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

by Roy Wood Sellars

When we once shake ourselves loose from these mythical, gnostic and rabbinical ideas, with their legal and poetical conceptions of ethics, and their naïve picture of the world as the seat of ethical forces struggling in a physical way against one another; when we once realize that it is meaningless to apply ethical distinctions to matter, we are led to press past these Hellenistic accretions to the simpler and nobler traditions which Christianity inherited from Jesus and the greater Hebrew prophets. Here, if anywhere, religion is in a position to solve the problem of evil. There are passages in the New Testament which breathe the same faith as that held by Deutero-Isaiah, a sort of sublime religious optimism or will to believe. For the Hebrew prophet of the exile, God is the creator and righteous ruler of the earth. "I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things." Such is monotheism of the creationalistic type in all its vigor and challenging fervor. Yet the prophet speaks and thinks in terms of world-movements and the fate of nations, and his thoughts scarcely drop from this vast setting to consider the fates of individuals. We should note further the absence of the poly-demonism of later Judaism and the evident impatience with the ancient myths and the belief in a Satan or Spirit of Evil. Had Christianity taken its departure from this high altitude, it would have been more truly monotheistic, but it would not have been the child of its age, and would not have been assimilated by the Mediterranean peoples. Let us examine the implications of this bolder and simpler faith.

There can be little doubt that the position adopted by the second Isaiah is the logical terminus of monotheism. If God be omnipotent, he must be responsible for all the evil in the world as well as for the good. In other words, this must be the best of all possible worlds. He who is a king, and not a marionette, cannot beg off from the duties of his station. To introduce Sin as a sort of hellish entity, as did Saint Augustine, is to mar our conception of deity. We no longer have that old Roman's courtier-like sycophancy, nor his nonchalance when others are condemned by divine caprice to the eternal flames. What was to him a means of manifesting God's greater glory is to us a crime which would sully our ideal of goodness. The educated world of to-day has at least come up to the level of the peasant-poet's indictment of the Calvinism of two centuries ago.

Christianity is on the horns of a terrible dilemma. It has long wavered between the bold attitude of Isaiah, softened by such devices as apologetic ingenuity could invent, and the mythological dualism current at the time of its birth. God must be totally responsible for all physical evils, at least; or else he must be thwarted by something independent of himself, whether this be an evil spirit or matter. Now scholars have pointed out that the idea of a prolonged conflict between a good and an evil power was characteristic of the Persian religion, and that this view tinged later Judaism and passed over into Christianity. Here it was met and reënforced by Neo-Platonism in the form usually called Gnosticism and Manicheism. At present, the tide has turned in favor of monotheism and against the coexistence of an evil power. We are inclined to smile at a personal devil, perhaps because superstition has made him humorous, perhaps because we know better the seat and cause of what we call evil. Science has helped to do away with the devil; but, in so doing, has it not also undermined the idea of Providence? Must not the same arrow transfix an effective God that does away with an effective Devil?

The God of the past was a realistic God; he counted for everything in the governance of the universe. The God of modern theology is fast becoming an ideal of personality. When God is thought of as a tender-hearted and perfect gentleman, the question of evil takes the following form: Can we harmonize this conception with the facts of life? Is God an agent or an ideal? We must bear in mind the fact that God is an hypothesis characteristic of the religious view of the world, and that, like every other hypothesis, it should help to explain the facts to which it is relevant. But does it do this? Is it fruitful?

I am free to confess that theodicies of all sorts strike me as proofs of the inapplicability of the religious view of the world. Yet immense dialectical ability has been displayed in the tireless search for some satisfactory theory of God's relation to the universe. A glance at these theories reveals the working of the time-spirit. When man is harsh, his god is harsh and cruel. When man is tender, his god is benevolent. And this correspondence does not complete the story. In past ages, the political organization was autocratic and unyielding. The subjects of the monarch did not dream of questioning the justice of his rule. It was not right for common men to think of such matters; it was out of their sphere of control and understanding. Besides, is not might the sanction of right? During these monarchial periods, God was thought of as a heavenly king whose power and glory and dominion was without end. This correspondence between the political organization and the theological picture betrays the sociological side of theology. All of man's ideas are human ideas, and so his idea of his God and the very personality and moral outlook of that God reflect the social standards which are in force around the individual. If human justice is cruel, God's justice is strict and unyielding. What could be more natural than this parallelism? But as punitive justice yields to ideas of mercy and sympathy, a change comes over man's conception of this heavenly replica of his own sentiments and institutions. Irrational punishment with its brutal terrors gives way to thoughts of lovingkindness.

