The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

Mithraism had an initiatory service in which the proselytes were admitted into the faith. The liturgy of this service is still extant and we know that it represented a mystical dying and rebirth in which the guilt of the old life is removed and a new immortal life is created through the spirit. The initiates spoke of themselves as reborn for eternity. "So striking," writes Pfleiderer the German critic, "is the connection of these ideas with Paul's teaching of Christian baptism as a community of death and resurrection with Christ (Romans 6) that the thought of historical relation between the two cannot be evaded.... Mithraism also had a sacrament corresponding to the Christian eucharist at which the sanctified bread and a cup of water or even wine served as mystic symbols of the distribution of the divine life to Mithra-believers."

When we bear in mind how little importance Paul attached to the actual life and ethical teaching of Jesus, we are not surprised at the frequent suggestion that Paul was the real founder of both liturgical and theological Christianity. He did not create this liturgy but found it to hand. The early church followed this natural impulse and added to the simpler inherited rites. Into the psychology of Paul's conception of the Christ it is difficult to enter. He was probably an enthusiast with the tendency to exalted moods peculiar to epileptics and yet with high mental ability. He felt himself inspired. He gives us to understand that he was subject to visions, and it is well known that religious excitement is capable of welding together the myriad suggestions which play upon the self. We can comprehend the work of Paul, one of the main founders of Christianity, only when we see him as the mystical interpreter weaving the Jewish traditions of the soberer type, the apocalyptic outlook of such books as Daniel and Ezra, the mystery cults of the Hellenistic world and the theories of the Stoic philosophy into one whole, dominantly supernaturalistic. Scholars will continue to differ in regard to the comparative proportions of the ingredients he fused together, but few will gainsay that Paul's teaching is a product of many sources. In this connection a very significant fact should be noted: although the Pauline epistles are the earliest records of Christianity, "aside from the crucifixion, not a single fact in the life of Jesus can be gleaned from these epistles, nor do they record a single saying of Jesus."

We shall next pass to a brief study of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels, the figure which has become endeared to humanity and with which the Western world has associated its noblest sentiments. But even the present study of some of the more mystical elements in Christianity must have persuaded the reader that we have in this movement the focussing of the complex life of ancient times. The circle of ideas passionately held by the members of the church was not created by any one man or group of men. It was the flowering out of primitive ideas and ethical aspirations. Moral idealism goes hand in hand with cosmological myth. We who have regained the nerve which that age had lost may have the gift and high adventure of separating moral truth from theological illusion.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROPHET OF NAZARETH

Of recent years a strong reaction against the Pauline interpretation of Christianity—or shall we say the Pauline type of Christianity?—has set in. We have so completely outgrown the primitive notions of sacrifice, and the Jewish belief in the necessity of an atonement is so contrary to our idea of God, that Paul's rabbinical theology does not strike a sympathetic chord. After all is said, we are descendants in the spirit of those gentiles for whom Paul's message was nonsense. Intellectually, we are the sons of Plato and Aristotle, of Archimedes and Justinian. During the Middle Ages, the ideas of the period of the Graeco-Roman decline were mingled with the social ideas of feudalism. To-day, science and philosophy have lifted us back to the serener heights of classic times, and bid fair to surpass that glorious period in solid construction if not in delicacy of inspiration. The result is, that the social mind is dropping those elements from Christianity which do not harmonize with our moral and intellectual temper. Now, the synoptic gospels are of a nature to lend themselves to this shifting of interest from the theological and the sacrificial to the more human and ethical. They present an idealized picture of Jesus Christ after the flesh, whereas Paul preaches only the second Adam, Jesus Christ after the spirit. Paul was interested in the world to come and the heavenly world above the clouds where sit the æons, the principalities, and the powers. We are interested chiefly in the world here and now, in social justice and democratic fellowship. As humanitarianism became aggressive, Christianity reflected the change. Is there any reason to suppose that its theological envelope will be able to place a boundary to the extent of this change? The real forces at work are those of to-day, those of our own spirit and mind. Only for a time will they seek to find themselves in the past. Only while they are gathering force and confidence will they masquerade as a mere revival of a truer primitive Christianity.

It is extremely suggestive that the more democratic movements within Christianity have always stressed the kindlier, more human, and more homely phases of the bible. The followers of St. Francis of Assisi were, at first, teachers of humility and brotherly love; and Francis, himself, modeled his life after that of Jesus as he conceived him. The disciples of Wycliffe made their home among the peasantry and artisans of Mediæval England. John Ball is a good interpreter to us of the social outlook they nourished. It appears that they thought of Jesus as like one of themselves, read his life in terms of their own pressing problems. Pietism and methodism have always inclined toward the gospel Jesus in preference to the Pauline Christ; but their social outlook was far too negative and passive. Democracy must be aggressive, non-mystical, triumphant. It must exalt reason while not forgetting tenderness. With the growth of modern democracy of a socialistic kind, Jesus the Carpenter with his kindly word for the poor and downtrodden and his scorn for the haughty and rich has become the symbol and sign of a new social ethics. It is evident that religion is not independent of the social temper of an age. Religion points to the seat of power as a compass points to the pole. When man's sore need made him cry out for mercy and succor in the primitive days, his ignorant helplessness inevitably peopled nature with gods of fertility. Illusion and need created the gods of myth and ritual. Remove this setting of ignorance and illusion, and put in its place a sense of power, and need will point to the proper use of that power. Justice and mercy and reason, used socially for a social purpose, will surely become the religion of an intelligent democracy. In the older forms of religion, man was a petitioner holding out helpless hands of prayer; in the religion to come, man will be a creator bravely taking his destiny into his own hands. What a reversal! Yet it is no greater than the contrast between the primitive world we have been studying, with its mana and taboos and magic, and the modern world with its knowledge of chemistry and electricity and its deep probing into the very soul of man.

But we must return to the explanation of the popular tendency to exalt the man Jesus over the Pauline Christ. Is the explanation far to seek? Theology of a recondite character has always been the expression of reflection and leisure. The religion of the masses has always been, on the contrary, in terms of pictures and emotions connected with their everyday needs. The rabbinical concepts of Paul were foreign to their experience, while the philosophical mysticism of John was appreciated only by a few who felt the beauty of the language and the strange charm of its figures of speech. To the common people Jesus was a loving friend who comforted them in their sorrows, and the witness to a heaven in which all tears would be wiped away. Of course, we must not be too romantic in our interpretation of the outlook of the masses. These sentiments often attached themselves to the given theology with dogmatic fierceness; and in the background superstitious fears were only too apt to smolder. But, on the whole, it is not false to say that the gospel story of the life of Jesus with its simple pathos and vivid diction appealed to the masses, while his personality met their ideal of nobility and moral grandeur. Jesus, the man who was also the Son of God, who came upon earth for them and for some reason died for them, affected them as nothing else could. And is it not a wonderful conception? Yes; in the right setting, there has been none grander in all literature. It is a masterpiece of lyricized mythology. But, when we have outlived its setting, it can affect us only as great literary masterpieces do, when we consent to throw ourselves into the æsthetic attitude.