To-day every individual is consciously or unconsciously longing for a fraternal community in which he can find sympathy, good-will, and an opportunity to serve his fellow-men. Capital and industry are groping for a common basis of justice and co-operation, where they can forget their present destructive feuds and hatreds and join in conserving their mutual interests and in discharging their obligations to society. All the nations of the earth are eager to perfect an agreement which will eliminate the horrible wastage of hate and war and enable them to dwell together as one great family. The Christian Church is also seeking a way in which it may adequately meet the crying needs of the individual and of society.
Is it not possible that Jesus’ social plan is the true and only way so to adjust the individual to his environment that he will find that which he is seeking? Is it not possible that Jesus’ plan provides the only practical way to eliminate the disastrous hatreds and wastage of modern industry, and to bring capital and labor into effective co-operation? Is it not possible that his idea of the fraternal community is the only satisfactory solution of our international problems? Is it not true that his simple social plan represents the historic commission of the Christian Church, and that the Church’s present divisions and most of its complex machinery are only impedimenta? Is it not possible that a whole-hearted effort to carry through his social plan in this plastic twentieth century might unite not only his nominal followers, but also the many who are not now reckoned as members of his fold? Upon the answers that the leaders of this generation make to these fundamental questions depends the future of our civilization. To the leaders in our Christian institutions of learning we look to-day for affirmative answers.
PERSONAL RELIGION AND PUBLIC MORALS
BY
ROBERT BRUCE TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D.
The last quarter of a century has seen a vast change in the general attitude toward organized religion. To some extent that change has had its points of pause and punctuation; we could tell where one paragraph ended and another began. In thought, a Robertson Smith or a Briggs case marked a period. The real range of a theological debate can never be measured by the resolution of an ecclesiastical assembly. Its main repercussion is upon the crowd, which becomes gradually conscious of the significance of the issue. The great change has come, however, almost without observation, and it may be said to have affected religion rather than theology. It has shown itself in lessened church attendance, and in the challenging of the right of the church to assume the monopoly of religious interest. The reduction in the number of men seeking to find their life-work in the Christian ministry is a grave feature; for the temper of the martyr and the soldier is not dead among us and the call for sacrifice has always in it a peculiar ring and compulsion. The Christian ministry is a great and noble calling, in which a man, if he is to have any happiness in his work, must deliberately put the world behind his back. But that particular form of sacrifice is losing its urgency. The war revealed, to those who were actively engaged in it, not so much a changed condition as unpleasant actualities in the old condition. It became wofully apparent that religious instruction had not penetrated as deeply as the religious organizations had imagined. One never knew whether to wonder most at men’s ignorance of what the Christian Church should have been teaching them, or at their indifference to some matters which the peace standard of domestic ethics regarded as vital, or at their continual and magnificent gaiety of spirit, their glorious comradeship, their mastery of fear. The war showed how little conventional religion stood for. It also made it plain that the great words of the Gospel—joy, peace, love, righteousness, sacrifice—were of the very heart of high conduct as men understood high conduct, face to face with death, in those most desperate conditions.
If one asks oneself what it is that has been going on beneath the surface to bring about so profound a change in religious outlook, one may say that it has been the challenging of the seat of authority in religion. In organized religion there have been two main conceptions of the seat of authority.
The Romanist and high-church view is that authority lies in the Church, in its continuity of tradition and in its possession of sacramental power. If men are to be left to their own devices there will be anarchy in religion. But if they will but look back to the very foundations of Christianity, they will find a body of truth steadily handed down, and an efficacy communicated by the laying on of episcopal hands, transmitted from one generation to another. They will find a divinely guided history of councils and creeds through which the deposit of truth has been safeguarded; and the doubter may commit himself with certainty to this system, which is the embodiment not only of divine truth but of human wisdom and practical knowledge. A Scottish Presbyterian is not predisposed to favor such a conception, but one has to admit its power. The majority of mankind are neither able nor willing to examine a long course of church history for themselves, and a strong, dogmatic assertion and a definite historical position have a vast power with a certain conservative and clinging and devotional type of mind. There are many people who have not sufficient intellectual daring to wrestle constantly with things for themselves. They want certainty. And so Newman and Adelaide Procter and many other equally pure souls have found rest in this obedience to authority. There is, however, particularly in this new land, a different temper springing up. The community spirit seeks inclusion rather than exclusion. It tries to use different gifts without judging between them. It will not nullify categories; it will simplify them. The question of apostolic succession, except where men are still held to belief in it by ecclesiastical authority, is ceasing to be an issue, just because this practically minded world does not see any such monopoly of spiritual power in one particular church. And, with regard to the permanence of any creed, we are in an atmosphere which tends more and more to utter its faith in the language of the day. A man may be very near to his Lord and yet unable to discern his Lord in the Athanasian Creed. The process is too long which requires that the believer search back through all those centuries of tangled historical stuff before he finds his Master. He does not need to be either a prophet or the son of a prophet who declares confidently that the sacramentarian, historically exclusive, miraculous, sanction of religion is likely to become less and less powerful.
