men can divert the almighty power from
its moral purpose. This is really a gathering together and lifting on high of
the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, that God maketh the sun to shine upon
the just and the unjust, and causeth his rain to fall on the evil and the good.
That is to say, while the Bible thinks of the cross as laying bare the
Almighty’s reaction against evil, it also thinks of that cross as showing a God
who will not be disturbed by any merely "personal" considerations. We behold the
Almighty’s use of power for the advance of a moral kingdom. The Almighty is set
before us as exerting all his power for the relief of men. The cross makes the
profoundest revelation of the moral fixedness and self-control of God so long as
we hold to the scriptural representation. It is to be regretted that many
theological theories break away from the Scripture basis and build upon
assumptions which are artificial, not to say unmoral: or, rather, in their
striving after system they get away from the atmosphere of moral suggestiveness
with which the Gospels and Epistles surround the cross. That God will do his
part in the redemption of men is set before us in the cross. That part can be
nothing short of making men yearn to be like Christ and of aiding them in their
struggle for the Christlike character. It will be remembered that in the last
chapter we called attention to the hopelessness of the Christian ideal viewed as
an ideal in itself without a dynamic to help men to realize the ideal. If Christ
is only to reveal to us the character toward which men are to strive, we are in
despair. That one man has reached such perfection is in itself no promise that
other men may reach that perfection. Moreover, the excellence of Christ is not
only a moral excellence; or if it is moral excellence, that excellence involves
a balance of intellectual attributes which is for us practically out of reach.
Now, Christ is the ideal, but the ideal is one toward which we not only labor in
our own strength, but one whose attainment by us is an object of solicitude for
God himself. And so we see in the cross a patience which will bear with men to
the utmost, and which will reenforce them as they press toward the goal. The
glory of Christianity is largely hi the paradox that it sets before men an
unattainable ideal and then commands them to attain the ideal. If the cross is
nothing but a revelation of an ideal for men, this paradox is insoluble and
intolerable. In the scriptural light of the cross, however, we catch the glory
not of an abstract ideal, but of a Father’s love for his children--not of the
commands of conscience in the abstract, but of the desires of a personal Friend
who will lift men as they stumble and fall. The ground for this patience seems
as we read to be in the very nature of God himself. God has brought men into
this world without consulting them, he has dowered them with the terrific boon
of freedom, he has set them in hard places; but he has done this out of a moral
and loving purpose. He therefore makes more allowances for men than exacting men
ever can make for themselves. He puts at the service of men so much of his power
as they can appropriate by their moral effort. The Christ of the cross is taught
as the truth about God--the God who is at once the supremely real and the
supremely ideal places his powers at the service of men who would make their
Christ-ideal progressively real in themselves. The power of the Bible over men
centers around the teaching that the cross not only reveals God as morally bound
to redeem men, but that it also shows us the divine aim in redemption. Men are
to be redeemed by seeking for forgiveness in the name of the moral life set on
high by the cross, but the repentant soul is to show its sincerity by devotion
to the task and spirit of cross-bearing. The aim of the cross is to bring men
together into a fellowship of the cross, in a fellowship of suffering for the
sake of the moral triumph to be won at the end. We are accustomed to think of
suffering as implying the possibility of joy. The man who can feel keen sorrow
can feel keen joy; they who have the power to weep have also the power to laugh.
In the final kingdom the weeping shall be turned into joy. But, according to the
Scriptures, it is not necessary for the disciples to wait until the consummation
before entering into the joy of their Lord. There is an entrance to the divine
mind through bearing the cross. Those who desired to learn of Christ as true
disciples were expected to take up the cross and carry it daily. The Master also
declared that the disciples were to think of themselves as blessed when they
endured persecution for righteousness’ sake, for men had persecuted the prophets
in all ages. The implication is that knowledge of and sympathy with the prophets
came out of cross-bearing like that of the prophets. To use a simple
illustration: a student of the careers of the leaders of any reform might gather
a mass of information about the reformers in an outside kind of fashion, as by
the study of books, or by visits to the scenes of their struggles. Such a
student, however, could not master the inner spirit of a reformer’s life until
he himself had battled for some cause at risk to himself. So the man who seeks
to bear the cross of Christ is on the path to sympathetic inner knowledge of the
spirit of Christ. In our second chapter we called attention to the truth that
approach to knowledge of God is through the doing of the will of God. Doing of
the will, according to Jesus, means much more than just a round of good deeds.
