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  WRITINGS OF S PARKES CADMAN
  by S. Parkes Cadman
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A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by S. Parkes Cadman,
compiled for study and devotional reading.

  Chapters: 8

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 0. Cadman, S. Parkes - Library
    2. 00. The Christ of God
    3. 01.     The Christ of Christian Tradition
    4. 02.     The Threefold Approach to the Person of Christ
    5. 03.     The Christ of a Growing Experience
    6. 04.     The Christ in the Modern World
    7. 05.     The Christ of to-Morrow
    8. S.   A New Day for Missions

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  CHAPTER 1: 0. CADMAN, S. PARKES - LIBRARY
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Cadman, S. Parkes - Library Cadman, S. Parkes - The Christ of God S. A New Day
for Missions


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  CHAPTER 2: 00. THE CHRIST OF GOD
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THE CHRIST OF GOD BY S. PARKES CADMAN, D.D., LL.D.

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1929 COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped.

Published March, 1929.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in
any form.

SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS LINOTYPERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO

MR. JOHN CHARLES AND MRS. CARROLL SHAFFER AS AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THEIR PERSONAL
KINDNESS TO THE AUTHOR AND IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF THEIR VALUABLE
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CIVIC AND CULTURAL LIFE OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
COMMONWEALTH OF ILLINOIS

PREFACE The chapters of this book were originally given as lectures on the
Shaffer Foundation before The Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and
are published at the request of The University Faculty. I am greatly indebted to
the Reverend Oscar L. Joseph, Litt.D., and Professor Edwin Lewis, D.D., for
their help in the preparation of the book for publication.


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  CHAPTER 3: 01.     THE CHRIST OF CHRISTIAN TRADITION
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CHAPTER I THE CHRIST OF CHRISTIAN TRADITION No issue before the human mind
to-day is fraught with greater importance than a correct apprehension of the
significance of Jesus. He has always compelled the reverent attention of
reflective and serious people. Their response to His supreme religious genius
demonstrates how deeply it has absorbed the variant multitudes who have
expressed their consciousness of Him in speech, in literature, in art, in
architecture, and chiefly in their efforts to emulate His example and to do His
will. The historic theological controversies waged around His person and mission
manifest the eagerness of the disputants rightly to understand the purpose of
His being. Our ambiguous era is preoccupied with a multiplicity of perplexing
problems. But none of them is more challenging in nature or vital in result than
the answer to that old inquiry: “What think ye of Christ?”

Scholars who do anything, however imperfect, toward establishing a larger,
clearer vision of Him, help to satisfy the world’s sorest need. Saints whose
fellowship with Him penetrates behind learned opinions and intellectual
attitudes perceive Him superior to changing categories and forms of thought, and
their experience illuminates the discussion.

Every sincere approach to Jesus is more or less contributory to the general
welfare. His revelation of the invisible God has in it the opulence of true
life. His consciousness of the All Father was supplemented by His familiarity
with the world of the here and now. His standards of man’s ethical and spiritual
relationship to the seen and unseen worlds necessitate the consideration not
only of philosophy and theology, but of science and psychology, of politics and
economics. His teaching and the elements it introduced or sanctioned bear on the
totality of human existence here and hereafter. Nor can what He authorized be
ignored or violated without jeopardizing that existence. It is therefore
gratifying to observe that an increasing number of men and women are convinced
that civilization’s beneficial progress must be more directly swayed by the
motives and the principles of Jesus.

Amid the volcanic upheavals and driftings of time He remains the watershed of
faith for Christians, and for many non-Christians who accept the spiritual
order. Whatever came before Him predicted Him; all that followed Him proceeded
afresh from Him. He is the Lord of the House of Life, and the Friend and Lover
of its occupants. His compassionate regard for sentient creation made His
sacrificial service a delight. “He went about doing good not with a sense of
duty, but with that sense of peace that comes to any creature in the fulfilment
of its being.” [1] The vision of truth and its beauty has been vouchsafed to [1]
William Ellery Leonard: The Poet of Galilee, p. 34. devout and gifted souls in
every age. But the choicest spirits among them only approximated its wider
ranges. Jesus is the sole exception. In Him “there shines more of the unexplored
and mysterious goodness of this universe, and in Him there is more promise of
that unimaginable blessedness that may sometime flood the world, than in any
other. Through Him we make better contacts with that which lifts the values of
human life to the highest level.” [2] The majority believe in Him, not on
metaphysical or psychological but on experimental grounds. Yet their experience
is far from being exclusively subjective. It originates in the individual, to be
tested and confirmed by the consentient testimony of the Christian centuries,
and of the Church as God’s most characteristic creation in Christianity. Such a
combination checks the vagaries of emotionalism and tones down the extravagances
of fanaticism. It enlists the support of substantiated facts; blends the ideal
with the real, and [2] Henry N. Wieman: The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, p.
127. corroborates its claims by the unbiased results of historical
investigation. The problem of relating faith to history is always with us.
Lessing was doubtless correct in his assertion that “contingent truths of
history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” This judgment
was evoked, however, by the emphasis of eighteenth-century apologetics upon
miracles as a convincing evidence of the credibility of Christianity. But the
prevalent theology of to-day is disposed to agree with Bergson that intuition
rather than reason is the creative faculty of our highest knowledge. Faith also
is reason in its loftiest mood; a spiritual determination based on loyalty to
conscience and the law of right, and not upon ratiocination. [3] From this
viewpoint religious beliefs are not entirely dependent upon alleged historical
events any more than upon dogmatic declarations, though both have their place
and meaning as secondary lines of proof. The time has certainly passed, if it
ever was, in [3] Cf. D. M. Baillie: Faith in God and Its Christian Consummation,
p. 231 ff. which the oldest Christian literature could be treated as a tissue of
forgeries and deceptions. For scientific inquiry it was an episode, “in which,”
to quote Harnack, “much was learnt and after which much must be forgotten.” The
general position and particular details of that literature may be accepted as
trustworthy. But it is through personality, whether human or divine, as the
gateway of all revelation, that we possess and exercise the faith that matters.
In His personality Jesus offers us the manifestation of God, not by a series of
impressive truths concerning Deity, but by the far more compelling
instrumentality of His own actual being and character, which originated in His
total consciousness of oneness with the Father. In this respect Jesus was “the
pioneer and perfection of faith,” [4] who as “the Supreme Believer” realized in
Himself the fulfillment of the twofold quest of God after man and

[4] Hebrews 12:2. The Bible text used in this book is taken from the American
Standard Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons,
and is used by permission. of man after God. Hence the unique significance of
Christianity is found, not in its enunciation of the twin verities of Divine
Fatherhood and human brotherhood, but in the incarnation of those verities in
the person of our Lord. Here we confront the Eternal One, and the believer in a
Christlike God finds in Christ a climax and a theme, a motive and a spirit,
which reveal God’s deepest nature. In other words, God is in Christ, as He is
not elsewhere, reconciling the world to Himself. [5] We confess Jesus as the
Word of the Father in the sense that He is the ultimate expression of His love
and justice as the Redeeming God. To be sure, He is the Jesus of history, and
not merely a symbolical idealization. The theory of the Christ myth is a
plausible explanation which defies the specific data of the Gospels, and resorts
to sophisticated speculations, under the cover of the curious pretension
prevalent among ultra liberals that they investigate without prejudice. Their
conclusions, which belong to the developments of the [5] Cf. Francis J.
McConnell: The Christlike God, p. 135.

Rationalist Movement from 1830 to the present day, are now looked upon as
fundamentally wrong, even by radical critics. Further, Jesus is the Christ of
faith in the profound sense that He has been received by successive generations
of believers as the Revealer of spiritual perfection, and the sole Mediator
between God and man. Their witness is both subjectively mystical and objectively
historical. Whether we take counsel with the New Testament or heed the voice of
Christian history, the outcome is the same. It is that the influence of Jesus,
which for nineteen centuries has molded and guided the worthwhile life of
mankind, has not been generated by a phantom projected by religious rapture into
the realm of imagination, but by a dynamic personality of exhaustless power. The
Gospels and Epistles are a record of extraordinary spiritual contacts and
interpretations which derive from Him. The experiences they relate have been
measurably repeated in the Church, ubique, semper et alt omnibus.

It is conceded that the conceptions of the Apostolic writers have to be
modernized because they are conveyed in by-gone tongues, and “are entangled with
traditions and philosophies which have grown strange to us. How can we recover
them in their inner significance?

What do they mean when we try to express them in those forms of thought which
are most vital for us?” [6] The same difficulty holds in reference to the
Christian concepts of nearly every period. But this will not dismay those who
realize the formidable barriers inherent in language as the medium of ideas.
These barriers yield to the processes of linguistics, the methods of logic, and
the application of psychological factors. Obscure or outworn formulae cannot
conceal the identical experiences of the Divine life, which underlie the vast
variations of human thought and speech. We are also justified in appealing to
the creeds, provided we treat them as statements of the faith of their
respective periods, without the final authority which is Christ’s alone. They
bear

[6] E. P. Scott: “The Limitations of the Historical Method” in Studies in Early
Christianity, edited by Shirley J. Case, p. 17. the marks of theological and
philosophical controversies, some of which are recurrent, while others have sunk
below the level of curiosity. The question they at least suggest, and which all
previous Christian belief and history emphasize, is whether the Christ who was
the guiding star of those creeds is the Illuminant of our own age. Does He still
lead us on the altar stairs that slope through darkness up to God? Can He make
Himself known to our generation, as the all-sufficient Savior, and the Lord of
good life?

II.

Several preliminary considerations merit attention. Let us agree with Aristotle
that man is a political animal, whose communal existence is indispensable to his
complete self-realization.

Let us further agree that history’s latest phases, which stress the economic
factor as the governing force of social movements, have in them moral elements
deserving approval. Yet the individual deludes himself who dreams that any
social or political Utopia would end man’s aspirations, or appease his hunger
for the things of the Spirit. However well contrived and ordered, such a
temporal paradise could not silence the soul’s insurgent questionings, nor solve
its hardest problems, nor engage its superior functions. Despite the
ameliorating drift of earthly circumstances, there is still a huge hiatus in
human life, which provokes skepticism, discontent, and the sense of wasted
energies. These agitations are quite as conspicuous among leisured and cultured
groups as among the industrious, the ignorant, or the poor. Despite their
affluence or destitution they look before and after, and sigh for what is not.
The satiety of wealth and the world’s wearying honors chafe their owners no less
than the deprivations and embarrassments of poverty afflict the unprivileged
multitudes. If the rejuvenated social estate so many desiderate to-day were
theirs to-morrow, they would discern beyond its equities and adjustments the
more spacious horizons which excite fresh longings and bolder experiments. And
this for the reason, as Principal John Caird said in the temper of the best
idealism, that the human soul is the seat of a potential infinitude, by virtue
of which it finds a limit only to be inspired to transcend it.

There is another fixed quality of human nature which remains changeless amid
ceaseless change. It monopolizes all ranks and conditions: princes and peoples,
literates and illiterates, capitalists and industrialists. It is that quality
which compels man to estimate his own life: the self-security which Spinoza said
should proceed sub specie eternitatis. This inquisition makes him aware that he
is a pilgrim of the infinite, a seemingly weak yet mysteriously mighty being;
apparently at the mercy of Nature’s ruthless and gigantic forces, yet forever
beyond their governance. It is the fascinating secret of our kind that its
spiritual possibilities transcend its sensory endowments.

Man may have many fetters, but he can always be unbound at the center from which
things are perceived and appraised. Invincible alliances with “the powers of the
world to come,” and wholesale commitments to whatever they shall determine for
him, are his possessions by the grace of God. His imagination constructs an
ethereal universe which transcends his actual surroundings. These, charm they
never so wisely, cannot dissipate his fears, nor ease the doubts that dim his
prospects, nor stay the lashings of his violated conscience, nor dominate the
promptings of his will or the impulses of his heart. Hence he is by nature
religious, and can no more help being so than he can help being a social and
political being.

Here, where two worlds meet in man, often antagonistically, Jesus enters the
situation to transform it. The differences already mentioned, which He
introduced elsewhere in society and its organizations, are traceable to the one
supreme and controlling difference which He established in human relations with
the Unseen. Whatever we conceive of God, the race, the moral order, the
universe, or of its ultimate purpose, has a rationale, of which for His
followers Jesus is the norm. Those who feel obligated to account for His
intervention in a systematic world, which tolerates no haphazard events and
connects all that is with preexistent causes, must face the fact that in such a
uniform and ordered world Jesus has historically appeared. Account for His
coming as we may, its reality is registered in the Christianity which owes to
Him its origin and direction. Admitting for the moment the naturalistic
explanation that he was simply a member of the human race, and as much its
product as any other member of that race, what follows? The fact that,
notwithstanding all drawbacks, the normal course of things proved equal to His
production: a sequence which frustrates fatalistic verdicts imbued with
prevalent pessimism upon that race. How can we despair of a humanity which
brought God’s Hero to birth at Bethlehem?

Those who maintain that the young Jew who came to hear John the Baptist, and
convinced him that He was the promised Messiah, was the Son of God in a singular
and supreme sense, assert, in harmony with the New Testament Scriptures, that
this Joshua (a name of which Jesus, meaning “Jehovah saves,” is the Greek form)
broke into our realm from the Infinite Beyond. He was not an emergent from
within humanity, but its Creator’s supreme self -manifestation of Himself to His
offspring.

