023. MODERN TENDENCIES IN THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT'

MODERN TENDENCIES IN THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT’

I Salute this great new institution, this infant Hercules, the achievements of whose cradle promise such wonders to come. The breadth of conception which determines its policy is no less admirable than the solidity of its material foundations. Whatever the term university may originally have meant, it has come to designate a collection of schools which teaches the whole circle of the sciences and is hospitable to all knowledge. There was a time when theology was counted the queen of the sciences, and was granted the central and commanding place among the various disciplines. Though that day is past, and the right of theology to lord it over the world is now as passionately denied as it was once passionately maintained, the greatest universities have never done such discredit to the higher nature of man as to shut theology out. The Register of the University of Chicago is witness that in your judgment theology has at least her equal claim to a hearing at the bar of enlightened reason. Her main contentions, however suspected and questioned they may be, still have power to awaken the deepest interest. Great movements in the world of faith have importance for us all. They have their influence not only upon practical life, but upon all other realms of knowledge. I trust then that I do not transcend the proprieties of this notable academic occasion when I take for my theme, "Modern Tendencies in Theological Thought."

Suffer a single word of preliminary statement with regard to the point of view from which my observations are conducted. Theology claims to be a science because it is the recognition, classification, and interpretation, by reason, of objective facts concerning God and concerning God’s relations to the universe. Theology, however, is a product of reason, not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, but in the larger sense of the mind’s whole power of knowing. Man does not consist of intellect alone, and, paradoxical as it may seem, man does not know with the intellect alone. States of the sensibility are needed to know music; a feeling for beauty is requisite to any understanding of plastic art; and the morally right is not rightly discerned except by those who love the morally right. In a similar way there are states of the affections which are necessary to know God. It is the pure in heart that see God. He that loveth God knoweth God; and this is the doctrine of Immanuel Kant: "This faith of reason," he says, "is founded on the assumption of moral tempers." If one were absolutely indifferent to moral laws, he continues, religious truths "would still be supported by strong arguments from analogy, but not by such as an absolutely skeptical bent might not be able to overcome."

Theology is based upon faith; but theology still claims to be a science, because faith is not speculation or im agination, but the act of the integral soul, the exercise of reason in this larger sense. Faith is not only knowledge; it is the highest knowledge, because it is the insight not of one eye alone, but of the two eyes of the mind, intellect on the one hand and love to God on the other. With one eye you can see an object as flat, but if you wish to see around it and get the stereoptic effect, you must use two. It is not the theologian but the undevout astronomer whose science is one-eyed, and therefore incomplete. Faith brings us in contact with and gives us understanding of realities which to mere sense alone are as if they were not. The errors of the rationalist are the errors of defective vision. What he cannot see he declares to have no existence, and what he does see lacks truth and proportion. A woman of rank once said to Turner, the painter, that she could not see in nature such effects as he depicted upon his canvas. The artist replied: "Ah, madam, don’t you wish you could?" He had a sense of beauty which she had not. So the Scripture speaks of the eyes of the heart, and intimates that they must be enlightened before we can come to a knowledge of religious truth.

Now theology is in large part the effort to justify to the one eye what was originally seen by the two; or, in other words, to find rational confirmation and explanation of the facts certified to us by faith. It is not wonderful, it is only natural, that with this two-fold origin of our religious knowledge there should be at different times a predominance of the one element over the other. Insight at one time overtops logic and logic at another time overtops insight. For this reason the history of theological thought is, like the history of thought in general, a history not of rectilinear but of spiral progress. Excessive confidence in one source of knowledge provokes revolt. Advocacy of the other goes to the extent of utter denial of the first. The next generation comes back to the element that had been denied, but grasps it now more intelligently in an organic synthesis with truth gotten from the other source. But theology stands now on a higher plane than it did before. It not only sees with both eyes, but the astigmatism that saw things double is corrected, and it is perceived that a true science is inseparable from religion.

It is, I believe, in the interest of no sect or school, but only in the interest of simple scientific truth, that I speak to-day of recent tendencies of theological thought. I call your attention to them because the element of truth in them gives to them a certain value, though the element of error needs to be eliminated if we would get from them an unqualified result of good. We must acknowledge that the exaggerations of mediaeval and of post-Reformation theology, and its pretense to a knowledge beyond what is written, have by a natural reaction given place to a questioning of much that is true and fundamental. Gnosticism has given place to agnosticism, not so much with regard to the existence of God as with regard to the person and work of Christ. The raw sailor who was ordered to steer toward the north star was found to have lost his course and to be driving his vessel toward quite a different quarter of the heavens, but his excuse was that he "had sailed by that star." Current theology for the last twenty years in Germany, and now at length in this country, has sailed by the pole star that used to guide it,—the deity and atonement of our Lord,—and it becomes a serious question whether the star has changed its place or whether theology has gotten off its proper track.

Though this theology presents a conception of our Lord quite new to this generation, its watchword nevertheless is: "Back to Christ." This phrase expresses a revolt from the old orthodoxy, and at the same time suggests a reason for the result. Supernaturalism on the one hand and dogma on the other are held to be accretions, if not excrescences, upon original Christianity. Science, it is thought, must strip off these integuments and go back to the earlier Jesus, who was only a moral teacher and the best of men. Some would call this Jesus the historical Christ, others would call him the ideal Christ, but both classes would agree that we must give up the Christ of supernaturalism and dogma, and must go back to a Christ who can stand the tests of modern scientific investigation. When Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh, was asked to go back for his church government to the Fathers, he replied that he had no objection to antiquity, but that he preferred to go back still farther to the grandfathers, namely, the apostles. So there is a great truth in this phrase, "Back to Christ," and the main purpose of my address is to vindicate it. I too would go back to Christ, but in a larger and deeper sense than the phrase commonly bears. I would go back to Christ as to that which is original in thought, archetypal in creation, immanent in history; to the Logos of God, who is not only the omniscient reason, but also the personal conscience and will, at the heart of the universe. I would go back farther than to the birth of the Son of Mary, namely, to the ante-mundane life of the Son of God. I would go back to Christ, but I would carry with me and would lay at his feet all the new knowledge of his ( greatness which philosophy and history have given. I would reach the true Christ, not by a process of exclusion, but by a process of inclusion. And this I claim to be an application of the methods of science, when science possesses herself of all accessible facts and uses all her means of knowledge.

We must judge beginnings by endings and not endings by beginnings. Evolution only shows what was the nature of the involution that went before. Nothing can come out that was not, at least latently, in the germ. I must interpret the acorn by the oak, not the oak by the acorn. Only as I know the glory and strength of the mighty tree can I appreciate the meaning and value of the nut from which it sprang. "We can understand the Amoeba and the Polyp," says Lewes, "only by a light reflected from the study of man." It is only an application of this method of interpreting the germ by what comes out of it, when Christian faith sees in Christ the source of the whole modern movement toward truth and righteousness, makes his historic appearance upon earth the beginning of a spiritual kingdom of God, and so recognizes him as divine Wisdom and Love incarnate. I would go back to Christ, but I would let nature and humanity and the church tell the true nature of him from whom they all derived their being and in whom they all consist.