It means carrying the burdens which are inevitable in cross-bearing. There is
good reason for believing that the very highest step in spiritual learning is
taken only through the willingness to bear the cross. In our modern educational
systems we lay varying degrees of stress upon the importance of different
methods of acquiring knowledge. There is at the bottom of the scale the method
of mastering the instruction of the teacher by attention and reflection. There
is, next, the method of learning through one’s own experiment--through using
microscope or telescope or textbook for oneself. There are, further, the social
aids to the quickening of the mind as groups of students study and discuss
together. But the deepest knowledge comes as the student feels his sympathy and
feeling involved. If he must pay himself out for the acquisition of the truth,
or if he must defend his conclusions at great cost to himself, this experience
which involves the feeling involves also the sharpening of the intellect. The
eyes of the soul are opened to the subtler intuitions. Thus it is in the
revelations of the divine purpose in the Scriptures. It is hard to make out how
anybody can hope to master a revelation of a cross-bearing God without himself
being a cross-bearer. In the New Testament narratives of Passion Week the Master
is reported as winning his surest convictions of the presence of God and of the
victory of his truth at the very instant when he entered into the extreme depths
of suffering. In the after days it was when the saints faced stoning that they
saw the heavens opening; it was the apostle who had suffered hardships almost
too numerous to mention who got the most positive conviction of the reward which
awaited him. In the school of Christ the very heaviest stress must fall upon the
indispensability of cross-bearing as a means to understanding. Not only does the
biblical revelation see in the cross of Christ the culminating manifestation of
the character of God, and of the purpose of God in redemption, but it also shows
to us the divine method in helping men. We have spoken of those who dwell upon
the Master’s nonresistance as a model of passivity in the presence of evil. The
example of Christ when thus treated is in danger of being misinterpreted. The
Christ of the cross was passive so far as physical force was concerned; but he
was never more intensely active in the higher ranges of his faculties--in
self-control and in alertness to the finer whisperings of the spirit. The
Christ’s non-resistance to the physical might of evil is not to be interpreted
as acquiescence on the part of the Divine toward the ravages of evil, but,
rather, as the divine method of thwarting evil by allowing it to reveal itself.
No amount of preaching about the nature of evil can equal in eloquence the
self-revelations of that nature as it works itself out into expression. While in
a degree the self-revelation of evil put forth against Christ was unique, yet we
must remember that the sins which put Christ to death are just those commonest
in all time. Judas was disappointed. He carried spite no more tenaciously than
the ordinary heart is capable of treasuring it. Caiaphas desired simply to hold
his own position and preserve the peace of his nation. Very likely the type of
opinion in the midst of which Caiaphas moved would have pronounced that he
rendered a disagreeable, but nevertheless necessary patriotic service in his
condemnation of Christ. Pilate too meant well, but was afraid of the crowd. His
friends may have commended his administrative wisdom in allowing the people to
have their own way. It was the play of just such ordinary forces of sin against
an extraordinary holiness that made it impossible for the mightiest revelation
ever vouchsafed to man to work through the earthly activity of Jesus for more
than a few months. The Scripture does not have much to do with abstract sins;
with concrete sins of men as we actually find them, it has much to do. The
Scriptures make it very clear that there is something which satisfies God
himself in the work of redemption. God acts out of moral obligation, out of
self-respect, out of love. But he acts always in respect for men as free moral
beings. The cross appeals to the free spirit of men to behold the nature of
evil, and to flee from that evil toward their redeeming God. If the redemption
is to be a moral redemption, the last detail of the method must be moral. The
power of the Almighty must not be used to break down freedom of men. It would be
theoretically possible for an almighty power to bring to bear such pressures
upon human wills as to crush them, but the strongest representation of the power
of God in the New Testament does not go to the length of hinting at interference
with the freedom of men. Men are to be saved as free men or not at all. We might
conceivably imagine the Almighty as granting such indubitable vision of the
material rewards of righteousness and the material loss of unrighteousness as
would irresistibly draw masses of a certain grade of men into the Kingdom
without a morally free consent to righteousness. Or we might conceive of the
Almighty as so weighing this or that factor of environment as to diminish almost
to the vanishing point the free choice of men. This kind of compulsion would not
be moral. The only compulsions of the cross are those of a moral God splendidly
attractive on his own account.

