031. THE FALL AND THE REDEMPTION OF MAN IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION 1

THE FALL AND THE REDEMPTION OF MAN IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION¹

There is a Christian conception of evolution, and in the light of it, I propose to interpret the fall and the redemption of man. To prevent misunderstanding, I must define what I mean by evolution and what I mean by Christianity. The evolution I have in mind is not an atheistic and unteleological evolution. Evolution is not a cause but a method. God is the cause. He is in his universe, and he is the source of all its activities with the single exception of the evil activity of the human will. When I speak of evolution as the method of God, I imply that the immanent God works by law; that this law is the law of development; that God makes the old the basis of the new, and the new an outgrowth from the old. In all ordinary cases God works from within and not from without. Yet this ordinary method does not confine or limit God. He is transcendent as well as immanent. He is not simply "in all" and "through all," but he is also "above all." This conception of evolution is that of Lotze. That great philosopher, whose influence is more potent than any other in present thought, does not regard the universe as a plemtm to which nothing can be added in the way of force. He looks upon the universe rather as a plastic organism to which new impulses can be imparted from him of whose thought and will it is an expression. These impulses, once imparted, abide in the organism and are thereafter subject to its law. Though these impulses come from within, they come not from the finite mechanism, but from the immanent God. Robert Browning’s phrase, "All’s love, but all’s law," must be interpreted as meaning that the very movements of the planets and all the operations of nature are revelations of a personal and present God, but it must not be interpreted as meaning that God runs in a rut, that he is confined to mechanism, that he is incapable of unique and startling manifestations of power. The idea that gives to evolution its hold upon thinking minds is the idea of continuity. But absolute continuity is inconsistent with progress. If the future is not simply a reproduction of the past, there must be some new cause of change. In order to progress there must be either a new force, or a new combination of forces, and the new combination of forces can be explained only by some new force that causes the combination. This new force, moreover, must be intelligent force, if the evolution is to be toward the better instead of toward the worse. The continuity must be continuity not of forces but of plan. The forces may increase, nay, they must increase, unless the new is to be a mere repetition of the old. There must be additional energy imparted, new combinations brought about, and all this implies purpose and will. But through all there runs one continuous plan, and upon this plan all the rationality of evolution depends. A man builds a house. In laying the foundation he uses stone and mortar, but he makes the walls of wood and the roof of tin. In the superstructure he brings into play different laws from those which apply to the foundation. There is continuity, not of material, but of plan. Progress from cellar to garret requires breaks here and there, and the bringing in of new forces; in fact, without the bringing in of these new forces the evolution of the house would be impossible. Now substitute for the foundation and the superstructure living things like the chrysalis and the butterfly; imagine the power to work from within and not from without; and you see that true continuity does not exclude but involves new beginnings.

Evolution, then, depends on increments of force plus continuity of plan. New creations are possible because the immanent God has not exhausted himself. Miracle is possible because God is not far away, but is at hand to do whatever the needs of his moral universe may require. Regeneration and answers to prayer are possible for the very reason that these are the objects for which the universe was built. Evolution, then, does not exclude Christianity. If we were deists, believing in a distant God and a mechanical universe, evolution and Christianity would be irreconcilable. But since we believe in a dynamical universe, of which the personal and living God is the inner source of energy, evolution is but the basis, foundation, and background of Christianity, the silent and regular working of him who, in the fullness of time, utters his voice in Christ and the cross.

I have explained evolution as theistic and not atheistic evolution. So I must explain Christianity as not simply the story of the Gospels, but rather as the whole revelation of God in Christ. In a true sense, Christianity is as old as the creation. Indeed it antedates creation, for Christ is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. The historic sacrifice on Calvary is the focusing of light that was shining dimly in all the preceding ages. The revelation of God that culminated in the cross began in Eden. And Christ was the organ of this revelation. He is the Eternal Word, the only revealer of God. The preincarnate Logos, Christ before he took human flesh, was the Angel of the Covenant, the leader of the chosen people, the giver of the law on Sinai. The principle of his final sacrifice was already working, when in all the affliction of his people he was afflicted. He suffered for sin before he was born in Palestine.

It is this conception of the larger Christ that is revivifying modern theology. We are digging out the dibris with which scholasticism and deism have half filled the wells of salvation, and are taking seriously the declarations of Paul and John when they assert that in Christ is all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, that he upholds all things by the word of his power, that all things consist or hold together in him, that he fills all things with all that they contain, that he is all in all. These wonderful utterances have passed over our heads without producing effect upon us. Now we perceive that Christ is the life of nature, and that all its quivering forces are the revelation of his omniscient mind and the energizing of his omnipotent will. Now we perceive that Christ is the life of humanity and that in him alone, the revealing God, we live and move and have our being, so that he is the Light that lighteth every man, so that conscience even among the heathen is the echo of his voice, so that history, even when we call it secular, is the marshaling of the forces of him who goes forth conquering and to conquer. Now we perceive that Christ is the life of the church, and that he is actually present not only in every individual believer as the soul of his soul and the life of his life, but in the great universal organism of his sacramental host, preserving it from corruption, endowing it with his Spirit, and leading it on to its final triumph.