But it is this very evolution of human morality which brings out the problem of evil in all its distinctness. Yahweh could command whole tribes to be slaughtered, and no one felt the least religious discomfort. But the man of to-day, when he allows himself to think, revolts against such heartlessness. God must be at least as merciful as man—and man would not do these things. Yet our experience tells us that pain and disaster are everywhere rampant in the world. How is it that an omnipotent and noble God permits these things to be? The line of reasoning which leads to the demand for a theodicy is simple and direct. God is a moral agent who has this peculiarity, that he can do what he wills and is therefore responsible for all that happens. But tragic things happen. Why did he permit them?

The various formulations of God's relation to the world turn about this problem. The inherent possibilities are few in number and are soon grasped and developed. If God is a limited deity, then evil can be assigned to something else. If God is unlimited, then whatever is, is somehow right. Let us glance at typical developments of these two main lines of approach.

Mr. H. G. Wells has recently startled the general public by his advocacy of a struggling deity. It is not in accordance with Christian tradition, he admits, but it is truer to the facts as we know them. But he might well have told the public that this view of his was not a new one. Long before the Christian era, the Zoroastrian Persians held just such a theory of a struggling deity combating the evil machinations of Ahriman. The faithful were exhorted to do all in their power to assist Ahura Mazda in his stern fight with darkness and contamination. This dualistic view found its way West and appears in Manicheism. It may not be well known, but it was this Manichean conception of the world that Saint Augustine gave up at his conversion to Christianity. Again and again, it found its way to the surface of Western society. Who has not heard of the Cathars or Albigenses of the Middle Ages? These people were believers in a struggling deity engaged with the powers of evil. Some of them identified the Jehovah of the Old Testament with this cruel and malignant spirit. In so doing, they showed an absence of all historical perspective, but, also, a keen ethical judgment. This tribal god of the early Jews did not harmonize with their ideals of goodness and mercy. While theirs was a darker and more superstitious outlook than an educated man of to-day would adopt, the logical basis of the system is essentially the same as the one which seems to be rising to the surface in our own times as a revolt against the smugness of traditional Christianity. The atmosphere of religion was more somber in the past; and these Cathars would have been shocked by the fine, careless rapture of the modern novelist; but they would have recognized that his view was akin to their own.

It may not be amiss to mention the fact that John Stuart Mill, the famous English philosopher of the middle of the nineteenth century, suggested that it would be truer to the experience of human beings to assume a God limited in power, though perfect in other respects. It is impossible, he thought, to harmonize the attributes of omnipotence and goodness in a divine agent, with the world as it is. This protest against the high, deductive faith of Christian monotheism was due to Mill's frank empiricism. Life must speak for itself, he held; it must justify hypotheses by their agreement with it. The traditional Christian method has been too dictatorial and too little inductive. It has started from a set of dogmas in regard to God and spun out their consequences, refusing to qualify these dogmas when the consequences did not fit the tragic character of life.

The treatment of the second logical possibility is familiar ground. Christian ethical monotheism followed Hebrew religious thought in its essentials. God is held to be an omnipotent agent who is also morally perfect. Theology knows two forms of this dogma, the Calvinistic or Augustinian, and the Arminian. Calvinism stands flatly on the thesis that God is just and that, therefore, what is done is just. Within this setting with its easy appeal to ignorance, it makes little difference whether events are right because God does them or whether God does them because they are right. Arminianism turns out, when examined, to be largely an attempt to soften the absolutism of Calvinism along certain lines. But these endless and, in the main, sterile theological controversies reveal the artificiality of the dogmas within which they are carried on. They are, when all is said, only ingenious modifications and redressings of the primary assumptions of the religious view of the world. I challenge any one to develop a really tenable system of theology, a system which is self-consistent and relevant to the world as we know it. I am certain that it cannot be done. As a student of ethics, my growing conviction has for some time been that these traditional controversies and modes of approach to human life are barren and irrelevant, because they cast absolutely no light upon human problems, social or personal. Modern ethics and theology have ceased to have any genuine commerce. The one is in touch with the sciences of biology, sociology, psychology and criminology; the other, by its very nature, can gain nothing from these sciences. Ethics is concrete and inductive. Theology is abstract and deductive.