It will have occurred to some readers by this time that we have said very little
about the love of God in our discussion of the Scriptures, whereas that love is
the outstanding feature of the biblical revelation. Our reply is that we have
been trying to be true to the impression made by the Scriptures as to the kind
of love which we must think of as expressing the deepest fact in God’s life. We
would not in the least minimize the truth that love is the last word of the
scriptural revelation; but in our modern life we are apt to get away from the
quality of the love revealed in the Bible. The love of the cross is built upon
the righteousness which runs through the Sacred Book from the beginning to the
end. A god of indifferent moral quality might love. The old Greek gods had
favorites upon whom they lavished their affections. A god might be conceived of
as an amiable and well-wishing father, foolishly indulgent toward his children.
The love of the New Testament, however, is the love of a Father who dares to
appeal to the children to make heroic response; and who shows his own love for
them in the lengths to which he will go for them. Moral love will go the full
length of heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot help believing that it is the quality
of God’s love, rather than the mere fact of that love, which is the explanation
of the power of the biblical teaching. A friend of mine many years ago wrote a
book which he called The Hero God. The publishers objected to the title because
they saw in it a touch of sensationalism. No title, however, could have more
adequately set forth the biblical God. God is the hero of the Bible. His heroism
appears in growing revelation from the beginning. It shows itself superbly in
his willingness to bear the burdens of mankind and in the appeals which he makes
for response from men. The picture is of a God who dares to believe in men and
who dares to call on them for the extremes of self-sacrificing devotion, not to
himself as an arbitrary Person, but to himself as the center of the moral life
which is above all other life worth while. It is open to anyone to object that
this biblical picture does not necessarily hold good for God; but it is hardly
possible to object that the picture is not biblical. The picture stands in its
own right and makes its own appeal. The only way to test it in life is to yield
to its appeal.

If we are asked to account for the power of the Bible, we are at a loss for any
one single statement. The most compendious reply is the magnetism of the love of
God as revealed in Christ. This is so broad, however, that it may not make a
direct and vivid impression. We may say, then, that one element of the magnetism
of the biblical revelation is the magnetism of the appeal to the heroic.
Whatever else the Bible may or may not be, it is not a book of soft and easy
things. Breaths of the most rigorous life blow across every page. It is made for
man in that it calls men to the service of the highest and best. The religious
systems which make the fewest and least demands upon their followers most
speedily fall away; those that call for the utmost are most likely to meet the
enthusiastic response. There is a frank honesty about the biblical appeal which
holds a charm for all men in whom there are any sparks of real manhood. The
severities of the Christian life are nowhere disguised. Men are never lured on
by false pretenses. The path is the path of cross-bearing, and the reward is the
comradeship between God and man as they together work toward the highest goal, a
comradeship which of itself brings relief to men burdened with the mystery of
the universe and agonized by remorse over sin. This essay is quite as
significant for what it has not said as for what it has said. In our omissions
we have tried to keep clear the main outlines of scriptural revelation. We have
sought to hold fast to principles rather than to discuss details. We have done
this because we have believed that there is more value for religious
understanding in pointing out the loftier biblical peaks which give the
direction of the whole range than in tracing out pathways through detailed
passages. Moreover, we have been afraid to employ many theoretical terms lest we
blur the quick moral impressions made by the Scripture phrasings. For example,
it may be objected that our treatment of the character of God is altogether
inadequate. We have not thus far said a word about the Trinity, for example, or
about atonement. The reason is that we believe that any theories about God must
base themselves upon the moral suggestions of the Scriptures; and our business
is with these rather than with the theories. The received revelation concerning
God would warrant us in fashioning any theory as to the richness of his inner
constitution which might even measurably satisfy our minds. The scriptural
atmosphere as to the moral life in God must, however, be kept in the chief place
in all of our theological theories. Atonement must be interpreted chiefly in
terms of ethical steadiness if it is to build on a biblical foundation. But the
instant we use formal terms like "Trinity" and "atonement" we have taken at
least one step away from the Scriptures. Again, we have said nothing about
Divine Providence. The Bible is full of instances of providences, but here also
we have preferred to let the fundamental moral character of the biblical God
speak for itself. We may have our own belief that there is no scriptural warrant
for that separation which obtains in much theology between the processes of God
and the processes of nature. We may admit that the Hebrew had no very
systematically framed theory of the processes of nature, but he deemed God to be
in such close touch with nature as easily to control its forces for a good end.
