CHAPTER IX
GENERAL RESULTS
The question of this third division of our inquiry is this: To what changed points of view, and to what restatements of doctrine, and so to what better appreciation of Christian truth, does the social consciousness of our time lead? The question is raised here, as in the case of the conception of religion, not as one of exact historical connection, but rather as a question of sympathetic points of contact. It means simply: With what changes in theological statements would the social consciousness naturally find itself most sympathetic?
Certain general results are clear from the start, and might be anticipated from any one of several points of view.
I. THE CONCEPTION OF THEOLOGY IN PERSONAL TERMS
In the first place, the social consciousness means, we have found, emphasis on the fully personal—a fresh awakening to the significance of the person and of personal relations. Its whole activity is in the sphere of personal relations. Hence, as in the conception of religion, so here, so far as the social consciousness affects theology at all, it will tend everywhere to bring the personal into prominence, and it certainly will be found in harmony ultimately with the attempt to conceive theology in terms of personal relations. These are for the social consciousness the realest of realities; and if theology is to be real to the social consciousness, then it must make much of the personal. Theology, thus, it is worth while seeing, is not to be personal and social, but it will be social—it will do justice to the social consciousness—if it does justice to the fully personal; for, in the language of another, "man is social, just in so far as he is personal."[54]
The foreign and unreal seeming of many of the old forms of statement, it may well be noted in passing, has its probable cause just here. They were not shaped in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. They got at things in a way we should not now think of using. The method of approach was too merely metaphysical and individualistic and mystical, and the result seems to us to have but slight ethical or religious significance. The arguments that now move us most, in this entire realm of spiritual inquiry, are moral and social rather than metaphysical and mystical. It is interesting to see, for example, how such arguments for immortality as that of the simplicity of the soul's being—and most of those used by Plato—and how such arguments even for the existence of God as those of Samuel Clarke from time and space, have become for us merely matters of curious inquiry. We can hardly imagine men having given them real weight. A similar change seems to be creeping over the laborious attempts metaphysically to conceive the divinity of Christ. The question is shifting its position for both radical and conservative to a new ground—from the metaphysical and mystical to the moral and social; though some radicals who regard themselves as in the van of progress have not yet found it out, and so find fault with one for not continually defining himself in terms of the older metaphysical formulas and shibboleths. The considerations, in all these questions and in many others, which really weigh most with us now, are considerations which belong to the sphere of the personal spiritual life. Ultimately, no doubt, a metaphysics is involved here too; but it is a metaphysics whose final reality is spirit, not an unknown substance—Locke's "something, I know not what."
The unsatisfactoriness of even so honored a symbol as the Apostles' Creed, as a permanently adequate statement of Christian faith, must for similar reasons become increasingly clear in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. One wonders, as he goes carefully over it, that so many concrete statements could be made concerning the Christian religion, which yet are so little ethical. The creed seems almost to exclude the ethical. It has nothing to say, except by rather distant implication, of the character of God, of the character of Christ, or of the character of men. The life of Christ between his birth and his death are untouched. The considerations that really weigh most with us—as they did with the apostles—in making us Christians, certainly do not come here to prominent expression. This whole difference of atmosphere is the striking fact; and were it not that we instinctively interpret its phrases in accordance with our modern consciousness, we should feel the difference much more than we do.
What the previous discussion has called the truly mystical—the recognition of the whole man, of the entire personality—is coming in increasingly to correct both the falsely mystical and the falsely metaphysical. We are arguing now, in harmony with the social consciousness, from the standpoint of the broadly rational, not from that of the narrowly intellectual.