A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life

by T. Edmund Harvey

So lofty is the thought that one may wonder whether, if these words had not come down to us as they have done, and some later Christian mystic had dared to utter this as his ideal, he would not have been treated as a madman or a heretic. It is hard to think of what it means: a unity of Christians one with another, even as there is unity between the Divine Father and the unique Son.

In the bygone days of scholastic theology men might have gone on to unfold the meaning of this by showing how unity of substance did not remove the difference of person; But these thoughts do not live for us to-day as for our forefathers. We must seek to find the meaning of Christ's union with the Father, not by the road of medieval metaphysics, but by some method which may appeal to our moral consciousness.

Is it not a fact that Christ is most truly revealed to us as in unity with the Father in his identification of himself with suffering and degraded humanity, as most truly Divine when he eats with publicans and sinners, pours out his strength [p.25] for the sick and suffering, and his life for those who have rejected him and at best have misunderstood him?

The Church, then, is most likely to attain to that inward unity for which her Founder prayed by following the guidance of his life. She will be most like him in laying upon herself and claiming as her own the sufferings and evils that befall or should befall, men in the world without; least like him and least likely to attain this Divine unity when she claims rights and privileges for herself, when she insists on her superiority, when she turns from her the publican and sinner, or leaves them to meet the punishment which is their due.

The union of Christians with each other is to be witness to the world of the Divine mission of Jesus. Men are to believe on him because they see how his life and spirit hold together communities with differing organisations and men of widely varying personality. The union is not to destroy personality or variety of character, but to underlie all difference. It is no external machinery to unite us in a single visible organisation by which individuality would be stamped out or fettered in growth. There is little trace of any such machinery in the earliest history of the Church, and the ages and places where it has been most perfect have not been those which we think of as nearest in spirit to Christ, nor those men most like Him whose lives have been spent merely in the development of such organisation. [p.26 ]

Perhaps the only one of the first group of disciples who possessed powers of organisation was Judas Iscariot; and some critics may say that he at least has had an apostolic succession of followers throughout the history of the Church. One remembers the terrible saying of Renan [2]: L'histoire de l'Eglise sera le plus souvent désormais l'histoire des trahisons que subira l'idée de Jesus; and though no churches have been dedicated to SS. Ananias and Sapphira, they have become in practice the patrons of too many Christian lives. But if we cannot wish for an external unity such as that for which many good men plead, we have, nevertheless, constantly to strive after a deeper union of spirit in the service of our fellows, in the search after truth, in love to our Lord.

First let us take our need of sincerity. Perhaps nothing so holds many men of to-day from Christ as the sense of the insincerity of those who call themselves Christians. Our worship, our hymns and prayers, are full of unreality; we persuade ourselves, perhaps, that we still believe in dogmas which have ceased to have any influence upon our lives. We shut our eyes to new truths because we are really afraid to be free, and what was the chalice of a new truth to our fathers becomes a poison-cup to us and our children. If the Church is to regain and to retain the respect of honest thinkers we must welcome fair-minded inquiry wherever it be directed, and not fear to open our eyes to the sun. [p.27]

And it is not only intellectual sincerity in accepting new truths that is needed; if the old truths are to be made real to our day, we must be prepared to translate them into language which people can understand. It is worse than useless often to attempt to hand them on in the garments of old words by which they were clothed in former days, for as truth is a living thing, and words fade and lose their meaning, the form in which it is rightly expressed must change from age to age. It is not enough, then, to repeat some passage of Scripture, some familiar verse of religious poetry, or some words of a man of God of former days, to bring help to men to-day, even though the words are full of meaning to us because we have entered into the inward experience which they represent. Some have heard the words so often that they are now almost meaningless; others cannot be touched by a mode of thought which was the outcome of another time. They need the truths that lie behind the old words and the outworn methods of thinking, but they must be re-expressed if they are to reach them.

The eternal realities of which the New Testament writers had hold, which filled their souls and made them struggle with words and metaphors to express some glimpse of what they felt, could never be completely represented by any language. Yet we have taken the words of the Scripture and treated them as though they were so many phials of truth in solution. The exquisite flowers of love and [p.28] faith have been crushed and bruised in the mortar of the theologians to produce the infallible dogmas of our orthodoxy. But the inward life does not live upon the abstractions of the theologian any more than our outward life upon the compressed drugs of the chemist, however perfect the process of their making may have been. Cannot we, then, honestly confess that our dogmas are but imperfect human attempts to fathom the deep things of God, symbols that stand for something which transcends them as much as the mother's face surpasses the poor drawing which her child may make of it? Such a drawing can only be understood by the eyes of love, and we need the same spirit to make our dogmas full of meaning.

It is not only in intellectual matters that the Church has been insincere. Many who are no thinkers feel that she has not honestly attempted to carry out her own teachings. "Blessed are the gentle," "Blessed are the poor in spirit," are explained in many a commentary, but illustrated by too few lives. Yet the only adequate commentary on the beatitudes is the life of a real follower of Christ.