Philosophy and Religion / Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

by Hastings Rashdall

In my last lecture I tried to effect a transition from the idea of religious truth as something believed by the individual, and accepted by him on the evidence of his own Reason and Conscience to the idea of a Religion considered as a body of religious truth handed down by tradition in an organized society. The higher Religions—those which have passed beyond the stage of merely tribal or national Religion—are based upon the idea that religious truth of enduring value has been from time to time revealed to particular persons, the Founders or Apostles or Reformers of such religions. We recognized the validity of this idea of Revelation, and the supreme importance to the moral and religious life of such historical revelations, on one condition—that the claim of any historical Religion to the allegiance of its followers must be held to rest in the last resort upon the appeal which it makes to their Reason and Conscience: though the individual may often be {158} quite justified in accepting and relying upon the Reason and Conscience of the religious Society rather than upon his own.

The view which I have taken of Revelation makes it quite independent of what are commonly called miracles. All that I have said is quite consistent with the unqualified acceptance or with the unqualified rejection of miracles. But some of you may perhaps expect me to explain a little more fully my own attitude towards that question. And therefore I will say this much—that, if we regard a miracle as implying a suspension of a law of nature, I do not think we can call such a suspension a priori incredible; but the enormous experience which we have of the actual regularity of the laws of nature, and of the causes which in certain states of the human mind lead to the belief in miracles, makes such an event in the highest degree improbable. To me at least it would seem practically impossible to get sufficient evidence for the occurrence of such an event in the distant past: all our historical reasoning presupposes the reign of law. But it is being more and more admitted by theologians who are regarded as quite orthodox and rather conservative, that the idea of a miracle need not necessarily imply such a suspension of natural law. And on the other hand, decidedly critical and liberal theologians are more and more disposed to admit {159} that many of the abnormal events commonly called miraculous may very well have occurred without involving any real suspension of natural law. Recent advances in psychological knowledge have widened our conception of the possible influence of mind over matter and of mind over mind. Whether an alleged miraculous event is to be accepted or not must, as it seems to me, depend partly upon the amount of critically sifted historical evidence which can be produced for it, partly upon the nature of the event itself—upon the question whether it is or is not of such a kind that we can with any probability suppose that it might be accounted for either by known laws or by laws at present imperfectly understood.

To apply these principles in detail to the New Testament narratives would involve critical discussions which are outside the purpose of these lectures. I will only say that few critical scholars would deny that some recorded miracles even in the New Testament are unhistorical. When they find an incident like the healing of Malchus's ear omitted in the earlier, and inserted in the later redaction of a common original, they cannot but recognize the probability of traditional amplification. At the same time few liberal theologians will be disposed to doubt the general fact that our Lord did cure some diseases by spiritual influence, or that an appearance of our Lord to the disciples—of whatever nature—actually {160} did occur, and was the means of assuring them of his continued life and power. At all events I do not myself doubt these two facts. But at least when miracles are not regarded as constituting real exceptions to natural law, it is obvious that they will not prove the truth of any teaching which may have been connected with them; while, even if we treat the Gospel miracles as real exceptions to law, the difficulty of proving them in the face of modern critical enquiry is so great that the evidence will hardly come home to any one not previously convinced, on purely spiritual grounds, of the exceptional character of our Lord's personality and mission. This being so, I do not think that our answer to the problem of miracles, whatever it be, can play any very important part in Christian Apologetic. When we have become Christians on other grounds, the acts of healing may still retain a certain value as illustrating the character of the Master, and the Resurrection vision as proclaiming the truth of Immortality in a way which will come home to minds not easily accessible to abstract argument. The true foundation not merely for belief in the teaching of Christ, but also for the Christian's reverence for his Person, must, as it seems to me, be found in the appeal which his words and his character still make to the Conscience and Reason of mankind. This proposition would be {161} perhaps more generally accepted if I were to say that the claim of Christ to allegiance rests upon the way in which he satisfies the heart, the aspirations, the religious needs of mankind. And I should be quite willing to adopt such language, if you will only include respect for historic fact and intellectual truth among these religious needs, and admit that a reasonable faith must rest on something better than mere emotion. Fully to exhibit the grounds of this claim of Christ upon us would involve an examination of the Gospel narratives in detail: it would involve an attempt to present to you what was this teaching, this character, this religious consciousness which has commanded the homage of mankind. To attempt such a task would be out of place in a brief course of lectures devoted to a particular aspect of Religion—its relation to Philosophy. Here I must assume that you feel the spiritual supremacy of Christ—his unique position in the religious history of the world and his unique importance for the spiritual life of each one of us—; and go on to ask what assertions such a conviction warrants us in making about his person and nature, what in short should be our attitude towards the traditional doctrines of the Christian Church.

