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

by Roy Wood Sellars

According to the teaching of Gnosticism, the soul was in danger of destruction or of dire calamities unless it possessed the proper preparation for its journey after death. The best means of safety was the participation in the life of some savior-god who had vanquished the powers of darkness and evil. It is evident that the world-setting of Gnosticism was not far different from that of Christianity. They were products of the same age, outgrowths of a similar soil. The advantage which Christianity had was its connection with a noble personality and the ethical background which this gave it. Gnosticism was oriental far more than it was Greek. Had it been connected with the ethical teaching of the classic Greek tradition, had a myth of the resurrection of some noble teacher like Plato arisen to control the phantasy of the oriental mind, the result would not have been far different from Christianity.

It was only natural that Gnosticism with its belief in a savior-god should feel itself drawn to Christianity with its similar teaching. Jesus was regarded by the Christian gnostics as divine, as an eternal being who had manifested himself historically in fulfillment of his function of mediator. The Christian congregations were thus forced to take another step in the deification of Jesus. For Paul, he was still a man, the second or spiritual Adam who began a new dispensation. For the earlier Christians, he was the God-selected Messiah. He now became a god who was also the son of God. The evolution was inevitable in the intellectual environment of the time. But the Christian congregations, as represented by their clearest thinkers, wished to avoid gnostic extremes and to keep near the historical basis and the ethical monotheism of the best Hebrew tradition. Jesus was God, but he was also man. In this way, arose the doctrine of the incarnation. Instead of being a monument of mystical insight as theologians tell us, it was the consequence of a problem forced upon the Church. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the attempt to combine gnostic polytheism and monotheism. The only way three can be made one is by a mystery, so a mystery it became. It is a bit of verbal gymnastic or a formal solution of an impossible problem which the pressure of events had forced upon the Church.

Christianity was now on the high-road to a theology. To enter the Hellenistic world and not be forced to develop a theology was simply impossible. The first fruit of this entrance into the intellectual world of the time was the Fourth Gospel or the so-called Gospel according to John. Scholars have begun to interpret this gospel as an attempt to combine the older Christian tradition with the theological speculations of the age. The beginning of the gospel strikes a new note which separates it immediately from the synoptics. "In the beginning was the Word (Logos) and the Word was with God and the Word was God." What is this Word or Logos with which the historical Jesus was identified? For Philo, the Alexandrian Jew who played such an important part in the theological speculation of the time, the Logos was a second God, the reflection of his glory, the only begotten Son, the actual creator of the world, his active agent at work in events. It is not going too far to assert that, without the speculations of Philo, the Fourth Gospel could not have been written. And yet Philo was merely developing and applying to the Old Testament the writings of the stoic philosophy and the teaching of Plato. Does it not follow that, in the Fourth Gospel, we have the more theosophic portions of ancient philosophy attached externally to the life of the Prophet of Nazareth? Under such conditions of origin, how can we begin to separate reason and revelation? Gnosticism, stoicism, platonism, the Old Testament, the stories of the life of Jesus, the broadening of Christianity, all went together to make possible the mystic theology of this gospel.

But the more Jesus was transformed into a god, the more he lost his human characteristics. The figure of Jesus becomes elusive and shadowy; he lives among men but is not of them. To make God a man or man a second God was an impossible task. When all is said, the Fourth Gospel performs this task about as well as it could be done, yet Jesus is no longer a Galilean peasant but a mystic being who speaks in riddles.

This vital interplay of Christianity and Hellenistic thought led to the passing away of the older Messianic idea with its distinct limitations. A noble monotheism was the result, while the concrete, human element which the historical origins of Christianity had contributed to it prevented this monotheism from losing sight of human problems. The value of Christianity lies in its ethics but it is doubtful whether the ethics could have become effective unless it had been carried by the more chaotic beliefs which we usually call religious. There can be little doubt that some religious system would have conquered the Roman empire; the educational level was too low to enable the better type of philosophy to dominate the life of the mass of the people. Magic and other-worldism were rampant because the social and political organization was unsatisfactory and mental discipline was not wide-spread. In brief, the world was still at the mythological level and was not yet prepared for a higher plane. This being so, the success of Christianity was the best thing which could have happened.