Contrary to common opinion, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive,
and their inconsistency is apparent rather than real.

They find their reconciliation in the personality of our Lord. His character
warrants our faith in the actual operation of the supernatural within His
strange eventful history. It shows the development of the natural into the
spiritual order. It is so charged with ethical and spiritual authority as to
become the means of a Divine regeneration in multitudes. [7] According to
Sophocles, “Nature’s dice are always loaded.” In this particular instance they
revolutionized man’s religious fortunes. So whether Jesus sprang from the racial
stock with which He identified Himself as the Son of Man, or from the very heart
of the Eternal God as His Only Begotten Son, makes little practical difference
so far as His salvatory significance for mankind is concerned. In either case
its spirit- [7 ] Cf. George Galloway: Religion and Modern Thought, p. 382. ual
renewal and its destiny are centered in Him alone. He is the best that can be of
our flesh and blood, and His being reveals limitless potentialities for good in
man. No world to which He belongs can be placed under sentence of death. We are
justified in entertaining the liveliest expectations for its moral renewal, and
in asserting that even those estimates of His origin which are reckoned
heterodox flatly contradict the impersonal, mechanical and purposeless theories
of current materialism. In Him resistless redemptive agencies have appropriated
our earthly existence as their realm, wherein, sooner or later, the Spirit of
the Christ shall reign. He has become, as St. Paul averred, “the First-born
among many brethren.” [8]

“But if, as the Church teaches, He was God’s actual and unique gift of Himself
to humanity, then Christ is forever the revelation of Him who sent Him forth.
Apart from this revelation, the Deity as conceived by us is not intelligible,
since the attributes we associate with [8] Cf. H. Wildon Carr: The Unique Status
of Man, p. 17ff. His nature have their sole warrant in the human order. Here
then are two conceptions of His person. If we accept the “natural” theory, it
still remains that the life of which He was the consummate flower is a life in
which truth, grace and holiness are immanent. If we accept the supernatural
theory, the transcendent Deity has unveiled Himself to mankind once and for all
in Jesus. Yet whether we accept Him as immanent or transcendent, or as both
combined, He is none the less the fountain of that knowledge of God, in which
stands our eternal life and freedom.

Again, if God is the Father Jesus represented Him to be, our whole outlook on
life is transfigured. The very “winds are henceforth voices; never a senseless
gust.” All things are ours since we are Christ’s, and He is God’s. The speech
which to the unbelieving mind is sound and fury, signifying nothing, to the mind
which is “in Christ” becomes a celestial language. Why is this? Because the
human mind is necessarily interpretative, and this function obtains its noblest
results when exercised upon the person, the work and the teachings of Jesus. To
enlarge upon these claims would be to attempt a close analysis of His entire
career, and this is not within my purpose even were it within my power. Yet by
every indication we can gather, He knew His own vocation. At His baptism He was
anointed for His great mission, and understood that henceforth He was to fulfill
in Himself all those lines of thought which He had learned in the Scriptures,
including “all righteousness,” as His sinless soul conceived that righteousness.
[9]

Since man’s religious nature is his outstanding characteristic, which he shares
with nothing else in creation, whoever is supreme for him in the moral and
spiritual realm enjoys a permanent supremacy. This is so true of Jesus in our
experience, that what He transmits about God and His designs is stamped with
finality. Its essentials may be condensed into His single phrase, Holy Father a
revelatory saying religion will never outgrow and in which deeper [9] Cf. Arthur
C. Headlam: The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, p. ISOff. and richer
meanings are ever discernible. It was the fruit of His filial relation with God
and of God’s paternal relation with Him. The name Father He constantly and
exclusively gives to God; the name Son He assumes Himself. His private
devotions, His public ministries, His high priestly prayer, His deeds,
discourses and parables clearly show that the sustaining principle of our Lord’s
life and being and likewise the gist of His message arose out of His absorbent
consciousness of the Eternal Father of all spirits. [10] His followers repeat
the words of the ancient creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of
Heaven and Earth.” But who among them has even faintly realized the magnitudes
of love and justice implicit in this historic confession? Did it have actual
control as it has moral authority, it would indeed reinterpret Heaven and Earth
for us. If the Creator has toward us none but parental aims, the human situation
despite its perplexing difficulties [10] Cf. Auguste Sabatier: Outlines of a
Philosophy of Religion, p. 148f. is rife with everlasting benevolence. That
Jesus thus believed and taught is indisputable. But before men can visualize
what arises out of and is involved in that belief and teaching, they must share
the temper and the attitude of Jesus. He exemplified His measureless faith and
devotion by His meek submission to sacrificial travail because it was the
Father’s will.

Dante’s moving line sums up the sequel: In la sua volentade e nostra pace, “In
His Will is our peace.”

Further, some progress is here made in reading the riddle of the universe. The
Fatherhood of God, as the source of Christ’s life and message, elucidates the
Creator’s ways in creation. This is desirable, especially in Christian
apologetics, for nothing has so hampered the faith of countless sincere souls as
the order of Nature. The history of intelligent skepticism is largely the
history of adverse judgments on the course of events. From Lucretius to Darwin,
it has been reckoned an act of credulity to contend that the natural order is
the ordination of an Almighty Father. Yet if such is not the case, the guidance
of Jesus collapses at a crucial stage where men have always craved direction. On
the other hand, the acceptance of Christ’s revelation of God necessitates the
acceptance of that which is implicit in the revelation. The cosmos,
notwithstanding its bewildering stupendousness and complexity, fulfills the
majestic purposes of its Presiding Mind.

It neither hastes nor rests in its execution of His grand design: steadily
pursuing its ageless course toward the goal of righteous and holy being, passing
from life to more life, from peace to greater peace. Those who reject this
interpretation remind us of the difficulties which it does not remove for them.
Without doubt these are real, and likely to continue, since so long as the
finite is impotent to grasp the infinite, many pressing questions cannot be
answered in the present world. But what of the far greater difficulties involved
in the skeptical position? It may be hard to believe what our Lord’s words imply
concerning the natural order. It is certainly harder not to believe them. The
souls which courageously make the venture are rewarded by an intellectual
consistency and a moral steadfastness, which those who decline to make it cannot
find in their negativism.

Finally, we here obtain light on the moral order. I am not unaware of the
efforts that have been made to show that the ethical is no more than the
customary, while the customary is simply that which experience has proved to be
prudent and helpful. There is an echo of the Spencerian philosophy, demolished
by Doctor B or den P. Bowne thirty years ago, in Professor William James’
assertion that “ ’the true’ is only the expedient in the way of our thinking,
just as ’the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” [11] One
is reluctant to think that the professor meant all this quotation seems to
imply. To reduce morality to expediency is admissible only by giving the latter
term a far deeper ethical connotation than it ordinarily conveys. Mortals [11]
Praffmatismi: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, p. 222. have often been
guilty of flagrant crimes because they conceived these expedient. But if we say
that Jesus went to the cross because it was more expedient for Him to endure
than to avoid it, do we here illustrate an expediency according to Professor
James’ theory? Quite otherwise. The natural thing for Jesus to do was to avoid
the cross, but when He voluntarily embraced it, He showed that the natural and
the moral are not identities, but that the natural is the setting for the
exhibition, the cultivation and the achievement of the moral.

Here, in Keats’ words, an unfriendly environment becomes “the vale of soul
making.”

If we see God in Christ and in man, surely we see all else in Him. The whole
cosmic process is perceptible as something projected and sustained by the
universal Father for “bringing many sons unto glory,” of whom Jesus Himself is
the prototype. Why wonder then that Christlikeness has become the human ideal?
What can we discover which is superior in thought or deed to His manner of life?
In Him God imparts Himself to man in His selfrealizing paternity, and man
surrenders himself to God in his self -realizing sonship. Religious certitude is
accomplished “when these two terms, God and man, opposed to each other at the
origin of conscious life, interpenetrate each other till they reach the moral
unity of love, in which God becomes interior to man and lives in him, in which
man becomes interior to God, and finds in Him the full expansion of his being.
Christianity is therefore the absolute and final religion of mankind” [12] This
is the main burden of what follows in the present discussion. The personal,
social, political, industrial and cultural life of the world owes far more to
Jesus Christ than to any other being who ever lived. But our concern is chiefly
with the unspeakable difference Jesus originated in religion. He has given the
race not only an adequate and satisfying idea of God, but also a conception of
man which finds imperishable values in His personality, [12] Auguste Sabatier,
Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 150f. His activities and His
circumstances. He has shed the healing radiance of a Father’s ethical love on
the sins and sorrows of the common lot.

He has taught all and sundry that beyond the horizons which hem us in there is
“still more sea.” He has manifested in Himself the perfection of our spiritual
nature, and thus become for believers the true and living way into the Holy of
Holies. He has presented to the world that immortal type of character which
presages the soul’s ultimate emancipation from iniquity and despair. The elect
among the blessed, such as St. Paul and St. John, St. Chrysostom and St.
Augustine, St. Francis and St. Theresa, Lancelot Andrewes and John Bunyan
unitedly exalt in their experience that regenerating power of Jesus which is yet
to be attained by those who love and obey Him. Abandonment to His will shall
then transform the libertine; dismiss those specters of the mind which prevent
confidence in sincere seekers after God; convert the mammonite into a
philanthropist, and the victim of self -obsession, ambitious for place and
power, into a willing servant of his fellows. In brief, everything man needs to
garrison the citadel of his spiritual nature this Redeemer and Regenerator
abundantly supplies. His compassion for the shepherdless ones; His charity for
the outcast and the degraded; His sympathy with childhood’s innocence; His
insight, searching the most remote crevices of the soul with the candle of the
Lord, were not so much parts of a conscious program, as activities native to His
divine being. Truly He “laid hold on the seed of Abraham,” and federalized in
Himself the whole human family. Its efforts to escape His gracious sway
succumbed to His genius for its apprehension.

Hence the question again: “What think ye of Christ?” Forget past speculations
about Him. Forget the metaphysics of the confessional Creeds. Forget there ever
were such valiant doctors and opponents as Nestorius, Apollinaris, Eutyches,
Arius, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. Allow the great Fathers and the
equally great Scholastics, who so ably interpreted Jesus for their own and after
ages, to sink out of sight. Call a truce between the warring camps of Modernism
and fundamentalism. Haul down their ragged banners, and clear the arena for the
entrance of the Lord of us all. Take nothing but the palpable facts of this
inquiry as found in the New Testament; in Christian history and experience; in
the multiform agencies of the organized Church. What do these facts signify? No
better answer can be found than that which was given in the earliest Christian
literature; and has since been indorsed by numberless disciples of the Master,
belonging to every tribe and nation. He is “the Head of the Body, the Church”:
He is “the beginning, the first born from the dead; that in all things He might
have the preeminence. For it was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him
should all the fulness dwell.” “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself.” He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning
and the end.” He is “the Word, who became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of
grace and truth.” [13] This is the Truth of and about Christ, which has done His
work in the world, andfitransmitted His life to the sons of men. All helpful
Christian thinking and doctrine owe their virtue to the concepts evoked by the
influence of Jesus upon those who beheld His glory in the days of His flesh.

“In reverent adoration we turn our thoughts toward Him by whose side no other
can stand, and with a conviction that we cannot escape, and which the ripening
experience of life only serves to make stronger, we exclaim: Here is that
Sonship that is ’coeternal and consubstantial with the Father.’ Here is that
truth and grace, that love and holiness which are enshrined in the very heart of
the Eternal Being. Here is the Light that lighteth every man coming into the
world. Here is what men have ever groped for, and concerning which God has
nowhere left Himself wholly without witness.

... Here is the promise and power of human [13] Colossians 1:18 f.; 2
Corinthians 5:19; Revelation 22:13; John 1:14. redemption the earnest that
struggling and disrupted humanity shall finally become one Family, moved by One
Spirit, and forever bearing One Name.” [14] [14] Edwin Lewis: Jesus Christ and
the Human Quest, p. 346.


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  CHAPTER 4: 02.     THE THREEFOLD APPROACH TO THE PERSON OF CHRIST
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CHAPTER II THE THREEFOLD APPROACH TO THE PERSON OF CHRIST

EMERSON said, “The Name of Jesus is not so much written as ploughed into the
history of the world.” Men may differ about the application of His ideals to
human affairs, or protest that modern society cannot be organized on His
precepts. But those who insist that life’s well-being depends upon obedience to
His teaching and example preponderate in numbers and influence. There is a
general agreement that His standards are the criteria of ethical judgments. To
understand the transformations wrought by the Personality of Jesus Christ, we
should approach it from every possible angle. First, the documents which contain
the sufficient accounts of His career should be studied. Second, the experiences
of His steadfast disciples should be kept steadily in view. Third, the organic
witness of the Christian Church to her Founder, expressed in her sacramental,
theological and evangelizing energies, should be treated as genuine evidence.
The exclusion of any one of these avenues of approach will result in inadequate
conceptions of Him, and lead to erroneous evaluations of His mission. Scholars
who rely solely upon the documents in the case face the frequent and sometimes
incapacitating hazards of literary transmission. The limitations of authors,
however venerable and gifted they may be, are reflected in their writings: a
rule which obtains in sacred as well as secular literature. It is scarcely
possible to obtain a sufficient knowledge of Julius Caesar from his Commentaries
or other records concerning him, unless his concrete achievements in expanding
and welding together the Roman Empire, and in shaping the political and social
evolution of Western nations, are brought into the picture. Similarly those who
endeavor to interpret Jesus exclusively by the canonical Gospels and Epistles
omit a large amount of available material essential for their aim. The
Psychological Reconstructionist, who at the moment occupies the center of the
stage in Christological discussions, is as liable to miss his mark as the
Traditionalist, the Apocalyptist, the Ethicist or the Skeptic. Each of the
groups specified has its valuable contribution to make to an undertaking of the
first magnitude. But no one of them singly and alone is competent to render a
balanced and an allround conception of Jesus.

