Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

by Harold Begbie

The situation today is changed in two directions. The Church, the Bible, and even the Teaching of Jesus are no longer regarded as infallible. History first abundantly proved that the voice of the Church was not inerrant; then science discredited the biblical account of man's origin and development; and finally the "kenotic" theory of Bishop Gore showed that what were considered the ipsissima verba of the Lord himself could no longer be regarded as infallible. The coup de grâce to the belief that Jesus must be followed literally was administered by official sermons during the war. This does not mean that men and women within or without the Church do not admire and venerate the teaching of Jesus and regard him as the best teacher whom they know. But they are not willing to accept all his teaching; they have been forced to admit that it is sometimes lawful to resist evil by force; they doubt whether he is to appear as the Judge of the living and the dead; they accept much of his teaching and try to follow it because they believe that it is true, but they do not believe that it is true because it is his teaching. It is therefore impossible today for educated men, even among those who most sincerely adopt it, to settle a moral argument by an appeal to the teaching of Jesus. The tragedy is that there are probably as many today outside the Church who endeavour to follow Jesus, but do not call him Lord, as there are within the church who reverse this attitude. For good or for evil (and I think it is for evil), the Church, especially the Church of England, seems to have decided that to say "Lord, Lord" is the pass-word to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Equally important with this great change in thought, which has abandoned the infallible trinity of Church, Bible, and Jesus, is the fact that the best of our generation have shifted the centre of endeavour from the future salvation of the individual to the present reformation of this world for the benefit of coming humanity. The best men of our time are troubling very little about the salvation of their own souls; not because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not a supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They have relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look forward is progressive and educational, not fixed or punitive. Moreover, most of them would say, with complete reverence, that the work which is set before them by the Purpose of Life, as they understand it, is to make a better world, materially, morally, and intellectually, as an inheritance for children who are yet unborn. They are not much disturbed if they are told that they are not Christians, for they are supremely indifferent to names.

Nevertheless their presence in the world today is the concrete problem to be faced by Liberal Churchmen. To consistent Catholics such as Father Knox it is not, I suppose, a problem at all. He would say that such men deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but they are not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a faith once delivered to the saints," Father Knox is right; such men are not Christians, but, if so, the fact that they are not is the death warrant of the Church, for they represent progress to a higher type than that of the Christianity of the past.

But the liberal Christian does not accept the view that the Church ought to exist for the preservation of traditional opinions. In his heart he feels that such men would have been accepted by Jesus as his disciples, and therefore he believes that the Church can and ought to be reformed so as to make room for them. For this Reformation he has no fixed and rigid programme, but there are three things which he thinks the Church must provide.

The first necessity is the right understanding of life. It cannot be given by any theory of the universe which, like the biblical one, is in glaring contradiction to the facts of modern science[1]. Nor is it conceivable that belief can be fixed so as to be unalterable. Intellectual correctness is relative, and Truth cannot be petrified into Creeds, but lives by discussion, criticism, correction, and growth.

[1] Mr. Bryan is right in maintaining that evolution and the whole scientific concept of life is unbiblical, though wrong in thinking that that settles the question.

The second necessity is the purification of the human spirit. Generation after generation of Christians on their way through the world have endeavoured to follow the moral teaching of the Church, but the friction and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities, the swell of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire, which a mere appeal to reason cannot remedy because it condemns but does not remove the evil. In the future as in the past, the Church must find means to satisfy men's need and desire for purification.

The third is closely allied to the second. It is "the helping hand of grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths, the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact normally work through them.

These are the three things which the Liberal wishes to keep in the Church. He knows that to do this the traditional forms of church life require great changes, but he wishes to preserve the institutional life of the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that Christians who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments, the thoughts, practices, and ordinances of the past, have the right in another generation to change these. The continuity of the Church is in membership, not in documents.

But the Liberals fall into two groups. There is the left wing which expresses itself with clearness and decision, which is not afraid of recognizing that the Church in the past has often been wrong and has affirmed as fact what is really fiction. Those who belong to it are sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled to yield to the practical necessities of ecclesiastical life, but their influence is greater than their numbers. The danger which would face the Church if they were allowed to have more prominence, is that their plainness of speech would lead to disruption. The danger is a real one, and the leaders of churches do right to fear it.