Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

Remember another thing. We have come, in this modern time, to place the kingdom away off in another world after the close of this life. The Jews had no such belief about it. They expected it to come right here on this poor little planet of ours; and they expected that a kingdom was to be set up which was not only to place them at the head of humanity, but through them was to bless all mankind. Different thinkers among them held different views, but this in substance was the belief; and they were constantly looking for signs of this imminent revolution which was to make the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, that is, his Anointed One.

John the Baptist preached that this kingdom was coming. But he was imprisoned and beheaded, having come into conflict with the civil authority. Jesus, then, having come from Nazareth, where he had studied and thought and brooded over the divine will, takes up this broken work of John, and begins a proclamation of the gospel; and the one thing which constituted that gospel was: The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe; accept this statement. And note that "repent" on the lips of Jesus did not mean what we have been accustomed to associate with it. The New Testament word translated "repent" means change your purpose, change your method of life. You have not been in accord with the truth, you have not been obedient to God; turn about, come into accord with the divine law, become obedient to the divine message.

Jesus taught no kingdom in any other world. He believed that the kingdom was to be here. For, even after he had disappeared from the sight of men, and this reflects in the clearest possible way the burden of his message, his disciples expected, not that they were to be transferred to some other planet or into an invisible world to find the kingdom, but that Jesus was to come back, to return in the clouds of heaven, and establish the kingdom here.

The kingdom, then, that Jesus preached was a kingdom of righteousness here on this earth, among just the kind of people that we are. And, note, he said, This kingdom of God does not come by observation. You are not to say, Lo here, Lo there, look for wonders. He says, The kingdom of God is within you, or among you. It is translated both ways; and, I suppose, nobody knows which way it ought to be. I believe both. The kingdom of God that Jesus preached is essentially in us. It is also, after it is in a few of us, among us, right here already, so far as it extends, and reaching out its limits and growing as rapidly as men discern it and become obedient to its laws.

Now I have been asked a great many times how I can be sure, or practically sure, as to what sayings in the Gospels are really those of Jesus and what are traditional in their authority, what are doubtfully his. I cannot go into a long explanation this morning; but I want to suggest one line of thought. And I do this because I wish it to be the basis of a statement that Jesus has not made any of these things that are to-day labelled "Evangelical" any essential part of his gospel at all. Jesus, for example, does not preach any Garden of Eden or any Fall of Man. Jesus says nothing about any infallible book. Jesus says not a word about any Trinity. He nowhere makes any claim to be God. His doctrine concerning the future is doubtful. But one thing which I wish to insist upon is perfectly clear: the conditions of citizenship in the kingdom of God are the simplest conceivable. He says, Not those that say, Lord, Lord, not those that multiply their services and ceremonies, but those that do the will of my Father shall enter the kingdom. The only condition that Jesus ever established for membership in the kingdom of heaven is simple human goodness, never anything else.

I am perfectly well aware that somebody may quote to me, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be damned." But the reply to that would be, The acknowledged statement to-day on the part of all competent scholars is that Jesus never uttered those words. They are left out of the Revised Version of the New Testament: they are no authentic part of the story of his life or his teaching.

How can we find his words? In the first place there are the great central, luminous truths which Jesus uttered, the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of men, goodness as the condition of acceptance on the part of God. And, on the theory that he did not contradict himself, we are at liberty to waive one side those statements which grew up under the influence of later tradition, popish or ecclesiastical, and which plainly contradict these. But the main point I have in mind is one which scholars have wrought out under the name of the Triple Tradition. It takes for its central thought, "In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established." We know that the Gospels grew up through a long process of accretion after a good many years. They were not written or planned by any one person; and, so far as we know, they may not have been written by anybody whose name is traditionally connected with them to-day. If, however, we find that three of the four witnesses agree in reporting that he said or did a certain thing, we feel surer about it than when only one witness reports it. And if two report, why, even then we feel a little more certain than we do when the report is from only one. And yet, of course, the three may have omitted that which only one has recorded, and which is true. But scholars have wrought out along this line what is called the Triple Tradition; that is, they have constructed a complete story of the life and the teaching and the death of Jesus out of the words which are common to three of the gospel writers. All of them tell this same story; and this story of the Triple Tradition has no miraculous conception, it has no resurrection of the body, no ascension into heaven. The miracles are reduced to the very lowest terms, becoming almost natural and easy to be accounted for. In this story Jesus teaches none of the things of which I have been speaking.

I say, then, that along the lines of the very best critical scholarship, coming as near to the teaching of Jesus as we possibly can to-day, we are warranted in saying that this which has usurped the name of the gospel of Christ is not only not good news, but it is not the news which Jesus brought and preached. As has been said a good many times, it is a gospel about Christ instead of being the gospel of Christ.

I am ready now to make the claim that we liberals of the modern world are the ones who come nearer to preaching the gospel of Christ than any other part of the so-called Christian Church. For what is it that we preach? We preach that the kingdom of God is at hand. We preach that there is not a spot on the face of the earth where we are not at the foot of a ladder like that which Jacob saw in his dream, and which leads up to the very throne of the Almighty. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God might begin anywhere and at any time in any human heart. Note what Matthew Arnold has called the secret and the method of Jesus. He says, The secret of Jesus is that he who selfishly seeks his life shall lose it: he who throws it away for good and God finds it. Do we need to go very deeply into human life to discover the profound truth of that saying? Seek all over the world for good and happiness, and forget to look within, and you do not find it. The kingdom of heaven is within. It is in the spirit, the temper of the heart, the disposition, the life. And the secret of it is in cultivating love and truth and tenderness and care, those things which bring us into intimate connection with which we mean when we say, Be unselfish, and that in doing this we find our own souls. For the man who gives out of himself love and tenderness and care, of necessity cultivates the qualities of love and tenderness and care; and those are the ones which are the essence of all soul-building. And he who looks outside for the greatest things of life misses them; while he who looks within, and cultivates the spirit, finds God and happiness and truth.

This gospel, then, that the kingdom of God is at hand, is always ready to come, is the gospel which we proclaim. And now I wish to extend that idea a little. The form in which Jesus held his dream of human good has changed in the process of the centuries. We no longer expect a miraculous revelation of a kingdom coming out of the heavens to abide on earth. The form of it is changed; but the essence of it we hold still, the same perfect condition of men here on earth and in the future which Jesus held and proclaimed.