Is, then, the seat of authority for religion in the claims of Holy Scripture? This has been the appeal of the Reformed churches. At the Reformation, when the assertion was again made of the rights of the human spirit to come directly into fellowship with Christ, Scripture of necessity took a place of new importance. It was the road of direct access to God. One can understand how, after being bound in the chains of the Roman Catholic Church, men and women found in Scripture the glorious liberty of the children of God. Is it any wonder that they brooded over it until even the translations themselves seemed to be the very breath of the Almighty? But the earliest and greatest of the reformers had no such cast-iron view of verbal inspiration as afterward came to prevail, in its turn to become a tyranny just as exacting as the old. Both Luther and Calvin knew far too much of religious history and of the Bible to be led into any such unbending position. Luther, for instance, had his pronounced views upon the Epistle of James, which he would have excluded from the Canon. He was well aware of the doubt which had prevailed as to the canonicity of the splendid Epistle to the Hebrews. The preacher of to-day is not wise who neglects Calvin on the Psalms and Calvin on Isaiah; but Calvin saw clearly that there were Aramaic elements in the 139th Psalm, and that the ascription of it to David was impossible. Gradually, however, what was really the record of a revelation came to be regarded as the revelation itself. It is not the New Testament which reveals God. It is Christ who reveals God, and it is the New Testament which gives the story of the incarnation of the Most High. In the post-Reformation days, however, when the Reformation, as a mighty revival of personal religion, was giving place to the time when men were trying to state in logical and philosophical form those wonderful experiences which they had lived through of the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible came to be used as though it were a collection of proof-texts. A creed is obviously the product of the time when the first overwhelming flood of enthusiasm has passed, and men have begun to reason about the experiences through which they have lived. Thus, in the seventeenth century the doctrinaire view of Scripture stiffened. There was no attempt to understand the history underlying this great library of sacred writings. So truculent a book as Esther was believed to be, every word of it, the breathing of the Almighty, because it found itself within the sacred boards, while so glorious a record as First Maccabees was ranked with any other piece of secular history because its date precluded its inclusion within the Canon. There was no knowledge of the fact that the early narratives of Genesis had a relationship to the Babylonian cosmogony; that, the Septuagint being witness, there had been widely varying texts of the Book of Jeremiah; that the Hebrew text of Hosea was in places in such confusion that anything more than a conjectural translation was impossible. The general and well-founded belief that Scripture was the Word of God was stretched until it became a new legalism, until it covered every word of the Authorized Version, and, in the minds of many, every comma of the splendid translation. That was an inflexible, an uncritical, an unscholarly position that was perilous. In the minds of multitudes it linked the truth in Jesus with some conundrum about Cain’s wife. It put the great causes of religion at the mercy of the negative and unbelieving critic. Many of us remember still the shock it was to our faith when we found that Scripture was being examined by the ordinary methods of critical and linguistic analysis; and yet we now realize that it is through this liberty that our faith has been re-established and set foursquare to all the winds that blow.
The present condition of things is that, while scholars have made the adjustment in their own minds, the great majority of believing people have not. That distinction between the revelation and the record of it is a delicate and subtle thing compared with the direct and unsophisticated view that every word within the boards that contain Holy Scripture is absolutely inerrant, in the most literal sense of the term. Piety and intellectual acumen do not always go together. Those who know out of a long experience what Scripture has been to them, in strengthening and comfort, are jealous with a godly zeal when they think they see heedless hands laid upon the ark. And so some good people have tried to beat back the tide by accusing scholars of unbelief, and again and again the attempt has been made to control the teaching in theological colleges in the interest of a particular theory of inspiration. The result is that the teaching of the pulpits has often become suspect by men poles apart in their general view. Some, clinging to the old ways, have been looking for heresy; others, feeling the new breath, have been wondering whether the preacher was frank. There has thus been unsettlement of a most profound character, and it is unsettlement upon a really first-class issue. The Protestant world as a whole has yet to be brought to understand that the believer’s faith in his Lord is something that will be affected in no way by a discussion of the question whether the sun did actually stand still upon Gibeon. Such a faith rests on something much more precious than the authority even of the written Word; it rests on the witness of the spirit of the believer to the revelation of God as he finds it in Christ.