In two accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites we have an
apparent contradiction which is at bottom not a contradiction. In one account
God seems to cause the waters to wall up on both sides of the Israelites in
defiance of the laws of nature. In another God accomplishes the drying of the
path through the blowing of a strong east wind. The Hebrew would not have
troubled himself much with the apparent contradiction, for he would have
conceived of God as the chief factor in either event, and of his purpose as
having the right of way. There is thus no great value in discussing specific
instances as long as the care of God for his children is the animating purpose
of the entire biblical content. So with answers to prayer--the God who is
willing to go for men to the lengths revealed in the cross will surely answer
any prayer worth answering. The essential is to lift prayer up into harmony with
the entire revealing and redeeming movement, and to conceive of it as a fitting
of the whole life into the purposes of a moral God. Certain general requirements
would always have to be met. Prayer would have really to deal with what is best
for the individual, best for those around him, and most in harmony with the
character of God himself. So, again, with the progress of the kingdom of God on
earth--the God of whose nature the cross is the final revelation can be trusted
to do the best possible for the Kingdom here and now. Much debate about the
second coming of Christ misses the great moral principles which are the heart of
the Christian revelation and loses itself in the incidental forms in which those
principles were declared. The best preparation for the coming of the kingdom of
Christ is absorption in the principles of Christ and in the spirit of Christ. To
get away from these in our search for external and material conditions which are
the mere vehicle of the biblical thought is not only to pursue a
will-o’-the-wisp, but to injure true spiritual progress. Jesus has given us the
spiritual principles which must control the destiny of any society here and now.
In the light of the Christ-faith revealed in the cross we must not despair of
the redemption of men by the city-full and by the nation-full, for the greatest
confidence ever placed in men is the implied trust of the cross of Christ. The
Almighty at the beginning paid an immense tribute to the human race when he
flung it out into the gale of this existence. In the light of the cross we
cannot believe that He expected the race to sink. In the cross the Christ who
revealed God’s own mind showed the length he was willing to go in confidence
that men would finally turn to him with all the powers of their lives. To throw
up our hands and say that the world is getting worse and we can do nothing
without a speedy physical return of the Christ is to overlook the spiritual
forces of the cross.

We have said nothing about immortality. What the Scriptures themselves say is
largely incidental. The Master did not allow himself to be drawn into any
extended conversation about the details of a future life, but he did give us the
God of the cross. In the presence of that cross we can profess the utmost
confidence in the eternal life of the sons of God, while at the same time
acknowledging the utmost ignorance as to any of the material conditions of the
future life. It is commonly assumed that the resurrection of Christ proves that
we shall likewise rise, but the rising of Christ does not of itself prove that
others shall rise. The cross, however--showing the extent to which the Divine is
willing to go for men--is the ground of our hope. God will not leave his loved
ones to see corruption. In a word, the cross of Christ gathers up all the
biblical truth. It is a revelation of God’s own character, of his hope for men,
of the methods by which he seeks to win men, and of the ground of our faith in a
right outcome for men and for society.

We may be permitted to summarize by saying that scientific and historical
biblical study is a preparation for the knowledge of the Scriptures; that it is
exceedingly important that the student approach with the correct preliminary
point of view. The revelation of the inner significance, however, does not dawn
until there is recognition of the need of obedience to the principles laid down
in the Scriptures. And this obedience must be broad enough to include zeal for
the uplift of our fellow men in all phases of their lives. Out of righteous
living the devoted life, we believe, will see that the greatest fact of the
Bible is God; that the greatest fact of God is Christ; that the greatest fact of
Christ is the cross.


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/writings-of-francis-j-mcconnell/
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