Christianity and Progress

by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Moreover, this idea of God as the Creative Power conceived in spiritual terms need not lose any of the intimate meanings which have inhered in more personal thoughts of him and which are expressed in the Bible's names for him: Father, Mother, Bridegroom, Husband, Friend. There is indeed this danger in the approach which we have been describing, that we may conceive God as so dispersed everywhere that we cannot find him anywhere and that at last, so diffused, he will lose the practical value on account of which we want him. For we do desire a God who is like ourselves—enough like ourselves so that he can understand us and care for us and enter into our human problems. We do want a human side to God. A man who had seen in Henry Drummond the most beautiful exhibition of God's Spirit that he had ever experienced said that after Henry Drummond died he always prayed up to God by way of Drummond. We make our most vital approaches to God in that way and we always have, from the time we prayed to God through our fathers and mothers until now, when we find God in Christ. We want in God a personality that can answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the least his greatness.

I know a man who says that one of the turning points of his spiritual experience came on a day when for the first time it dawned on him that he never had seen his mother. Now, his mother was the major molding influence in his life. He could have said about her what Longfellow said in a letter to his mother, written when he was twenty-one. "For me," wrote Longfellow, "a line from my mother is more efficacious than all the homilies preached in Lent; and I find more incitement to virtue in merely looking at your handwriting than in a whole volume of ethics and moral discourses." So this man would have felt about the pervasive influence of his mother. Then it dawned on him one day that he never had seen her. To be sure, he had seen the bodily instrument by which she had been able somehow to express herself through look and word and gesture, but his mother herself, her thoughts, her consciousness, her love, her spirit, he never had seen and he never would see. She was the realest force in his life, but she was invisible. When they talked together they signalled to each other out of the unseen where they dwelt. They both were as invisible as God. Moreover, while his mother was only a human, personal spirit, there was a kind of omnipresence in her so far as he was concerned, and he loved her and she loved him everywhere, though he never had seen her and never could. If spiritual life even in its human form can take on such meanings, we need not think of God as an expanded individual in order to love him, be loved by him, and company with him as an unseen friend. Let a man once begin with God as the universal spiritual Presence and then go on to see the divine quality of that Presence revealed in Christ, and there is no limit to the deepening and heightening of his estimation of God's character, except the limits of his own moral imagination.

IV

With many minds the difficulty of achieving an idea of God adequate for our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual shift of emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's religious life in this next generation is the decision as to which of these two ideas of the Church shall triumph. We may call one the exclusive and the other the inclusive conception of the Church. The exclusive conception of the Church lies along lines like these: that we are the true Church; that we have the true doctrines and the true practices as no other Church possesses them; that we are constituted as a Church just because we have these uniquely true opinions and practices; that all we in the Church agree about these opinions and that when we joined the Church we gave allegiance to them; that nobody has any business to belong to our Church unless he agrees with us; that if there are people outside the Church who disagree, they ought to be kept outside and if there are people in the Church who come to disagree, they ought to be put outside. That is the exclusive idea of the Church, and there are many who need no further description of it for they were brought up in it and all their youthful religious life was surrounded by its rigid sectarianism.

Over against this conception is the inclusive idea of the Church, which runs along lines like these: that the Christian Church ought to be the organizing center for all the Christian life of a community; that a Church is not based upon theological uniformity but upon devotion to the Lord Jesus, to the life with God and man for which he stood, and to the work which he gave us to do; that wherever there are people who have that spiritual devotion, who possess that love, who want more of it, who desire to work and worship with those of kindred Christian aspirations, they belong inside the family of the Christian Church. The inclusive idea of the Church looks out upon our American communities and sees there, with all their sin, spiritual life unexpressed and unorganized, good-will and aspiration and moral power unharnessed and going to waste, and it longs to cry so that the whole community can hear it. Come, all men of Christian good-will, let us work together for the Lord of all good life! That is the inclusive idea of the Church. It desires to be the point of incandescence where, regardless of denominationalism or theology, the Christian life of the community bursts into flame.

As between these two conceptions there hardly can be any question that the first idea so far has prevailed. Our endlessly split and shivered Protestantism bears sufficient witness to the influence of the exclusive idea of the Church. The disastrous consequences of this in many realms are evident, and one result lies directly in our argument's path. An exclusive Church narrows the idea of God. Almost inevitably God comes to be conceived as the head of the exclusive Church, the origin of its uniquely true doctrine, the director of its uniquely correct practices, so that the activities of God outside the Church grow dim, and more and more he is conceived as operating through his favourite organization as nowhere else in all the universe. In particular the idea grows easily in the soil of an exclusive Church that God is not operative except in people who recognize him and that the world outside such conscious recognition is largely empty of his activity and barren of his grace. God tends, in such thinking, to become cooped up in the Church, among the people who consciously have acknowledged him. What wonder that multitudes of our youth, waking up to the facts about our vast and growing universe, conclude that it is too big to be managed by the tribal god of a Protestant sect!

The achievement of a worthy idea of God involves, therefore, the ability to discover God in all life, outside the Church as well as within, and in people who do not believe in him nor recognize him as well as in those who do. Let us consider for a moment the principle which is here involved. Many forces and persons serve us when we do not recognize them and do not know the truth about them. This experience of being ministered to by persons whom we do not know goes back even to the maternal care that nourished us before we were born. No mother waits to be recognized before she serves her child. We are tempted to think of persons as ministering to us only when the service is consciously received and acknowledged but, as a matter of fact, service continually comes to us from sources we are unaware of and do not think about.

"Unnumbered comforts to my soul
Thy tender care bestowed,
Before my infant heart conceived
From whom those comforts flowed."

This principle applies to mankind's relationship with the physical universe. Through many generations mankind utterly misconceived it. They thought the earth was flat, the heavens a little way above; yet, for all that, the sun warmed them and the rain refreshed them and the stars guided their wandering boats. The physical universe did not wait until men knew all the truth about it before being useful to men and at last, when the truth came and the glory of this vast and mobile cosmos dawned on mankind, men discovered the facts about forces which, though unknown and unacknowledged, long had served them.

This same principle applies also to man's relationship with social institutions and social securities that have sustained us from our infancy. If a boy knows that there is a Constitution of the United States, he does not think about it. Then maturity comes and he begins vividly to understand the sacrifices which our forefathers underwent in building up the institutions that have nourished us. He recognizes forces and factors of which he had been unconscious but whose value, long unacknowledged, he now gratefully can estimate.