Think not that this larger conception of Christ will work harm to our common faith. It will only exalt our Redeemer and make it more clear that his is the only name given under heaven among men whereby we can be saved. If it is he who is King of the ages, the only God, the universal life, that became incarnate and suffered on the cross for us, then Christianity is the unique and only system of religion, and the condescension of the Highest in taking our form and nature and in becoming subject to death, even the death of the cross, becomes a motive to holiness unspeakably powerful and affecting. In the light of these conceptions of evolution on the one hand and of Christianity on the other let us examine anew the doctrine of man’s fall and of man’s redemption. And the first question is, what is man? Evolution declares that he is the product of resident forces, the outgrowth of previous forms of life, the crown and culmination of a long course of palaeontological history. Scripture declares him to be the creation of God. But if we have grasped the conception that these resident forces are only the manifestation of God’s mind and will, then we can see that the biological solution does not exclude the theological. To all intents and purposes, these forces are God; for the will of God is the only real force in nature. That this will of God works so regularly as to seem automatic, not only ought not to obscure for us its divine significance, but rather should be new proof to us of God’s unchanging faithfulness. That man is the offspring of the brute creation does not prevent him from being also the offspring of God. The fault of the development theory as held by many scientific men is that it attributes to mere matter, or force, or law, or evolution, conceived of as blind irrational agencies, what can in right reason be attributed only to purpose and will. Its advocates assume that matter is something impersonal and dead, and out of it they try to get a personal and living being called man. Rut matter is not impersonal and dead,—it is conceivable only as the energizing of an intelligent and personal will. Law and evolution are mere names for a method,—a glove which can do nothing without a hand inside of it. Man’s advent upon the scene of life can never be explained by reference simply to that which existed before him. It was due to a new impulse of that divine energy which had been resident in all preceding forms indeed, but which now added to the process a new element from the unexhausted and infinite resources of its own nature. That pre-existing forms were used as the basis of the new development does not prevent that development, so far as it is new, from being the creation of God. That Christ used water in making wine at Cana does not warrant us in saying that the wine was simply a development from the water. That five loaves and two fishes were used in feeding the five thousand does not prove that Christ’s will had nothing to do with the result. The dust from which the body of Adam was made was animate dust; lower forms of life were taken as the foundation upon which to build man’s physical frame and man’s rational powers; into some animal germ came the breath of a new intellectual and moral life. But the fact that existing material was used so far as it would go does not prevent God’s authorship of the result,—it only shows that God in creating man acted in perfect harmony with his ways in other parts of his creation. The wine in the miracle was not water because it had come from water, nor is man a brute simply because he has come from the brute. Indeed, he has not come from the brute in any proper sense,— he has come from the creative hand of God. He is an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute creation was a lower manifestation.

We are now prepared to understand the reality and the method of man’s fall. Evolution has been thought to be incompatible with any proper doctrine of a fall. It has been assumed by many that man’s immoral course and conduct are simply survivals of his brute inheritance, inevitable remnants of his old animal propensities, yieldings of the weak will to fleshly appetites and passions. This is to deny that sin is truly sin, but it is also to deny that man is truly man. As Doctor Simon has well shown, the principle of evolution requires that when man emerges in the history of life he should be not brute but man, with brute instincts under the control of reason, conscience, and will. Birds are outgrowths of reptilian life, but the reptile does not remain in the bird to drag it down and hinder its flight; when birds appear, they are not reptiles, but birds. The law of evolution would require that when man appeared he should be, not brute, but man. Man is a creature of free-will, able to put beneath his feet the lower impulses and to live for holiness and for God. That man does not, like the bird, fulfill the end of his being and live in the upper air of purity and truth, but rather like the reptile buries himself in the slime of sin, is due to a self-perversion of his powers such as the bird knows nothing of. The long course of depravity and degradation that has been universal in human history points back to a fall of humanity, and this fall is no natural development, but rather a willful departure of the very first representatives of the race from God and from his law.

Sin must be referred to freedom or it is not sin. To explain it as the natural result of weak will overmastered by lower impulses is to make the animal nature, and not the will, the cause of transgression. And that is to say that man at the beginning is not man, but brute. Dr. E. G. Robinson once said that sin explained is sin defended. I might add that sin explained is sin denied. When you can find a good reason for sin you deny its existence, for the very essence of it is irrationality, the senseless and wicked self-perversion of a free personality. Yet just such an initial self-perversion of humanity is required upon scientific principles to account for the failure of man alone, of all the orders of creation, to live according to the law of his being. Science recognizes reversion as well as progress, degeneration as well as development. The fish of the Mammoth Cave once had eyes, or at least their ancestors had. They fled from the light and they lost their sight. So man at the beginning willfully left the light of God and wandered into the darkness. He lost his eyes for holiness and truth, and he transmitted his spiritual blindness to his posterity.