(1) The Traditionalist confines his apologetic to the verbal accuracy of the New
Testament writings as a Divine revelation infallibly given and received. He
further supposes they were thus transmitted under conditions which practically
obliterated the individuality of their authors, reducing them to a state of
mentality virtually identical with that of hypnosis. He claims in behalf of this
literalism that the Evangelists and Apostles portrayed a Figure of godlike
perfection, immaculate in every particular, and entirely free from the
possibility of error. Moreover, as he regards them, these portrayals are final
and complete, nothing can be added to or taken from them.

Such a claim is symptomatic of a defective intellectual attitude prolific of
needless difficulties. Nineteen centuries of Christian history largely dominated
by Jesus as the Christ, not only of the Church, but of the whole fabric of
advanced society, are treated as though they were negligible in behalf of a
theory of Holy Scripture which cannot be sustained. An isolated view of the
Master is hereby permanently confined to certain categories which, however
spacious and commanding, have since been supplemented by other categories
derived from the actual experience of countless believers in the various ages of
the Christian dispensation.

Consider, for instance, the admirable elucidations of this question in our own
day of the late Professor William Newton Clarke, Professor H. R. Mackintosh,
Principal Alfred E. Garvie and Professor Edwin Lewis. Their interpretations of
Jesus follow the clue first suggested by August Dorner, who argued that the
Incarnation was not a precipitate intervention of the Divine Nature in human
life, but an ordered unveiling from God manward, and a correspondingly
historical development from man Godward, of which Jesus is the nexus and
consummation.

Professor Lloyd Morgan in his Gifford Lectures on Life, Mind and Spirit,
projects the evolutionary hypothesis into the debate by his contention that
although the life movement is, as science teaches, an unbroken continuity, any
one of its emergents is more than the mere sum of its antecedents. General Jan
Christian Smuts airs a. kindred concept in the philosophical hypothesis of
Nature’s inherent developments which he terms Holism. Both these thinkers show
traces of the influence of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, and furnish the
intelligent Christian, cleric or layman, with fresh and impressive backgrounds
for his belief in Jesus as the crown of God’s creative purpose in redemption.
Their broad, constructive reasonings vindicate our instinctive rejection of what
Professor Pringle-Pattison describes as “the lower Naturalism,” by which he
means the prevalent habit of interpreting the superior forms and values of life
by their historical origins alone. [1] In one notable respect Professor Morgan
and General Smuts were anticipated by John Stuart Mill. The strange blend of
Scotch common sense and Gallican political fervor which colored many of Mill’s
utterances induced men of opposite parties and opinions to shelter their
diversities under the protection of his great name. His Logic dealt in a
masterly way with the problems of knowledge as these bear upon man’s connection
with the physical universe. But the Utilitarian position he assumed exposed his
reasonings to the damaging criticisms of Professor F. H. Bradley, whose
Principles of Logic have made some of Mill’s arguments archaic. He asserted
historical sociology cannot admit that in the world’s development a character
could arise which had no relation to the past and no roots in existing
conditions. Yet he conceded that Jesus was charged with “a special express and
unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth [1] Cf. The Idea of God, p.
88ff. and virtue.” [2] This quotation is taken from his familiar tribute to
Christ as still left to us, whatever else may be taken away by rationalism’s
forays upon faith. It is greatly to the credit of Mill that, though he began his
intellectual life deeply alienated from the Christian revelation by his father’s
insolent metaphysic, he nevertheless steadily rose to so noble an appreciation
of its central Personality. And if some twentieth-century moralists and
metaphysicians more clearly apprehend the significance of Jesus, it is because
they stand on Mill’s shoulders.

Yet such attempts to prepare the way for “the larger Christ who is to be” are
arbitrarily repudiated by the Traditionalist. He impeaches Christian and
scientific thinkers alike when they suggest new methods which emphasize the
immense differential the Master created in human development.

(2) The Apocalyptist is also confident that he can successfully plow his
solitary furrow, and interpret our Lord according to the times [2] Cf. Essays on
Religion, p. 255. in which He lived, with scrupulous regard for His actual
historical matrix. He is at the poles from the Traditionalist in some important
issues, yet at one with him in his reliance upon the written Gospels. So the
Apocalyptist makes no concession to other interpretations of Christ’s life,
which are dictated by the experience of its regenerating power. His standpoint
moreover is entirely too subjective and therefore unscientific. He is committed
to the idea that Jesus anticipated an imminent catastrophe, to be speedily
succeeded by the inauguration of His personal sovereignty in a glorified world.
This typically Semitic conception is advanced as the only motivating impulse of
His teaching concerning the unfolding Kingdom of God, which is to spread as
leaven in the meal through the oncoming ages, and grow from small beginnings,
like the mustard seed, until it shall embrace the whole range of human life.
Dean Inge well observes that much apocalyptism during the last century B.C. and
the first century A.D. was “a compromise between the religion of rewards and
punishments and the religion of spiritual deliverance.[3] In this respect it
totally differed from the stress which our Lord’s prophetism laid upon the
ever-increasing reign of the Divine righteousness in the far-reaching vistas of
the future.

Harnack, in his well-known volume, The Essence of Christianity, reiterates the
vital importance of Jesus as the prophet and teacher, and shows that His
authority consisted in truths originative in Himself, independent of the
contemporary theologies of His time. On the other hand Schweitzer, in The Quest
of the Historical Jesus and Warschauer in The Historical Life of Christ, cling
to the apocalyptic principle as the explanation of the Jesus of history. To be
sure, He accepted the apocalyptic outlook of His day, but His real message was
independent of it. He demanded a new life of fellowship with God, which
contemplated progressive advance toward perfection for all mankind. It is
therefore sheer assumption to regard Jesus as absorbed in a wholesale
apocalyptism. This would constitute Him an [3] Outspoken Essays, First Series,
p. 247. unbalanced and shortsighted propagandist of mediocre ideas and of a
provincial cast of mind.

(3) The Ethicist starts out with the Apocalyptist, but they part company on the
question of Christ’s moral teachings and whether these have more than temporary
significance. The Ethicist maintains as against the Apocalyptist that the
paternalistic theism of the Master’s Sermon on the Mount and the ethical
imperatives of His discourses were not intended by Him to serve as a bridge
between a world that was dying, and one about to be born in a cataclysmic
upheaval. Such utterances possessed permanent values beyond the shock of every
convulsive circumstance. But in acknowledging that Jesus reflected the
apocalyptic ideas of His time, the Ethicist fails to distinguish between His
intrinsic message concerning the universal Fatherhood of God, and the
nationalistic outlook of contemporary Judaism. This failure betrays an
obliviousness to the transcendent worth of our Lord as the superb religious
genius, not only of His day, but of all time. His proclamation of an ideal
social order to be perpetuated in individual piety, and by the establishment of
national and international relations upon a purely spiritual basis, sanctions
and amplifies the noblest prophecies of Israel’s seers and of the world’s best
idealism.

(4) The Skeptic, keenly aware of the disparities and contradictions already
noted, maintains that no trustworthy conception of Jesus is possible. Wrede, the
German savant, avows that after years of patient investigation, he is unable to
reproduce from the New Testanent’s material a consistent and verifiable
presentation of the Master as a historic personality. The late Georg Brandes
declared in his last book that Christ was a lovely myth, and thereby voiced the
belief of other radical speculators, who view the Gospels as the work of a
brilliant but unlicensed imagination. Their verdict is a virtual disavowal of
historical veracity and an admission of intellectual and spiritual prejudice.

(5) The Psychologist is attracted by the sociological benefits of Christ’s
message. But he denies on a priori grounds the validity of the Divine portrait
contained in the Gospels and Epistles, and thus implicitly invalidates the
results of historical criticism. Christianity stands or falls with the
conviction that Jesus walked this earth as the Word made flesh, and that in Him
the Everlasting One manifested Himself in Time for the salvation of the world.

It heralds an Evangel of universal Redemption which is inwoven with human
history, and must therefore have been in some manner conditioned by it.[4] If no
such person as Jesus existed historically, as the Psychologist avers, it is
necessary to discover behind this mythical being the resplendent mind which
enunciated the ideals attributed to Jesus. The attempt to do so, begun somewhat
clumsily by the late President G. Stanley Hall, has since been furthered by more
competent theological scholars. Georges Berguer, in Some Aspects of the Life of
Jesus, and Professor Shirley J. Case, in his volume, Jesus, A New Biography, aim
to portray Him as He appeared

[4] Cf. E. P. Scott: “The Limitations of the Historical Method” in Studtes in
Early Christianity, edited by Shirley J. Case, p. 5. to those who knew Him face
to face, with utmost fidelity to His social orientation.

According to this view, “the picture in the oldest (Christian) documents is an
artist’s creation, to be reduced by removing features that owe their presence to
the creative impulses of the author and his associates at the moment when the
document was written,” and “to be supplemented by information wherever the data
may be found...” Especially is it necessary to enlarge the author’s horizon by a
more complete integration of Jesus within the distinctively Jewish setting where
He had actually lived. [5] But such a portrait, as the books in question show,
is a projection of subjective fancy, quite unlike the presentation of Him given
in the Gospels and substantiated by the Church’s testimony during the centuries.
ii The second avenue of approach to the Master is also needlessly exclusive and
constricted. At the same time it is less concrete [5] Cf. Jesus: A New
Biography, p. 6. than that constituted by the historic documents and the
theories attached to their origin and interpretation. It consists of the
constantly growing body of testimony to Jesus derived from experience. This
testimony is valid in so far as it relates to the transforming effects of faith
in Him upon individual and collective life and character. But it transgresses
its legitimate boundaries when it is employed either to support or oppose the
varying documentary problems and philosophies arising out of our various
contacts with Jesus. Supreme within its own realm, experience, as Kant showed
once and for always, is secondary beyond it, since it is liable to substitute
emotion for reason and fancy for fact. For instance, the application in certain
Evangelical schools of the experiential values of the Christian life to such
issues as the authorship of the Book of Job, the first chapters of Genesis, or
the Fourth Gospel, is unwarranted, prejudicial to reality, and productive of
confusion. These and similar questions belong to historical criticism, and
cannot be decided by states of feeling, however devout or sincere. The thrusting
of pious emotionalism beyond the limits of credibility, in order to prevent the
ravages of unbelief, has frequently reacted in the contrary direction.

It is doubtless true that what one has seen and felt may be ultimate for him and
for those who feel as he does. Their experience may also be as widely diffused
as it is beneficial. But it affords no sufficient basis for a stable religious
authority on which to rest the entire Christian apologetic. Its deficiency is
manifest in the crude but popular prejudice against an open discussion of
faith’s essentials. It is disdainful of realities which do not serve its
immediate ends. It insists that the unbiased examination of Christian documents
and creeds shall either be relinquished as injurious to religion, or that the
results of the inquiry shall agree with orthodoxy’s prepossessions. To declare
that the historical criticism of Holy Scripture, or the doctrines derived there
from, must be subjected to Christian experience, is scarcely less detrimental
for a satisfactory approach to Jesus than is the neglect of Christian experience
by historical criticism. In this, as in all else concerned, what is true is
orthodox, and what is false is heterodox.

Moreover, truth consists in relations, hence the quest for it should be
cooperative. We shall then find that the religion of Jesus is eternally self
-verifying because it is a religion of the spirit, which does not require us to
conform to tradition at any cost, nor to crucify intellectual integrity in order
to save our soul’s beliefs. We cannot have a religion, however, without the
Absolute in history. Yet how can we discern the Absolute without the reverent
use of those mental processes which apprehend its presence? It is only by
observing these fixed principles that the whole field of research can be
covered, and made to yield further results to the scholar. In their primary
aspects, Christian experience and Christian learning are different but not
inconsistent. So far from being at odds, they jointly express life’s major
realities, and meet in harmony above the din and dust of controversy. Those who
enjoy the privileges of academic training, should be able to judge for
themselves the values of sound learning allied with unfeigned faith, and
productive of what St. Paul terms “reasonable worship.” Certainly no disciple of
Jesus need quarrel with conscientious scholarship. Nor can the witness of the
Spirit within man form a lasting alliance with the reactionary obscurantism
which arbitrarily repudiates the results of scholarship. The reconstruction of
the life of our Lord and of His relation to the life of the human family is
rather to be achieved by the united efforts of belief and knowledge. Either
without the other resembles a boatman rowing in circles because he persists in
using one oar instead of two.

Here that true catholicity is implicated, which attains that supreme achievement
of the heart and mind in unison a rational faith.

Christian annals do full justice to the paramount consequence of the believing
man’s experience, while at the same time they rebuke the excesses due to a
prostrated emotionalism which zealots mistake for genuine faith.