Later phases of the evolution of Christianity force us to qualify this position that its success was the best thing which could have happened. In order to escape the dangers which free theosophizing brought, the leaders of the Christian congregations felt the need of a firmer organization. The result was the gradual concentration of moral and doctrinal authority in the hands of bishops. The early Church had been democratic in polity but the times were not ripe for such democracy and slowly elders were chosen to be leaders. These elders were shepherds or bishops, that is, spiritual overseers. Soon they claimed and were granted life-tenure and greater authority. Every analogy from the Old Testament and from the larger political organization of the time worked in their favor. This assumption of authority on the part of the bishops is well represented by the letter of warning sent out by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch. "Obey the Bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and the Presbyters as the Apostles, but honor the Deacons as the law of the Lord.... Whoever honors the Bishop is honored of God; whoever does aught behind the Bishop's back, serves the devil." The natural result of this changed organization was the doctrine of Apostolic succession. With this doctrine went another, the belief in the Apostolic Origin of the articles of faith. The flexible growth of Christianity was at an end. There arose a series of dogmas enunciated by Councils of bishops and these were forced upon Christianity as authoritative. Free enquiry and speculation was at an end. A religion with a creed had appeared, a thing unknown before in the history of ancient thought.

When Protestantism arose, it made a half-hearted appeal to the spirit of free inquiry. Protestantism was, however, a complex movement with decided limitations in the motives at work and the knowledge on which to build. The old church organization, molded on the lines of the Roman empire, was discarded and the function of the priesthood was changed, but the intellectual attitude and the creed upheld remained practically the same. Some of the more radical branches of the movement like the baptists of Northern Italy were suppressed too soon to allow their influence to be felt. On the whole, Protestantism was hampered by the New Testament canon which it inherited from the later stages of the evolution of Christianity. It seldom went seriously back of the stage at which Jesus was deified. Its reforms were social and political rather than theological. The tendency was to establish the bible as ultimate authority without investigation as to its origin. The consequence of this establishment of the bible as the final court of appeal was decidedly harmful since it set reason and experience over against a supposed revelation. So far as Protestantism itself was concerned, it did not have in it, as a consequence of this bibliolatry, the intellectual vitality necessary to a true evolution. Had it not been for the larger social, scientific and philosophical developments which sprang up at the same time and founded themselves on reason and experience, the protestant revolt would have ended in a blind alley. There is every reason to believe, however, that it helped to break the tyranny of the theological view of the world and to free the human spirit for new endeavors. Protestantism, just because it was a revolt, could not attain sufficient unity and power to stamp out intellectual freedom. The modern world was too complex to be dominated by religion. But we have already indicated the conditions which gave rise to the higher criticism whose results we have been summarizing.

We must frankly ask ourselves what features of historical Christianity are congruent with our modern life. The Hellenistic world to which dogma and ritual are mainly due is a thing of the past, existent for no one but the scholar. Ours is a new world with new ideas, new problems and new possibilities. Does the recognition of historical continuity preclude the acknowledgment of very radical changes?

I am certain that the deification of Jesus will be given up step by step. He was not born miraculously, nor was he preëxistent as the Word or Logos. These terms do not fit into an outlook dominated by science. To call him the Son of God in an exclusive sense is not warranted by the facts, nor has it any clear meaning for the present age. To the old Greek, Egyptian, and Roman, the idea was familiar; many of the patrician families traced their descent to Apollo or Jupiter. But such a literal interpretation of the phrase has no sanction for us, and any other than a literal meaning is essentially meaningless. Jesus was a noble and tender-hearted man with the beliefs of his age. To speak of him as ideally perfect and sinless is absurd just because these terms are absolutes where relatives alone have meaning. Like most theological terms they cut themselves loose from their necessary setting, which, in this case, is human nature and society.

When the necessary critical work has been done, what is left of the stately theology reared by Church Fathers, councils and scholastics? Apparently only a mellowed religion with a universalistic outlook and a strong ethical trend. This mellowness and this universalism were not qualities present in perfection from the start, although we cannot say that Christianity was antagonistic to them. Mellowness takes time. I cannot but feel that men like St. Francis, Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Melancthon, Wesley, on the ecclesiastical side, and men like Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Fichte, Darwin, and Mazzini, on the laic side, have contributed to this mellowness. From this point of view, we can best describe modern Christianity as an evolution of Hebrew ethical monotheism along tenderer and more human lines under the stimulus of many very noble personalities.