Christianity and Progress

by Harry Emerson Fosdick

[5] C. G. Montefiore: Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus According to the Synoptic Gospels, p. 133.

[6] Gilbert Murray: Tradition and Progress, Chapter I, Religio Grammatici, IV, pp. 19-20.

LECTURE VI

PROGRESS AND GOD

I

We may well begin our final lecture, on the interplay between the idea of progress and the idea of God, by noting that only faith in God can satisfy man's craving for spiritual stability amid change. The central element in the conception of a progressive world is that men's thoughts and lives have changed, are changing and will change, that nothing therefore is settled in the sense of being finally formulated, that creation has never said its last word on any subject or landed its last hammer blow on any task. Such an outlook on life, instead of being exhilarating, is to many disquieting in the extreme. In particular it is disquieting in religion, one of whose functions has always been to provide stability, to teach men amid the transient to see the eternal. If in a changing world religious thought changes too, if in that realm also new answers are given to old questions and new questions rise that never have been answered before, if forms of faith in which men once trusted are outgrown, man's unsettlement seems to be complete. The whole world then is like a huge kaleidoscope turning round and round and, as it turns, the manifold elements in human experience, even its religious doctrines and practices, arrange and rearrange themselves in endless permutations. How then in such a world can religion mean to us what it has meant to the saints who of old, amid a shaken world, have sung:

"Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou, Who changest not, abide with me!"

This fear of the unsettling effects of the idea of progress accounts for most of the resentment against it in the realm of theology, and for the desperate endeavours which perennially are made to congeal the Christian movement at some one stage and to call that stage final. Stability, however, can never be achieved by resort to such reactionary dogmatism. What one obtains by that method is not stability but stagnation, and the two, though often confused, are utterly different. Stagnation is like a pool, stationary, finished, and without progressive prospects. A river, however, has another kind of steadfastness altogether. It is not stationary; it flows; it is never twice the same and its enlarging prospects as it widens and deepens in its course are its glory. Nevertheless, the Hudson and the Mississippi and the Amazon are among the most stable and abiding features which nature knows. They will probably outlast many mountains. They will certainly outlast any pool.

The spiritual stability which we may have in a progressive world is of this latter sort, if we believe in the living God. It is so much more inspiring than the stagnation of the dogmatist that one wonders how any one, seeing both, could choose the inferior article in which to repose his trust. Consider, for example, the development of the idea of God himself, the course of which through the Bible we briefly traced in a previous lecture. From Sinai to Calvary—was ever a record of progressive revelation more plain or more convincing? The development begins with Jehovah disclosed in a thunder-storm on a desert mountain, and it ends with Christ saying: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth;" it begins with a war-god leading his partisans to victory and it ends with men saying, "God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him;" it begins with a provincial deity loving his tribe and hating its enemies and it ends with the God of the whole earth worshiped by "a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes and peoples and tongues;" it begins with a God who commands the slaying of the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling," and it ends with a Father whose will it is that not "one of these little ones should perish;" it begins with God's people standing afar off from his lightnings and praying that he might not speak to them lest they die and it ends with men going into their inner chambers and, having shut the door, praying to their Father who is in secret. Here is no pool; here is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God.

Consider as well the course of the idea of God after the close of the New Testament canon. The Biblical conception of God in terms of righteous and compassionate personal will went out into a world of thought where Greek metaphysics was largely in control. There God was conceived in terms of substance, as the ontological basis and ground of all existence—immutable, inscrutable, unqualified pure being. These two ideas, God as personal will, and God as metaphysical substance, never perfectly coalescing, flowed together. In minds like St. Augustine's one finds them both. God as pure being and God as gracious and righteous personal will—St. Augustine accepted both ideas but never harmonized them. Down through Christian history one can see these two conceptions complementing each other, each balancing the other's eccentricities. The Greek idea runs out toward pantheism in Spinoza and Hegel. The Biblical idea runs out toward deism in Duns Scotus and Calvin. In the eighteenth century an extreme form of deism held the field and God, as personal will, was conceived as the Creator, who in a dim and distant past had made all things. In the nineteenth century the thought of God swung back to terms of immanence, and God, who had been crowded out of his world, came flooding in as the abiding life of all of it.