Patient investigation and dependable evidence had nothing to do with the ecstasy
of the good bishop who, standing for the first time on Mount Sinai, solemnly
ejaculated: “Now I know that Moses wrote the Pentateuch [7] The naive remark of
a prince of the Church on the miracle of the sun standing still, that “there is
a sense in which the sun could be said to both move and stand still at the same
time,” further illustrates the delusions of this lopsided method of
interpretation. If clergy of high station commit these offenses, no wonder that
many are found in the rank and file less advantaged, who regard their peculiar
state of mind as the sole proof of the Holy Spirit’s existence as the third
person of the Godhead. Herein is also exhibited that total ignorance of the
ardent intellectualism exercised in formulating the dogma of the Trinity by
those great Cappadocian theologians, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of
Nazianzus and St. Basil of Csesarea.

[7] The evaluation of Jesus is too vital Cf. “The Evolution of the Doctrine of
the Trinity” by E. E. Kirk in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, edited
by A. E. J. Rawlinson, p. 159ff. a proceeding and one too intimately related to
the elevation of mankind, to be left to unaided Christian experience.
Indispensable as this factor is, it does not furnish an adequate method of
approach to the totality of His regnant being.

Some who detect the perils of these narrower devices are confident that the
institutional life of the Church can unveil the mystery of Christ’s nature. To
her and her work in the world they turn for the solution of the problem. Does
she not speak with the accents of an authority the duration and weight of which
should silence objection? What are the theories of scholars and philosophers,
erudite and able though they may be, compared with her undeviating witness to
her Lord, in creed, sacrament and practice? Such a position would be far less
vulnerable if the Church herself had not submitted to the guidance of
enlightened saints and thinkers in the readaptation of her message to the
changing enviroments of her career. They revealed an intimate acquaintance with
pagan metaphysics and preexisting theological systems, and also an intellectual
flexibility which rigid orthodoxy had heretofore forbidden. Even the Incarnation
process was subjected to repeated theoretical explanations, and the doctrine of
our Lord’s Person did not assume its present accepted form for many centuries.
Indeed, the great St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of all Roman Catholic
seminaries save those belonging to the Jesuit Order, was conspicuous as a bold
and visioned innovator. He soared like an eagle above the level of his fellow
Scholastics, and with rare prescience foresaw certain controlling principles of
doctrinal formulas and interpretations which are now widely accepted by
theologians of different denominations. It was this “Angelic Doctor” who
incorporated in the creed of his Church Aristotle’s speculation that creation
implied previous substances, and therefore was not the making of something out
of nothing.” Other germinal ideas traceable to Greek

[7] In a recent Neo-scholastic volume, Cosmology, by Professor McWilliams of St.
Louis University, the author criticizes St. Thomas at this very point. See the
note in chapter IV on “The Beginning of the World in. Time.” thinkers are found
in St. Thomas as well as in the writings of the Fathers and of the schoolmen.

Examples of the originative changes thus effected could be multiplied. But
enough have been adduced to show that the advent of Origen, St. Augustine, St.
Anselm, St. Thomas, Bradwardine and Calvin, to name but a few pivotal minds of
the Patristic, Scholastic and Reformation periods, involved marked transitions
in the belief and teaching of the Church. Of all organizations she can least
afford to flout her own luminaries, or to forget that they shone in a borrowed
light. It would be just as inconsistent for her to profess indifference to the
higher sources from which they drew, while appraising to the full their
excellence. Not then exclusively in the Church nor in the chosen remnant who
charted her course during critical epochs, shall we discern the fuller
significance of our Lord’s Person. The bypath of ecclesiastical authority offers
strong inducements to those who are averse to the more arduous ways of constant
and careful examination. Many Protestants exhibit a decided preference for
dogmatic pronouncements, and are disposed to asperse the rights of the mind in
matters of faith. Yet the purer Christianity which Protestantism professes to
represent sprang from the exercise of those rights. It vindicated every
believer’s priesthood and his consequent freedom of approach to God. Liberty of
conscience and of inquiry are of the essence of the Reformed Churches.

Surely they cannot have it both ways, nor abrogate in the conclusion what they
strenuously maintain in the premises. The Christian Ecclesia of the first two
centuries authorized no system of creedal belief, with the exception of the
Baptismal formula and its elaborations. 8 Yet in his Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine, Cardinal Newman contends that the dogmas Protestantism
renounced as superfluous were in reality the latest forms of ideas which, though
not found in Holy Scripture, were nevertheless incipient in its authors and in
their readers.

8 Cf. Adolph Harnack: History of Dogma, Vol. II, p. 20ff.

This, he adds, was a salutary provision, since Christianity, as a universal
religion, intended for all ages and all peoples, was bound to adapt itself to
its mutable surroundings or cease to be. Its teachings were thus made capable of
infinite applications harmonizing with the social demands upon them. The
straitest Protestantism has not been exempt from this law of change and
adaptation. The duty of public worship, the substitution of the Lord’s Day for
the Sabbath of Israel, the rite of Infant Baptism, and the affirmation that the
Bible is the religion of Protestantism, have little if any prominence in the New
Testament. They were not directly due to the letter or sanction of the Sacred
Oracles, but to the silent growth of ideas fostered by prolonged Christian
consciousness.

Other questions, broached but not settled in Holy Scripture, were so real and
imperative that they had to be met by permissible developments of the substance
of Revelation. So much was this the case that it is impossible to escape the
conclusion that post-Biblical evolutions of the teaching of Christianity are
within the scope of its Divine Author’s providential purpose. The presence of
need and supply in Nature offers convincing proof of design in material
creation. In like manner, the breaches in the structure of the original creed of
the Church made it probable that those growths which developed out of the truths
surrounding that creed were intended to fill up its fissures. So argued the most
gifted advocate, since Bossuet, of ecclesiastical authority and tradition as the
media of approach to Christ. In summary, Newman contended that the Apostolic
Church received the living seed of truth and the living nucleus of a coherent
system of belief; to be developed by its own potentialities reacting upon
society, beneath the direction of the Spirit of the Living God. 10 So far the
Cardinal enlists consent; he was an evolutionist before Darwin appeared upon the
scene, a pragmatist prior to Pragmatism. When, however, he endeavored to relate
New Testa- 8 Cf. Alfred Loisy: The Gospel and the Church, p. 180ff.

10 Cf. the Author’s The Three Religious Leaders of Oxford, p. 653ff. ment
teaching and Catholic doctrines as the root and the branches of the one tree,
whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, his touch was not so sure.
Disturbing elements of human error, frailty and misguidance interfered with the
smooth operation of his striking theory. It could not stand alone. For Newman
the answer to the query how Christian Communions equally confident of their
Apostolic descent, yet separated from one another, were to be reconciled, was in
an infallible authority. This relieves the situation for Catholics and
Protestants alike who identify religious life with its doctrinal expressions.

There is no via media between an inerrant Church for the preservation of an
inerrant dogmatic system, and the candid discussion of the dogma or of whatever
it implicates.

Auguste Sabatier enforces the foregoing statement in his two works: Outlines of
a Philosophy of Religion and Religions of Authority and the Religion of the
Spirit. He nevertheless comments that those who do not agree with the assumption
on which the theory of infallibilism is based are not concerned for its
sequences. But once the premise of an inerrant deposit of sacred truth is
conceded, its inerrant interpretation is necessitated. All believers gratefully
own the inexpressible service of the witness of the Church to the reality of
Jesus and His Gospel. Yet that service is not so final as to forbid any who
would seek further light upon their Faith’s present and future prospects. Nor
does it bind every motion of their minds in slavish subjection to the past. The
touchstone between the true and the false, the essential and the incidental in
morals and religion, is not the sole right and property of tradition, nor of the
Fathers, nor even of the Scriptures.

Objective authority goes behind these to its original source in Christ Himself.
In the words of Bishop Lightfoot of Durham: “The center of Christian Faith is
neither a creed nor a book, but a Person and a Life.” The spiritual
administration of that authority is not a fixture in chronology nor a decree of
antiquity. It is the Voice and Spirit of the Eternal speaking through all His
diversified activities, and inseparable from the conscience of men and women.
Our sense of its supremacy signifies the discernment of something higher than we
are, making an imperious claim upon us. Though it mingles with our consciousness
and is manifested through its intimations, it transcends our personality. We
cannot interpret this sentiment within our personal limits, because it carries
us resistlessly on to the recognition of Another than ourselves, even One who
has moral affinity with us, but who is above and beyond us. “We encounter this
Objective Authority without quitting our own being. The sanctities He enforces
are not contingent on our consent. They are embedded in the eternal realities of
righteousness. They hold their quality wherever found, and the revelation of
their dominion for one mind is valid for all.”

It is apparent that any one method of approach to Jesus, when employed singly,
11 Cf. James Martineau’s Life and Letters. VoL II, p. 410, and his Essays and
Reviews, Vol. I, p. 248. prevents a full apprehension of Him. It should not be
less apparent that taken together they converge to a full-orbed view of his
marvelous Being and its manifold significance. The Traditionalist, as we have
seen, nullifies the operation of the Spirit of God in postBiblical eras, and
confuses stagnancy with stability. The Apocalyptist assumes that Jesus was
victimized by His dream of a millennial intervention, but since this view
mistakes catastrophe for completion, it does not explain the stupendous hold of
Jesus upon man’s subsequent faith and devotion. The Ethicist heartily magnifies
His claims, yet he not only denies in Him the quality of character essential for
their source and range of influence, but also places moral standards above the
spiritual dynamic of which they are a derivative. The Skeptic submits his doubts
to the dominion of an imagination impervious to the evidences of history. The
Psychologist too often indulges a subjectivism scornful of objective realities.

He commences by heavily discounting the sacred documents themselves, yet
proceeds to discover the actual mind of the Master in their discredited pages a
method reminiscent of the rustic who severed from a tall tree the limb on which
he himself was perched. The Experimentalist confines the infinite ways of God
toward man within his own emotional states. The Authoritarian, whose hope is in
an unwavering ecclesiastical uniformity, requires that our acquiescence shall he
conditioned by our acceptance of its dogmatic deliverances. ill There is virtue
in them all and they can be blended into an effective whole. The original
documents reciprocate with the experiential life and institutional agencies of
Christianity.

Each sustains and supplements the other, safeguarding them from the abuses
generated by isolation and overemphasis. Individualists obsessed by the original
literature about Jesus, yet immune to the mass of experience which responds to
His Incarnation of God’s life in the world, are deficient in historical
consciousness. The deficiency can be removed by a more comprehensive background
for their faith. The Christ of St. Chrysostom, St. Francis, St. Theresa, St.
Bernard; of John Bunyan, John Wesley, General Booth, Phillips Brooks, Dwight L.
Moody, and Cardinal Mercier is or should be as real to a vital Christian
consciousness as the Jesus of the Gospels, the “Word made flesh” of St. John,
the Crucified and Risen Lord of St. Paul; and as much a datum for theological
reflection as for religious nourishment. Again, there are scholars who assert
the utmost freedom of speculation for themselves in their treatment of the
original Evangel, and for their attempts to reconstruct what they claim is the
true portrait of Jesus.

Yet wisdom’s impartiality forsakes them when they forbid a similar freedom to
those who invoke for their better understanding of Him, not only the New
Testament documents, but His entire course in the past as guaranteed by the
Church and by the testimony of her children. Lawful liberty is the Christian
heritage and prerogative. But however warmly eulogized, it has no jurisdiction
in those expositions of Jesus, which reject the account of His royal progress
through nineteen stirring centuries. On the other hand, ethereal Christological
theories concerning the limitless relationships of Jesus to Deity and the cosmos
should be articulated with historical and objective facts.

Professor H. R. Mackintosh clearly points out that “there will always be
metaphysic in Christology, but it ought to be a metaphysic of the conscience, in
which not substance but Holy Love is supreme.” He further says, “It does not
seem possible to hold or vindicate the absoluteness of Christ as an intelligent
conviction except by passing definitely into the domain of reasoned theory.” ia
Neglect of these weighty advices has brought a scathing challenge on many
well-meant utterances, not because they were untrue, but because they leaned
toward the purely conjectural. We must not forget, however, that Divine
mysteries necessitating spiritual discernment are at stake, and that there is in
man a general reason 12 The Doctrine of the Person of Christ, p. 472ff. which
takes a higher range than severely logical and scientific reason. Truths can be
felt and can also be proved, for we know them not only by the reason, but by the
intuitive sense which may be called the heart.

13 Hence Sacerdotalism, Sacramentarianism, Bibliolatry, and other latreia, or
worship, are valuable channels for receiving and transmitting the manifold grace
of God in Christ Jesus.

It is futile to urge, for instance, that the massive intellect and profound
spirituality of the late Baron von Hugel were dedicated to the holiest of
enterprises by means of sacramental efficacy alone. His Essays and Addresses on
the Philosophy of Religion, his book on Eternal Life, and his striking biography
of Catherine of Siena indicate the diversified sources of his light and
knowledge.

Truly Christ is mediated to such rich and communicating spirits in ways other
than the Eucharist, which was nevertheless for the Baron the Eternal Offering.
Anglo- Catholics 18 Cf. Boutroux’s last chapter in his Science and Religion in
Contemporary Philosophy. also obtain from it the Divine help which they convey
to the distressed, the poor and the lowly. Their social passion for the
unprivileged should teach Evangelicals who cannot accept their doctrine of the
Mass that our Anglo- Catholic brethren are one with their Lord in His warfare
against sin and suffering.