You may know something of the position taken up in this matter by the dominant school of what I may call believing liberal Theology in {162} Germany—the school which takes its name from the great theologian Ritschl, but which will be best known to most Englishmen in connexion with the name of Prof. Harnack, though it may be well to remember that Harnack is nearer to the left than to the right wing of that school. The fundamental principle of that school is to base the claims of Christianity mainly upon the appeal which the picture of the life, teaching, character, and personality of Christ makes to the moral and religious consciousness of mankind. Their teaching is Christo-centric in the highest possible degree: but they are almost or entirely indifferent to the dogmatic formulae which may be employed to express this supreme religious importance of Christ. In putting the personal and historical Christ, and not any doctrine about him, in the centre of the religious life I believe they are right. But this principle is sometimes asserted in an exaggerated and one-sided manner. In the first place they are somewhat contemptuous of Philosophy, and of philosophic argument even for such fundamental truths as the existence of God. I do not see that the subjective impression made by Christ can by itself prove the fact of God's existence. We must first believe that there is a God to be revealed before we can be led to believe in Christ as the supreme Revealer. I do not believe that the modern world will permanently accept a view of the Universe {163} which does not commend itself to its Reason. The Ritschlians talk about the truth of Religion resting upon value-judgements. I can quite understand that a value-judgement may tell us the supreme value of Christ's character and his fitness to be treated as the representative of God to us, when once we believe in God: but I cannot see how any value-judgement taken by itself can assure us of that existence. Value is one thing: existence is another. To my mind a Christian Apologetic should begin, like the old Apologies of Justin or Aristides, with showing the essential reasonableness of Christ's teaching about God and its essential harmony with the highest philosophic teaching about duty, about the divine nature, about the soul and its eternal destiny. The Ritschlian is too much disposed to underrate the value of all previous religious and ethical teaching, even of Judaism at its highest: he is not content with making Christ the supreme Revealer: he wants to make him the only Revealer. And when we turn to post-Christian religious history, he is apt to treat all the great developments of religious and ethical thought from the time of the Apostles to our own day as simply worthless and even mischievous corruptions of the original, and only genuine, Christianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the ipsissima verba of its Founder. The Ritschlian dislikes Dogma, not because it may be at times a {164} misdevelopment, but because it is a development; not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, but simply because it is Philosophy.[1]

In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal development, it must be remembered that what is commonly called dogma is only a part—perhaps not the most important part—of that development. Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's great principle of Brotherhood, it is impossible to deny that, if we look in detail at the moral ideal of any educated Christian at the present day, we shall find in it many elements which cannot explicitly be discovered in the ipsissima verba of Christ and still less of his Apostles. And development in the ethical ideal always carries with it some development in a man's conception of God and the Universe. Some of these elements are due to a gradual bringing out into clear consciousness, and an application to new details, of principles latent in the actual words of Christ; others to an infusion of Greek Philosophy; others to the practical experience and the scientific discoveries of the modern world. Christianity in the course of nineteen centuries has gradually absorbed into itself many ideas from various sources, {165} christianizing them in the process. Many ideas, much Hellenic Philosophy, many Hellenic ideals of life, many Roman ideas of government and organization have thus, in the excellent phrase of Professor Gardner, been 'baptized into Christ.' This capacity of absorbing into itself elements of spiritual life which were originally independent of it is not a defect of historical Christianity, but one of its qualifications for being accepted by the modern world as a universal, an absolute, a final Religion.

It does not seem to me possible to recognize the claim of any historical Religion to be final and ultimate, unless it include within itself a principle of development. Let me, as briefly as I can, illustrate what I mean. It is most clearly and easily seen in the case of Morality. If the idea of a universal Religion is to mean that any detailed code of Morals laid down at a definite moment of history can serve by itself for the guidance of all human life in all after ages, we may at once dismiss the notion as a dream. In nothing did our Lord show his greatness and the fitness of his Religion for universality more than in abstaining from drawing up such a code. He confined himself to laying down a few great principles, with illustrations applicable to the circumstances of his immediate hearers. Those principles require development and application to the needs and {166} circumstances of successive ages before they can suffice to guide us in the details of conduct. To effect this development and application has been historically the work of the Church which owes its origin to the disciples whom he gathered around him. If we may accept the teaching of the fourth Gospel as at least having germs in the actual utterances of our Lord, he himself foresaw the necessity of such a development. At all events the belief in the continued work of God's Spirit in human Society is an essential principle of the Christian Religion as it was taught by the first followers of its Founder. Take for instance the case of slavery. Our Lord never condemned slavery: it is not certain that he would have done so, had the case been presented to him. Very likely his answer would have been 'Who made me a judge or a divider,' or 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' No one on reflection can now fail to see the essential incompatibility between slavery and the Christian spirit; yet it was perhaps fourteen hundred years before a single Christian thinker definitely enunciated that incompatibility, and more than eighteen hundred years before slavery was actually banished from all nominally Christian lands. Who can doubt that many features of our existing social system are equally incompatible with the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the {167} accepted Christian morality of a hundred years hence will definitely condemn many things which the average Christian Conscience now allows?