Yet the same admirable traits distinguish the Society of Friends and the
Salvation Army, which are non-sacramentarian organizations.

Wherever the tokens of fellowship with Jesus appear, there certain validating
results follow.

It should be our aim to find in each approach to Him the agreements rather than
the differences of believers. They assuredly share one life in their common
Lord. Theirs is one struggle and one victory, and they are all members of the
one Spiritual Body of which He is the Living Head.


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  CHAPTER 5: 03.     THE CHRIST OF A GROWING EXPERIENCE
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CHAPTER III THE CHRIST OF A GROWING EXPERIENCE IN the preceding chapter I
endeavored to show that an adequate realization of the person and mission of
Jesus could only be obtained by the inclusive use of all material available for
the purpose. As already noted, this material is derived from the written
records, the experiential contacts with the Master extending through nineteen
centuries, and the organic life and activity of the Christian Church during
those centuries. Some criticisms and comments were offered concerning previous
attempts of scholars and thinkers to discover the fuller significance of Jesus
by means of the exclusive use of any one of these sources of evidence. Reference
was made to the synthetic method which construes and harmonizes all of them to
that end. It is pertinent to add that the investigator of our Lord’s character
and career also needs the impartiality of the historian, the integrity of the
scientist, the insight of the philosopher, and the fervor of the religionist. To
assert with Canon Quick, for example, that Christianity is essentially a
sacramental religion, and at the same time, to concede, as he does, that there
is no clear historical evidence that Jesus instituted the Eucharist, is an
instance of the failure to establish a true correlation between the expanding
life of the Church and the documents which portray her actual beginnings. 1 We
cannot interpret Christian ideas solely in the terms of their ancestry, without
doing violence to the larger meanings those ideas acquire from the mystery cults
and pagan rites of the earlier Christian eras. On the other hand, we should
guard against a common temptation of students of history to conclude that there
was an intentional borrowing from those cults and rites because of their
occasional coincidence with Christian language and ritual. To be frank, 1 The
Christian Sacraments, p. 188ff.

Christianity never assumed unique originality in all respects. “The glory of
Christianity,” said Doctor Benjamin Jowett of Balliol, “is not to be as unlike
other religions as possible, but to be their perfection and their judgment.” In
this respect it claims to satisfy the eager desires and aspirations of man by
means of an Evangel, which gives him the consciousness of conquest over self and
an accordance with the Infinite not found elsewhere.

These primal values are not recognized, as they should be, by Bruce Barton in
his widely read volume, The Man Nobody Knows. Its arresting title is scarcely
justified in view of the testimony of the Gospels, and of countless souls who in
every subsequent age have confessed their indebtedness to Jesus as their Savior
and Lord. Nor does Mr. Barton’s delineation of the Master accord with the
conception of the Evangelists and Apostles of the New Testament. However
sympathetic may be his presentation of Jesus as a man of affairs, a typical
captain of industry and trade, shrewd and adroit in His social manipulations,
possessing resilient physical strength, and a consummate acquaintance with human
nature, this curiously mundane figure is a stranger to those who have rightly
appraised the portrayals of New Testament literature. Certainly Mr. Barton has
not introduced us to the stainless Being of redemptive passion, through whose
manifestation believers have in many places and times found peace with God, with
themselves and with their fellows.

Artists, to say nothing of theologians, instinctively antagonize a portraiture
which makes that Being subservient to the tumult of the market place and the
standards of its devotees. This book of the hour sets Christ’s sublime
personality in typical American sceneries, at the antipodes from those in which
He moved and achieved His triumph of sacrificial love and reconciliation.
Written for that somewhat delusive creature “the man of the street,” the graphic
story in question does not do credit to its author’s undoubted reverence for
Jesus. It belongs to the perishable writings of which the present age is
prolific, and, toward which the future will be utterly indifferent. In its pages
mysticism and spiritual sensibility are as ill fated as was the dove Noah sent
out of the ark over the inhospitable waters of the Deluge. Imaginative
descriptions are here employed for perishable affairs, to the obscuration of the
eternal realities at stake. In saying this one does not forget that every period
must write its own books. Nor is it of any use for pedants and pundits to
affirm, with pontifical ardor, that contemporary bookmakers are pigmies in
comparison with the past masters of literature. The reading public of any era
will not be bullied into reading those authors who have reached the dignity of
classics, sacred or secular. Nevertheless, modern attempts to bring Jesus into
the regions of ordinary life must be made in an extraordinary way, and evince
some traces of that transcendent temper which first launched Him upon the world.
This achievement is not within Mr. Barton’s metier, and its absence makes what
he writes ephemeral.

Kenan’s Vie de Jesus belongs to a very different order. It is a genuinely
artistic production, quite superior to Canon Liddon’s sweeping stricture that
Renan portrayed Jesus as “a lewd Frenchman of the lesser sort.”

2 It has a haunting felicity of style and beauty of allusion, a charm of
reference and an exalted humanitarian tone, which often leave emotion in the
heart and music in the memory.

Yet its fatal drawback is that when the devout look beneath this elaborate
vesture of rhetoric and learning, the Lord they adore is not there.

They search in vain for the Christ of their actual fellowship. He is absent from
the stately edifice the French savant so skillfully built. Nor is it possible to
give unqualified assent to so manifestly sincere an effort as that of J.

Middleton Murry’s volume on Jesus, Man of Genius. Such He assuredly was because
He was infinitely more, but the “more” is not present, nor even hinted by this
eminent authority on English letters. While cheerfully 8 The Divinity of our
Lord: (Bampton Lectures) p. 15; also compare Note A, section 5. conceding
certain privileges to literary scholarship, despite loud protests against its
intellectual refinements and cultural precisions, it is hardly possible to admit
Mr. Murry’s plea that his “training as a literary writer might be the equivalent
of the more specialised training of the professor of divinity.” 8 By the same
token the law could be placed at the mercy of earnest amateurs, and the healing
sciences practiced by enthusiasts ignorant of their technique.

It may be recalled that Matthew Arnold made trenchant use of a suggestion akin
to Mr. Murry’s in Literature and Dogma. But its author wandered far afield from
the theological problems he essayed to solve.

Believing souls definitely revolt against Mr. Murry’s bald assertion that Jesus
sought baptism by His forerunner John because He was “conscious of sin.” The
qualifying clause immediately follows that “these sins were the sins of a man of
supreme spiritual genius, who knew and taught that the outward act was 8 Jesus,
Man of Genius, p. viii. Cf. his volume, Things to Come, p. 99ff. less
significant than the inward attitude”; and that the sins involved consisted
essentially in a spirit of doubt and despair/ Since when, however, were geniuses
exempt from the moral law? And at what moment in His most crucial circumstances
did Jesus exhibit either doubt or despair which was morally blameworthy?

Surely He had but to know the Will of the Father to accept and fulfill it.
Moreover, the notion that we exalt our Lord by attributing minor imperfections
to His character is fundamentally false to the New Testament record of that
character. It presupposes what experience verifies: that sinful humanity, aware
of its frailty and helplessness, has always found its enablement in the Divine
Daysman who was without spot or blame. To rob men of this confidence, and to do
it at the behest of a purely theoretical process, is to render the race a
depressing disservice.

We are indebted to Doctor Gamaliel Bradford for a series of illuminating
biographies, the latest of which, Life and I, is characterized by him as “an
autobiography of humanity.”

He rightly regards Jesus as the central influence of religion. “Among all the
varied agencies for disciplining the mutinous, rebellious, all-engrossing I,
none probably has been more notable or more efficient than the life and teaching
of Jesus.” But this “critical outsider,” as the author styles himself, evinces a
serious misunderstanding of the spirit and purpose of the Master. He enlarges
upon His “perpetual diatribe against riches,” which implies “a good deal of
ignorance of actual conditions, and, if one dares to suggest it, even a trifle
of jealousy, perhaps not for oneself, but for those whom one represents.” If the
havoc riches have wrought in the social order does not convince Mr. Bradford
that Jesus was justified in pointing out their inherent perils, perhaps a
reminder of the seamy side of that order, or in the circles vitiated by
Mammonism, might do so. Moreover, our Lord’s animadversions were directed
against that lust for wealth which is the admitted source of multitudinous
evils, rather than against wealth per se. Again, it is a clear misreading of the
New Testament to assert that “the interest of beauty, of esthetic emotion, and
of intellectual curiosity, of the abstract passion for the truth,” does not
exist in its pages. To one who has recently returned from wandering through the
European art galleries this sounds rather farfetched. Provided Mr. Bradford’s
criticism is correct, one wonders whence the celebrities of mediseval and
renaissance religious art received their subjects and their inspiration, if not
from the Gospels and Epistles. The idyll of the Nativity alone, as idealized by
them, flatly contradicts Mr. Bradford’s superficial reflections on “beauty” and
“sesthetic emotion.”

Still, these are not so surprising in the light of his admission that he has
“not read a chapter of the Bible continuously for over ten years,” nor “the
Gospels as a whole for a great many more years than ten.” B Such candid
confession of unconcern is naive, to say the least. But on what does this author
base his right to instruct others concerning so paramount an 6 Cf. Life and I,
p. 155f.; 172ff. issue if he has omitted a rereading of the original sources? It
is precisely this indirect, second-hand approach to Jesus, which accounts in
great measure for the misapprehensions and erroneous estimates of Him and of His
relation to mankind, which hamper the progress of knowledge. It is trite to
observe that experts in one realm may be and frequently are bunglers in another.
Eminent in a given department of inquiry, they seem impotent beyond it, and
carry over from it prepossessions and methods which either stultify research or
blind its makers to realities they should consider.

These observations apply to The Son of Man, by Emil Ludwig, another biographer
of deserved reputation. His preface states that “one who would venture to
ascribe to Jesus imaginary sayings and doings should be a person at least equal
to Jesus in intuitive power.”

Yet this discriminating condition is discarded by Herr Ludwig when he comes into
closer touch with his theme. While he is occupied with the backgrounds of
Palestinian life and manners, or the doctrines and customs of the Orient, he
displays the fecundity of ideas and constructive force we have been taught to
anticipate from his previous works upon the Ex-Emperor William, Prince Bismarck
and Napoleon the First. But the soul of Jesus is entirely beyond his
apprehension. To cover the hiatus in his interpretation, he indulges in
melodramatic assertions and romantic conjectures, indicative of preconceptions
entirely foreign to the Master’s nature and utterances. The biting words
“hectoring,” “fanatical,” “overbearing,” and “arrogant,” applied to Jesus as the
creator of the then novel virtue of humility, reveal Ludwig’s petulance rather
than his biographical discernment. It is nothing short of the perversion of the
records, and shows an astonishing lack of critical insight to insist that Jesus
called Himself “the Son of Man” in the earlier period of His ministry, and “the
Son of God” in its later period. In brief, the psychological bias prevalent in
Ludwig’s writings here makes him gullible of fancies and disdainful of facts.
Not a few of his suppositions are too flimsy to be regarded seriously, and they
are of such a kind as would pass unnoticed but for the name attached to them.

One lays aside his book with the feeling that if this is the best evaluation of
Jesus that can be made by one of the leading analytical biographers of the age,
St. Paul’s verdict that the world by wisdom knows not God is reaffirmed. An
error common to certain historical writers is to follow the line of reasoning,
post hoc ergo propter hoc. This fallacy obtains in The Paganism in our
Christianity by Arthur Weigall. He quotes as analogies to the Virgin Birth
heathen legends of the union of gods with the daughters of men, but fails to
note that these ceased to be virgins after their union. His assertion that the
phrase “the blood of bulls” in the Epistle to the Hebrews is due to the
influence of Mithraism grievously overlooks the Levitical ritual of the Old
Testament. The Church absorbed some things from the pagan mysteries, but they
were subordinate to the truth of her Lord’s Person. “Those who tell us what
Christianity took over, whether from Hebrew religion, Greek philosophy, Stoicism
or the pagan cults, too often forget to tell us what it refused and rejected.

Yet in that process of assimilation and rejection is the proof of the living
organism.” 8 These words of a competent authority on comparative religion
establish a test which many are inclined to overlook. A fatal misconception of
the Jesus of history is seen in Mr. Weigall’s ingenious reading of the Gospel
story in the light of myths and legends. It is not surprising that he revives
the swoon hypothesis of Paulus, prevalent among the earlier rationalists, that
Jesus did not die on the cross but only suffered a temporary lapse of
consciousness. To accept such a theory is to discountenance the clear testimony
of the Evangelists that Jesus was actually dead.

Indeed, it would have been nothing short of a miracle if a ghastly and exhausted
Figure had induced the disciples to believe that He was alive with power. It
might be said of Mr.

8 Kenneth Saunders: The Gospel for Asia, p. 182.

Weigall’s theories that “what is new is not true and what is true is not new.”
No explanation that fails to give full credit to Jesus for the spiritual impulse
which He inaugurated and advanced has yet been found satisfactory.

What is propounded in this book is akin to a theory of music offered by a deaf
mute.

Nevertheless, the suspicions of critical scholarship to which allusion has been
made receive some countenance in certain theological coteries. An accomplished
writer of this liberal persuasion asserts that “every statement in the records
is to be judged by the degree of its suitableness to the distinctive environment
of Jesus, on the one hand, and to that of the framers of Gospel tradition at one
or another stage in the history of Christianity, on the other.” * Yet if
everything in the sacred narratives which cannot be explained as an echo of its
“distinctive environment” is to be regarded as negligible, the whole idea and
fact of creative personality is discarded. Who can integrate the second Isaiah’s
prophetic majesty T Shirley J. Case: Jesus, A New Biography, p. 115. with a
harassed band of exiles in Babylonia, or the unequaled poetry of the drama of
Job with the provincialism of post-exilic Judaism? A similar historical
obtuseness is seen in Doctor Warschauer’s Historical Life of Christ 3 in which
he maintains that the Gospels are “records of the Passion extended backwards,”
and that many elements of a miraculous nature were read into the narratives by
His credulous followers, who did not testify to the reality of the events, but
to their impressions, actual or otherwise, and mostly the latter. For example,
the genealogies were fabricated because of a desire to prove the Davidic descent
of Jesus. The accounts of the Nativity reflect current legends about Mithra and
Buddha, and were accommodations to the Old Testament’s Messianic prophecies. The
baptism of the Master embodies the belief of the early church that He was
anointed with the Holy Spirit, whereby He became conscious of a mission which He
afterwards understood. The betrayal by Judas consisted in his giving away the
Messianic secret reserved in the keeping of the Twelve. The Resurrection story
was an apocryphal product of floating traditions due to imagination. 8

Professor Benjamin W. Bacon rightly points out in The Story of Jesus and the
Beginnings of the Church 3 that there could be no Gospel of Jesus apart from the
Gospel about Jesus. They who desire a return to the simple religion of Jesus,
“the paternalistic theism of the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer,” do
not realize that the ethics of Jesus cannot be separated from his theology
without devitalizing His religion. Indeed, the Gospel of Jesus is in reality the
Gospel about Jesus, for the Four Gospels as well as the Pauline and other
writings of the New Testament harmoniously convey the apostolic testimony “even
as truth is in Jesus.” * It is here that Professor Bacon’s negative criticism
undermines the solid construction of the Faith. His very acuteness and
resourcefulness lead to many ingenious conclu- 8 J. Warschauer: The Historical
Life of Christ, pp. 16ff.; 46; 298; 344 ff.

8 Ephesians 4:21. sions, based upon strained combinations, due to the dangerous
tendency toward subjectivism, which has wrought so disastrously in the
reconstruction of the Gospel narrative. It is simply conjecture to assert that
Jesus did not identify Himself with the Suffering Servant of Messianic promise,
and that He did not consider that death was the inevitable outcome of the agony
in Gethsemane. If Jesus is “the greatest religious Teacher that ever lived,” as
Doctor Bacon acknowledges, it is incredible that He should have misread the
purpose of His mission. It is hardly possible that His disciples showed greater
insight, and that especially St. Paul, who was not an original disciple, had a
more profound grasp of the religion of Jesus than did Jesus Himself. Such a view
runs directly counter to the teaching of the New Testament, which is our final
literary authority on the claims of our Lord.

These gratuitous explanations of effects after dismissing their ascribed causes
necessitate reasoning within a circle carried to the nth power. One ventures to
submit that it is not within the province even of professional capacity to
assign world-shaping events to fond deceits and fantastic legends which were the
common property of the proletariat. Marked liberties have been taken with
Shakespeare, and an extensive literature dedicated to the denial of his
authorship of the plays and sonnets that bear his name. But until now no censor
has hinted that their imperial flights should be assigned to the gossip of a
rural community, or to the current tittle-tattle of London’s taverns and the
alleyways of its primitive theaters. Yet such an attribution would be facility
itself compared with the task of wholly explaining Jesus by the age and
environment in which He lived. In passing from the forced interpretations of
ill-digested knowledge and theoretical speculation to those of real magistrates
of divinity, it is as though one left a crowded and noisy room for the mountain
side with its unintercepted vision and purer air. The three Anglican bishops,
Doctors Headlam, Temple and, Gore, may be classed as conservatives. But theirs
is the conservatism of men in whom the historical sense is virile and
intelligent. They properly appreciate the tremendous importance of the order,
life and energies of the Church. Their outlook is not confined to a solitary era
of the past, however momentous.

They visualize it as the progenitor of a growing future, the potencies of which
make the beginning moment the supreme moment; a future, in which, after the
debate is silenced, a few stars of righteousness and truth shine resplendently
in man’s spiritual firmament, with Jesus as their sun.

Bishop Headlam, who collaborated with the late Professor Sanday in one of the
most satisfactory commentaries extant on the Epistle to the Romans, is as fully
cognizant of the problems connected with New Testament literature as any living
authority. He writes: “To those who deny the historical character of the
documents which narrate the life of Christ, we may reply that they give us a
coherent and consistent narrative of events; that they contain the record of a
teaching harmonious with the period to which it belongs, unaffected, or but
slightly affected, by the development of Christian history; that they present to
us a Person whose character and message are unique; and that they form an
adequate cause for the events which followed them.” 10 In an earlier volume
Bishop Headlam stressed the truth that the teaching of Jesus as contained in the
Gospels, is not a collection of diversified estimates and opinions held by
various individuals during a period of from fifty to seventy years, but a
homogeneous whole with conspicuous internal oneness, derived from a Teacher of
intense spiritual authority, whose dominance was acknowledged alike by His
disciples and adversaries. 11 This is reasoning without rage, critical but
cautious, by a divine who exercises restraint and eschews evasion. Its spiritual
refinement and acute insight are admirably adapted to the nature of the theme.
When the occasion requires, the bishop can forge the 10 Jesus Christ in History
and Faith, p. 37f.

11 The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, p. 314. anchors of faith as well
as define its more delicate issues, and dismiss with appropriate peremptoriness
what he calls “learned trifling.”

Many entitled to judge esteem Bishop Gore’s volume on Belief in Christ his
magnum opus. Others contend, however, that it but reaffirms his previous
position taken in earlier days in the volume of essays entitled Luce Mundij and
more completely set forth in his Bampton Lectures on The Incarnation of the Son
of God. Some who are familiar with Bishop Gore’s ecclesiastical convictions
assert that his maintenance of the Chalcedonian Christology, while consistent
with AngloCatholicism, disqualifies him as an effective apologist for “the
modern mind.” Whatever this somewhat intangible mind may happen to be, it is
presumable that wisdom was not born with it, nor will it necessarily share its
disappearance. Besides, when a Christological conclusion nearly identical with
that of Bishop Gore is reached by Archbishop William Temple in his Christ the
Truth and also by Canon B. H. Streeter in his lucid chapter on “The Christ”
found in his remarkable volume, Reality, these three very dissimilar apologists
should be heeded. If Bishop Gore favors Biblical and historical methods for the
process, Bishop Temple proceeds according to the canons of philosophical
inquiry, and Doctor Streeter agrees with both bishops after a fresh and
comprehensive survey of all the relevant testimony. This agreement is further
strengthened by his more recent essay on “Finality in Religion,” contained in
the book entitled Adventure, The Faith of Science and the Science of Faith. The
competence of these Anglican leaders for the task they have discharged is beyond
successful dispute. They fortify the conviction that Christianity’s received
doctrine of its Founder’s person is inseparably related with enduring realities,
which neither hypothetical criticisms, conjectural explanations, nor
undisciplined imagery disguised in scholastic dialect can displace.

Any conception of Jesus which invalidates the historic experience of the Church,
and by dispelling her assurance of pardon and peace to the penitent, invites her
dissolution as the worshiping center of His redeemed brotherhood, cannot be
viewed with equanimity by those to whom God’s honor and man’s welfare are alike
precious. When the chief argument adduced for this reversal of Christian
consciousness is that the historic doctrine of Jesus is “a strain on our
credulity,” one begs leave to dissent. The strain, if there be any, is in the
opposite direction. Since the fullest proof of Christianity is original
Christianity itself, much credulity is presumptively demanded by those who
lightly ascribe the world’s noblest religion to entirely inadequate sources. If
we realize, as we should, that none can “explain” life’s most ordinary forms, we
shall not be confounded by the apostolic declaration that, in Jesus as the
Christ, the Eternal entered Time. Professor H. R. Mackintosh appositely
observes: “Everywhere in life, in nature, in history, in personality, there are,
for each of us, irreducible and enigmatic facts, which we can touch and
recognize and register, but of which we never become masters intellectually.
Nature itself is full of new beginnings of real increase, of novel fact not
deducible from the previous phases of the cosmos... There is an alogical element
in things, not to be measured by the canons of discursive mind... Being is too
rich and manifold for us to lay down a priori regulations to the effect that
this or that, even though worthy and morally credible, is impossible for God.”

How then with all the ascertainable subject matter before us are we to appraise
the values which abound in Jesus? The question should be answered before any
attempt is made to apply those values to the multiplex needs of our own life. We
might begin by urging that He has made an immeasurably larger differential in
the world than any other being who has ever lived. This observation trespasses
on the obvious, yet it has the initial advantage of a practically universal
indorsement in countries enjoying the highest civilization. It may be 12 The
Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, p. 471. further predicated that He is
abundantly able to amplify the differential when men shall correspondingly
appropriate its meanings.

Everywhere to-day the beneficial realities of His mission are acknowledged. Its
incalculable good profoundly impresses the general mind, and kindles the
eagerness to know more of Jesus, shown by believers and non-believers in the
self -manifestation of the Father in Him. The average man or woman pays little
heed to scholars, who, while bent on what they deem “the Jesus of history,” at
the same time ignore the relations He has established between the Creator and
His children. It is instinctively felt by the mass that unaided mortals, however
erudite, cannot encompass the entire revelation which Jesus made. This would
involve nothing less than an inerrant analysis and interpretation of nineteen
centuries of Christian history and progress.

Again, students of the past are aware that in its decisive moments those
super-personalities have emerged, who possessed a combination of gifts which
found its expression in the guidance of events. The very contradictions of their
age expanded their ability to direct its passional forces into new channels.
Such a personality was John Wesley, vigorous without vehemence, neither loud nor
labored, a fixed luminary of private and public virtue, who shone on the just
and the unjust. Annalists long since rejected the idea that Wesley’s
significance, or that of other kindred spirits, was exclusively religious.
Doubtless after his conversion in Aldersgate Street, London, on May the
twenty-fourth, 1738, it was his absorbing business to rekindle in
Englishspeaking lands the spiritual fires which sloth, sensuality and unfaith
had almost quenched.

But, to quote Lecky: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the scene which
took place in that humble meeting house in Aldersgate Street formed an epoch in
English history. The conviction which then flashed upon o’Se of the most
powerful and most active intellects... is the true source of English Methodism.”
18 This verdict is altogether too modest.

18 England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. Ill, p. 48.

Neither England nor her Methodism was the sole recipient of Wesley’s
illumination. His transcendence was diffused among the nations; his words have
gone out to the ends of the earth. He would have been the first to assert that
no soul shines in its own radiance, or transmits more light than it is able to
receive. The strength and extent of his influence but reflect his intimacy with
the Light of lights.

He found his spiritual lineage and leverage in the Crucified and Risen Jesus. By
His aid Wesley proposed to upraise the deserted and shepherdless folk of the
period not only to decency but to holiness. It was through the vision of the
Christ that he foresaw an apparently hopeless and degenerate populace gathered
into an ideal Communion broadly and securely based on love, on justice, on
social and religious responsibility.

These passing references to the foremost Protestant statesman-evangelist of the
past three hundred years simply emphasize our inability to depict the moral
preeminence and spiritual distinction of the Christ of the Graseo Roman Empire
and of subsequent States.

Gibbon and later historians show that St. Paul’s arraignment of that ancient
organization in his letter to the Romans was well within the mark. The marvelous
political system which for seven hundred years had governed earth’s most
habitable provinces with magnanimity, courage, prudence and firmness was then on
the verge of collapse. The heart of Rome was decrepit through carnality and
corruption. Neither Cicero’s ethical writings nor those of Marcus Aurelius or
Seneca could avert her impending doom any more than they could redistribute the
solar system. Yet while her decline was hastened by lust, luxury, oppression and
war, a new life was injected into Roman society by an obscure and despised band
of sectaries. It was the life of Christ and the life in Christ. His disciples
could not save the venerable political fabric which tottered to its fall almost
unaware of their existence. But they did something better. They inaugurated the
civilization we inherit, which, notwithstanding its lamentable blunders and
crimes, contains the promise of a universal betterment which was unknown before
Christ’s appearance, except by prophetic Judaism.