And then there is another kind of development in Ethics which is equally necessary. The Christian law of Love bids us promote the true good of our fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as equally valuable with our own or with the like good of any other. But what is this good life which we are to promote? As to that our Lord has only laid down a few very general principles—the supreme value of Love itself, the superiority of the spiritual to the carnal, the importance of sexual purity. These principles our consciences still acknowledge, and there are no others of equal importance. But what of the intellectual life? Has that no value? Our Lord never depreciated it, as so many religious founders and reformers have done. But he has given us no explicit guidance about it. When the Christian ideal embraced within itself a recognition of the value and duty of Culture, it was borrowing from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to Theology, the actual fact of development is no less indisputable. Every alteration of the ethical ideal has brought with it some alteration in our idea of God. We can no longer endure theories of the Atonement which are opposed to modern ideas of Justice, though they were quite compatible with {168} patristic or medieval ideas of Justice. The advances of Science have altered our whole conception of God's mode of acting upon or governing the world. None of these things are religiously so important as the great principle of the Fatherhood of God, nor have they in any way tended to modify its truth or its supreme importance. But they do imply that our Theology is not and cannot be in all points the same as that of the first Christians.

Now with these presuppositions let us approach the question of that great structure of formal dogma which the Church has built upon the foundation of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly it is; but, while we must not assume that every development which has historically taken place is necessarily true or valuable, it is equally unphilosophical to assume that, because it is a development, it is necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself did, indeed, claim to be the Messiah; the fact of Messiahship was what was primarily meant by the title 'Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits a consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely important for his own race; and, before the close, we can perhaps discover a growing conviction that the truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his followers set themselves to devise terms which should express their own sense of their Master's unique {169} religious value and importance, to express what they felt he had been to their own souls, what they felt he might be to all who accepted his message. Even to St. Paul the term 'Son of God' still meant primarily 'the Messiah': but in the light of his conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea expanded till the Christ was exalted to a position far above anything which Jewish prophecy or Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the means of expressing these new ideas were found naturally and inevitably in the current philosophical terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, if not already with St. Paul, there was infused into the teaching of the Church a new element. From the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology the author borrowed the term Logos to express what he conceived to be the cosmic importance of Christ's position. He accepted from that speculation—probably from Philo—the theory which personified or half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God through which God was represented in the Old Testament as creating the world and inspiring the prophets. This Logos through whom God had throughout the ages been more and more fully revealing Himself had at last become actually incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is also described as truly God, though in the fourth Gospel the relation of the Father to the Word—at {170} least to the Word before the Incarnation—is left wholly vague and undefined.

From these comparatively simple beginnings sprang centuries of controversy culminating in that elaborate system of dogma which is often little understood even by its most vigorous champions. You know in a very general way the result. The Logos was made more and more distinct from God, endowed with a more and more decidedly personal existence. Then, when the interests of Monotheism seemed to be endangered, the attempt was made to save it by asserting the subordination of the Son to the Father. The result was that by Arianism the Son was reduced to the position of an inferior God. Polytheism had once more to be averted by asserting in even stronger terms not merely the equality of the Son with the Father but also the Unity of the God who is both Father and Son. The doctrine of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost went through a somewhat similar series of stages. At first regarded as identical with the Word, a distinction was gradually effected. The Word was said to have been incarnate in Jesus; while it was through the Holy Ghost that the subsequent work of God was carried on in human hearts. And by similar stages the equality of the Holy Ghost to Father and to Son was gradually evolved; while it was more and more strongly asserted that, in spite of the eternal distinction of {171} Persons, it was one and the same God who revealed Himself in all the activities attributed to each of them.

Side by side with these controversies about the relation between the Father and the Word, there was a gradual development of doctrine as to the relation between the Logos and the human Jesus in whom he took up his abode. Frequently the idea of any real humanity in Jesus was all but lost. That was at last saved by the Catholic formula 'perfect God and perfect man'; though it cannot be denied that popular thought in all ages has never quite discarded the tendency to think of Jesus as simply God in human form, and not really man at all. Even now there are probably hundreds of people who regard themselves as particularly orthodox Churchmen who yet do not know that the Church teaches that our Lord had a human soul and a human will.