Grant Showerman, in his Eternal Rome, objects to that appearance and its
results, because, according to him, they destroyed the Roman Empire; an event
which he mourns as the bitterest tragedy of time. His antipathy to Christianity
probably preceded this astounding discovery. The causes of Imperial Rome’s fall
were certainly in no way related to the new Faith. On the contrary, they were
due to facts, habits and principles which were the antithesis of that Faith.
Moreover, to assume that the world’s future depended upon the perpetuity of the
Poos Romano, is to show oneself devoid of historical imagination, and unaware of
the inevitable outcome of glaring social evils in physical and moral bankruptcy.
The contention of Edward Lucas White, another writer predisposed against
Christianity, that Rome’s overthrow was brought aboul by the insidious
undermining of the Christians) is virtually a repetition of Gibbon’s circuitous
arguments. Mr. White’s facts are out of focus when he states that the religion
of Jesus stressed thoughts and not deeds, and that its disciples were intolerant
fanatics and hypocrites, whose other-worldliness induced them to conspire
against the State. 1 * Such are the nebulous sentimentalities enlisted to
explain a crucified Jew’s unique conquest of the best conceived and administered
political sovereignty of antiquity. To return to realities, the Caesars
forfeited the world’s allegiance because when the gods arrive the half gods
depart. Yet this is a strange reason for antagonizing a religion which ushered
in what Napoleon himself exalted as the imperishable Kingdom of the
spiritualities.

What began in the remote province of Judaea has not stayed its beneficent march.

Modern society owes much to Rome and more to Greece. But its essential elements
have been conserved and hallowed by the Gospel of Jesus, which was first
heralded in the GraacoRoman Empire during its decadence. What 14 Cf. Edward
Lucas White: Why Rome Fell, p. 296ff. happened then has happened since and is
happening now. The Christ of a growing experience is not confined to
institutional Christianity or to anything it covers. He takes the kingdoms of
the earth for His operating stage, and coordinates their peoples and their
policies in behalf of His redemptive purpose. Remove from our age what is
discernibly there because He lived, loved, taught and died; because men
willingly surrender themselves to His will; and what have you left in it of
vital consequence?

Enter a great library, and set apart the volumes which are in more or less
degree motivated by Jesus. Walk through the art galleries and museums of capital
cities, and remove from them the masterpieces inspired by Christian sentiment,
or portraying Christian events. Stand in the Angel Choir of Lincoln or the
transepts of Notre Dame in Paris and consider their adumbrations of eternity;
their power to make even the secularized spectator conscious of, A presence that
disturbs him with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far
more deeply interfused, and to hypnotize him, so to speak, into religious
feeling. Banish these visible evidences of Christ’s great differential, and how
bare and desolate life would be! 1B

Think of the benevolent Christian influences that have humanized the customs and
laws of once barbarous nations. Challenged by the doctrines of the Master,
mighty States, prone to license, outrage and persecution, have measurably
exterminated these iniquities, and attained civic integrity and honor. The
selfish tyrannies of capricious princes were tamed. The fickleness, perversity
and cruelty of the populace were modified. The dissoluteness of the
aristocracies and the turpitude of the multitudes were lessened. The finer
elements of existence were restored to primacy. Conduct was won to better
courses. Time ceased to be “a maniac scattering dust, and life a fury flinging
flame.” On the low dark verge of humanity’s horizon the dawn of a new day was
visible. These things have not been done in a 16 Cf. James R. Cameron: Jesus and
Art; Ernest H. Short, The House of God. corner. The upper room where the first
disciples barred the door for fear of their foes has given way to places of
public concourse.

Christianity has cried aloud in the streets and from the house tops. Its message
is to all the sons of men. Its issues are now an open contention, fraught with
such matters as the honorable dealings of trade and politics, social
reconstruction, national well-being, international concord, the cultivation of
righteousness in the entire life and activity of mankind in a word, the
supremacy of Christ’s Kingdom in all world affairs.

Troeltsch comments on the extent to which the Calvinistic interpretation of
Christianity affected modern society by instilling in the peoples of northern
Europe the ideal of “selfdevotion to work and gain, production for production’s
sake as the Will of God for every man.” lfl On the other hand, how often and
tragically we have been taught that industry and trade, or even knowledge and
the cultural

19 Cf. R. S. Sleigh: The Sufficiency of Christianity, an exposition of the
religious philosophy of Dr. Ernst Troeltsch, p. 169ff. arts rub elbows with
disaster when separated from Christ’s control, and subjected to the discords of
hate or the anarchy of physical violence.

Allow me to commend in this connection Charles Loring Brace’s Gesta CTiristi.
Few authors have more succinctly described the peaceful interpretations of
Christianity in human progress. Ideas, principles, practices now looked upon as
the alphabet of ethics, have either been implanted or stimulated and sustained
by the religion of Jesus. Among these are “regard for the personality of the
weakest and poorest; respect for woman; the absolute duty of each member of the
fortunate classes to raise up the unfortunate; humanity to the child, the
prisoner, the stranger, the needy, and even the brute; unceasing opposition to
all forms of cruelty, oppression and slavery; the duty of personal purity and
the sacredness of marriage; the necessity of temperance; the obligation of a
more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater cooperation
between employers and employed; the right of every human being to have the
utmost opportunity of developing his faculties, and of all persons to enjoy
equal political and social privileges; the principle that the injury of one
nation is the injury of all, and the expediency and duty of unrestricted trade
and intercourse between all countries; and finally and principally, a profound
opposition to war, a determination to limit its evils when existing, and to
prevent its arising by means of international arbitration.” 1T The reading of
this list of actual achievements is a reminder that, although Jesus has not yet
been accepted with consistent seriousness by his Church, it cannot be said that
His will has been wholly disregarded. Nevertheless a wide gulf still yawns
between the theory and the practice of organized religion. Christ’s followers
everywhere should therefore hasten to bridge that gulf by a more unreserved
consecration to His teachings, in order that God’s Kingdom might come with power
to earth’s remotest bounds.

17 C. Loring Brace: Gesta Christi, A History of Humane Progress under
Christianity, p. xii.


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  CHAPTER 6: 04.     THE CHRIST IN THE MODERN WORLD
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CHAPTER IV THE CHRIST IN THE MODERN WORLD IN his History of Doctrine, Professor
Hagenbach makes a five-fold division of the course pursued by Christian thought
from its beginning. First in order was “The Age of Apologetics,” when the infant
Ecclesia was chiefly concerned for the defense of the Faith against its Pagan
opponents. Next came “The Age of Polemics,” during which the Church established
by the Emperor Constantine’s edict devoted herself to the formulation of her
doctrines. “The Age of Systematic Theology” which largely influenced the modern
period followed that of “Polemics” and deserves more than casual mention. It was
developed by the keen and logical cogitations of the Schoolmen, whose
theological reign extended from the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century.
They [in], made a praiseworthy attempt to reconcile the dogmas of faith with the
dictates of reason, setting up an all-inclusive system on the supposition that
the creed of the Church was the one reality capable of rationalization. As the
product of Christian intellectualism, Scholasticism acted under the Aristotelian
method, and was governed by the assumption that all phenomena must be understood
from and toward theology. The early Fathers had bequeathed their successors a
closely articulated, comprehensive body of dogma, and a philosophical apparatus
which determined and shaped its content. Once the Schoolmen realized the nature
of this bequest, they endeavored to recover the spirit of inquiry that lay
behind its results. The Church consequently entered almost automatically upon
another era of strain and conflict, intensified by the previous organization and
concurrent growth of the Papacy, which had reinforced the predicates of
catholicity, authority and dogma, and the paramountcy of their spiritual claims.

Although St. Augustine’s influence was regnant in Scholasticism, Erigena, one of
its first representatives, was a Neo-Platbnist and a Mystic rather than a
typical Schoolman.

Roscelinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux, and his pupil Abelard belong to its
first period, which terminated with the twelfth century. The prominent figures
of the second period were Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and
William of Ockham. In so far as the term science is applicable to their
meditations, for them and their disciples it consisted almost exclusively of
divinity.

Doubtless they reasoned in a circle, since they set out on their quest with
inherited convictions they were determined to substantiate.

Many of their arguments may seem frivolous and barren to Modernists, who accuse
them of fabricating absurd problems and wasting endless pains upon their
solution. Yet jibes are meaningless when flung at able and dedicated men, who
gave practical proof of their unsurpassed eagerness in thinking, and exhibited
an intrepid energy in subjecting to thought what ever they deemed essential to
its dominion. NOT should it be forgotten that the Schoolmen were also the
Modernists of their age: bold and advanced spirits whose work could not be
canceled without a break in the continuity of Christian thinking and
achievement. Our political, ethical and religious ideas and institutions have
been constructed in part out of the material these mediaeval quarrymen excavated
with prodigious toil. If its results were not effective in enriching knowledge,
they certainly strengthened the reasoning faculties of the future, and prepared
them for their arduous tasks. In summary, the mission of the Scholastics
expanded and invigorated the human mind until the limitless realms of the
natural sciences were opened to its researches. When that mission ended, it was
succeeded by the Renaissance which ushered in the freedom and the methods of
organized knowledge.

“The Age of Conflict and Confessions” covered the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Its developments show that Protestantism was at odds not only with
the Roman See, but within itself; and the severity of its internal separations
is evidenced by Schaff’s third volume on The Creeds of Christendom. In
Hagenbach’s scheme, “The Age of Criticism” comes last. It began in the latter
half of the eighteenth century and persists to the present. The advance, on the
one hand, of the natural sciences, and on the other, of historical and Biblical
criticism, dismayed theological orthodoxy, jealous as it was for the
preservation of those doctrinal formulas which now seemed to be threatened with
dissolution.

Here the poets enter the scene. They are usually the best interpreters of their
age; alive alike to its hopes and fears,and sensitive to those subtler movements
of the Time Spirit, which so often escape the notice of partisans.

Arthur Hugh Clough gave up the whole problem of faith’s reconciliation with
knowledge, yet still clung to faith in blank bewilderment, and affirmed, “Christ
is not dead.” Tennyson ultimately succeeded in reaching a stage where faith was
the one “beam in darkness,” which we must “let grow.” Browning’s optimism, so
often lauded, was at times too insistent to be convincing. Matthew Arnold may be
described as “faint, yet pursuing.” At his critical hour he was dejectedly
Wandering between two worlds, One dead, the other powerless to be born.

He distilled through his compositions a stoical resignation and a tranquil
reserve prepared to endure the worst. Many inquired with Clough, Where lies the
land to which the ship would go?

Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from?
Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

Arnold echoes this refined and pensive pessimism, The world, which seems To lie
before us like a land of dreams So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really
neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Here is doubt deeply tinged with its native melancholy: the utterance of
cultured spirits who are reluctant to leave their former habitations, and gaze
back on them with infinite desire and infinite regard. From such mingled
elements the most intimate strains are evoked.

They have no message for the popular mind.

Yet so long as we cherish classic forms committed to elevated and candid
reflections on pregnant themes, we shall read Arnold’s “Resignation,” “Dover
Beach,” and “Thyrsis.”

Though the inevitable word was not always at his command, his poetry plumbs
spiritual depths which the best prose has seldom sounded.

Out of the heart of this “Age of Criticism” came Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,”
published when the conflict between belief and unbelief raged at its height.
That saint, mystic and scholar, the late Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, then a
Cambridge Professor, gratefully acknowledged the service rendered by the poem.
Its one hundred and twenty-fourth section caused many intelligent people to feel
with Westcott that the long meditated work had in it the “inalienable minimum of
faith which humanity cannot surrender because it is necessary to life.” It reads
in part, If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, I heard a voice, “Believe no
more/’ And heard an ever breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep. A
warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like
a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d, “I have felt.”

No, like a child in doubt and fear; But that blind clamor made me wise;

Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; And what I
am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the
hands Which reach thro’ nature, moulding men.

Thus the Laureate found for himself and for multitudes besides that “Strong Son
of God, Immortal Love,” without whom the world was drear indeed, but with whom
its darkest phases shone in a new and a transforming light. 1 1 Cf. Gaius Glenn
Atkins: Reinspecting Victorian Religion, p. 67ff.

It may be asked if we are still in Hagenbach’s “Age of Criticism.” So far as the
essentials of Christianity are concerned, the answer is that criticism is on the
wane, and that what may be called “The Age of Reconstruction and Restatement” is
at hand. This does not mean, however, that criticism is listless and silent. On
the contrary, it is energetic and vocal. But it concentrates in the main upon
the failure of institutional Christianity to fulfill the fundamental ideals and
aims of the New Testament Faith. Seldom indeed has any era experienced a
profounder or a more widespread conviction of the significance of Jesus than our
era is now experiencing. The conviction that individual, social, national and
international safety and welfare are bound up in whole hearted allegiance to His
example and teaching exists to-day on an unprecedented scale. If He cannot
redeem humanity from its fevered ways and useless restlessness, its sin and
degradation, then, for the majority, its evils are plainly beyond redemption. We
are told that science has to be correlated with religion; that those facts which
bear upon the theory of the nature of things must be rediscovered and restated
before the claims of any religion can have concrete meaning. We are further told
that, provided the result of this process is favorable to religion, it must
include the service of science, and be subjected to such interpretations as
science permits. It is also asserted that we have to look to an inductive
philosophy, based upon scientific phenomena, for a solution of the problems of
faith, and that when this philosophy and its implications are completed, we
shall be able to offer men a religion, the ethical and inspirational qualities
of which surpass anything that conventional religion now offers. 2 This
emancipating program is as yet inchoate. But it can be predicted that unless it
is to prove futile, it will have to acknowledge

2 Cf. Henry Nelson Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth. Doctor Wieman
accepts as in every way adequate and justifiable Professor Whitehead’s
conception of God as “that arrangement of all being which makes for concretion,
but which is never completely actualized here. But God is increasingly
actualized throughout an infinite progression,” p. 196f. that while the living
universe is a compacted whole, Jesus is for our race the center of its cosmic
unity. The truly Divine element of His nature is not to be found in the purity
of His moral precepts, nor even in the uniqueness of His character, but in the
glorious lucidity which the great Ideal He embodied attained in His own soul.
This Ideal of absolute accord with Deity also implied that all which is finite
requires a higher mediation than man or anything man achieves can bestow; and
that for him true life is only to be found in a mediative personality. The
relation of Christianity to science or philosophy is therefore neither one of
dependence nor of opposition, but of distinction of function. Each is entitled
to its own freedom; each contributes toward an ultimate harmony. Christianity is
supreme in its own realm because it makes possible an ineffable fellowship
between the Creator and the creature. This reasoning transfers the things of the
Spirit from metaphysics to psychology, and bases their authority upon the
attested experiences of believers. Neither scientific nor any other outward
standards can domineer over the soul in which the Divine Mercy records its
decrees of pardon and reconciliation. Christians are therefore delivered from
fear of the changes attending the expansion of knowledge.

They do not have to rely upon those apologetic methods, which, though they may
arrest doubt, fail to set forth the plenitude of God’s grace and truth as these
are revealed in Christ Jesus.

Accurately estimated, Christian theology is not speculative; it is expressive.
Its substance consists, as Schleiermacher asserts, of the facts of Christian
consciousness, and its mission is to enumerate and interpret these facts without
undue subserviency to the problems of philosophy or the discoveries of physical
science. In the words of Professor H. R. Mackintosh, “The trust that Chirst is
final can no more than the trust that He is real be produced by theoretical and
constraining argument; we name Him absolute because in experience we recognize
Him as the ultimate Divine answer to man’s individual and social needs.” 8 To
put it bluntly, the world with which Jesus identified Himself cannot miss its
appointed destiny. He will always be its lodestar; and though it may wander far,
in the long last it will return to Him as the nexus of its attachment to God.
Enough has been submitted here and in the previous chapters to make plain the
primary significance of Jesus in the realm of religion, as thus understood.

What He said and what He did have endless worth for every intelligent being. One
is aware that sin also has its social ramifications, but its tragedies begin and
end in the individual. It projects in the sinner a malefic disturbance which
severs him from his higher self, his proper environment, and his Maker. The
final rationale for any universal religion will be that this disturbance is
abolished and its ravages healed. Man is intended for God’s ownership, apart
from which he cannot be truly 3 The Originality of the Christian Message, p.
187f. man. Jesus incarnated that ownership. It was His meat and drink to do the
Father’s Will, and He declared He could do nothing save that which the Father
commanded. He furthermore manifested the very selfhood of Deity to us, and
enabled us to see ourselves as He sees us. Herein is the organic law and the
living source of an ideal Divine-human relationship, made actual in steadfast
trust, loyal obedience, and loving fellowship. Nor can it be seriously
questioned that if every human being bore himself toward God as Jesus did, and
as He invites all men to do, a regenerating transformation would ensue.

If there is any distinguishing trait in modern civilization, it is the
realization that no soul lives to itself. For this reason a religion concerned
with nothing more than the salvation of the individual cannot win the interest,
much less the reverent adherence of mankind. If, as regards Christianity, this
is “The Age of Reconstruction,” it must respond to the social compunction which
has retrieved the credit of our day. And why not? The genius of the Gospel lends
itself to social betterment with singular power and fitness. Its capacity in
this respect makes one wonder how institutional Christianity could waste so many
centuries in comparative idleness or indifference, while the field, which is the
world of human aspiration, labor, suffering and wrong, awaited its latent
energies. To be sure, the vision of the stream of tears and blood, ever falling
darkly through the shadows of mortal travail, appeared to ittuminati like St.
Francis and other mediaeval leaders. But the social viewpoint was heavily
befogged by that sense of individualistic importance which still disfigures some
religious propaganda. It has its rights, but their exaggeration usurps the free
play of Christian humanitarianism, and reduces the Evangel to a scheme for
personal rescue rather than for social restoration. So we take for granted the
social force and meaning of that Gospel, and contend that if its Lord does not
reign in industrial and international affairs, He cannot reign at all.

It was Immanuel Kant who taught our age its doctrine of human personality. Two
of his controlling principles were that God had set before Himself a “Kingdom of
ends”; and that because humanity is the center of all real values, we should
treat it, whether in one’s person or that of another, as an end and never as a
means. Hence the cosmic goal is at once social and moral, nor can there be any
sufficient ethic which does not include both these elements. Auguste Comte, the
founder of Positivism, did much in his sociological system to give Kant’s
concepts an organized form. He proposed an inductive study of human society
based on its definite and ascertainable ways of action. For him these ways
resembled those of other natural phenomena, and their specific laws were
legitimate matters for observation and classification. Long before his death in
1857, however, Comte also endeavored to satisfy man’s religious requirements by
demanding a real object for them and real relations between the object and man.
This object he termed Le Grand fitre, “Ideal Humanity,” to which the individual
should relate himself in love and adoration. In other words, the French thinker
sought a religion in which the social passion should predominate over
selfinterest. He held that in this predominance was the secret of personal and
communal regeneration. The constitution of human nature, according to Comte,
guaranteed the possibility of the change, since the heart was superior to the
intellect. This theory of the superiority of feeling had already been
foreshadowed by Pascal, and later, by Rousseau. But its larger implications were
stressed by Schleiermacher, who plunged into unusual depths of religious
thinking, and salvaged from them a theology of his own. In so doing he rejected
Catholic and Protestant Scholasticism; refashioning a Christian philosophy by
means of the combination in his experience of Moravian quietism, and the
metaphysics of Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Schelling. His volume on Religion:
Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, published in 1799, contained the marrow of
his contribution to the question. Its intense subjectivity displayed a
characteristic trait of the Teutonic mind. Yet we may find therein not a few of
the happiest abstractions of the scholar blended with the fervent aspirations of
the saint; and what it lacks in historical perspective is partly compensated by
its humanistic tone. Schleiermacher maintained that the Divine life in man
resided in the emotions, and was as separate from the dominion of the mind as it
was from that of dogmatic authority. His mystical interpretations of idealism
and social progress were interwoven with ascriptions to the preeminence of Jesus
as the Mediator of the Divine immanence in man and in society.

Human consciousness of this immanence found its best exhibition, not in
ecclesiastical organizations, but in the community of spiritual fellowship,
animated by one Lord, one faith, and one baptism of Christ’s spirit.

Under Kant’s monarchical influence, later idealistic movements of philosophy
tended to emphasize the importance of human personality. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, who by his studies in German universities obtained a more intimate
contact with the concepts of the famous German of Scotch descent, introduced
them in Great Britain. Kant argued that “the teleology of Nature rested on a
transcendental theology as the principle of systematic unity; a principle which
connects all things according to universal and necessary natural laws, since
they all have their origin in the absolute necessity of a single primal Being.”
* Coleridge shocked the evangelical divines who were as deficient in knowledge
as in sympathy, by his plea for the emancipation of orthodox doctrine from its
root and branch defenders.

Thus alone, he insisted, could theological propositions be accorded a place
compatible with their importance for the entire body of Christian truth and in
the moral affection of mankind. Frederick W. Robertson, an enthusiastic disciple
of Coleridge, declared that he preferred the enlightened views of the Sage of
Highgate to the atrocious caricatures of * Critique of Judgment, p. 538.
contemporary Calvinism. The practical results of this infusion of continental
theological thought in the religious provincialism of Great Britain were seen in
those mid- Victorian social crusades, the most significant of which was led by
John Ludlow and Thomas Hughes. These laymen called themselves Christian
Socialists, and among their ardent clerical allies were Frederic Denison
Maurice, Julius Charles Hare, John Sterling and Charles Kingsley.

They were the promoters of The Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street,
London, of which Maurice was the Principal until his death, after which Hughes
succeeded him.

Comte’s theories were promulgated in England by John Stuart Mill, aided by other
literary and philosophical celebrities. He proposed to substitute humanity for
God as the better known object of human devotion.

He insisted that even if God existed, He would be far better satisfied with this
substitution than with the formal acknowledgment of his hidden being, which
current orthodoxy reckoned for righteousness. David Hume had previously
expressed the same idea in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But Mill
made the familiar and remarkable concession to the original Christianity of
Christ already mentioned, which virtually denatured his professed skepticism.
“Religion,” he wrote, “cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on
this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity: nor even now, would
it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of
virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that
Christ would approve our life.” 5

There were a few women who fostered humanitarian enterprises in England. The
notable though somewhat stormy career of Harriet Martineau cannot be recited
here. But her marked intellectual gifts were nowhere more richly manifested or
rewarded than in her efforts for social betterment. George Eliot was meant for a
great theologian and moralist as well as a superb delineator and 8 Essays on
Reliffion, p. 255. analyst of human life and society. In Romola she portrays the
lurid scenes of Savonarola’s last hours, which blend the sadness of
disillusionment and despair with not a few of the noble elements of martyrdom.
We are here made to feel the searching force of the Apostle’s word: “Whether
there be prophecies, they shall fail.” 8 In Dinah Morris, the heroine of Adam
Bede, the holy, believing, compassionate spirit of early Methodism has been more
perfectly presented than in the pages of the best ecclesiastical historians. 7
Theological students who would know the worth and the endurance of the
workingman and field laborer of the time, and also the genesis of its social
reforms, should read this novel. Frederic Harrison was the last and foremost of
Positivist prophets. With him its hopes of ascendancy may be said to have ended,
although the prevalence of the social emphasis in modern American theories of
religion is a distinct result of Positivist influence. Nor 8 1 Corinthians 13:8.

7 Cf. T. G. Selby: The Theology of Modern Fiction, p. 16. should the
sociological theories of Herbert Spencer be forgotten. Whatever may be offered
in criticism of his Agnostic philosophy, it must be conceded that he compelled
Englishspeaking men and women everywhere to realize that the individual and
society exist in reciprocal relations with each other, and that these relations
are not only physiological but ethical in their nature and functions. This,
indeed, is the real thesis of his Data of Ethics. rv Psychology has since come
to the support of the racial point of view. There is no field of knowledge and
speculation in which the difference between traditional and modern conclusions
is so sharply accented as in the science of the mind. The older language of
theology described the soul as a “substance.” It was regarded as a
self-contained entity linked in some inexplicable way to the body, and divided
into separate qualities known as faculties, any one of which could act without
reference to the rest. To-day psychologists do not use these terms or
constructions. Their science has scrutinized the mysterious processes of
consciousness and of self -consciousness. It has brought to light the fact that
the soul or self is a development, and that as such it is physically and
socially conditioned. Physiological processes profoundly affect the growth and
the moral qualities- of consciousness. The character of a human being, as well
as his limitations and accomplishments, are also largely determined by his
environment.

Naturally the apprehension and transmission of the mission and the message of
Jesus have been affected by this youthful but enterprising branch of ordered
knowledge. It is not too much to say that contemporary science, philosophy,
ethical speculation and theories of history or of society are being rewritten
under the enforced recognition of the essentially social nature of personality.
We have learned that the soul is not a special creation without any reference to
preexistent conditions, but that it is a product of the life of the race as
truly as is the body. We have further learned that numerous ills which handicap
the individual are the inevitable results of remedial causes. Some influential
thinkers insist that the preceding statement can be universalized, so that not
only many, but all the ills to which human flesh is heir are amenable to healing
measures. Yet the theory that the individual is a social deposit, and a merely
incidental factor of the gigantic social evolution, involves him in a
determinism even more despotic than that conceived by St. Augustine or Calvin.

There is a very serious danger in thus construing the problem of personal
existence. It threatens to merge the man in the group to such an extent that he
loses his identity, and with it his actual significance. The metaphysical
theories of Bosanquet, for example, are Oriental in their fatalism rather than
Occidental in their freedom. 8 Yet his doctrine of the individual and his
destiny receives considerable support from not a few contem-

8 Bernard Bosanquet: The Value and Destiny of the Individual. For a searching
criticism of Bosanquet’s theory, see Pringle-Pattison: The Idea of God in the
Light of Recent Philosophy, Lectures XIV and XV. porary scientists and
philosophers. It is still possible to show, however, that the individual is the
ultimate seat of value, and that all socalled social values fulfill their
purpose in the ennoblement of individual life. We have but to mention the
respective Gifford Lectures on this issue by Professor Pringle-Pattison, Sir W.
R. Sorley, 9 and Sir Henry Jones, 10 to corroborate the foregoing statement.
Nevertheless, with the peril duly posted, the cardinal truth remains that the
capacities, the obligations and the achievements of the individual are to a
large extent determined by his interrelations with the social structure. We
shall presently observe the remarkable way in which the Gospel of Jesus does
full justice to human life, alike in its individual and social aspects. In this
connection the contributions of Albrecht Ritschl marked a decisive change in our
approach to the person and Gospel of the Master. It is no longer necessary to
differen- 8 Moral Values and the Idea of God, Lecture V.

10 A Faith That Enquires, Lecture XVIII. tiate men as Ritschlians, since the
chief contentions of the celebrated German theologian are so commonly accepted
that the title has ceased to be definitive. Think of Kaftan, Harnack, Herrmann
and Troeltsch in Germany; of Sabatier and Menegoz in France; of Hastings
Rashdall and Alfred E. Garvie in Great Britain; of William Newton Clarke, Arthur
C. McGiff ert and William Adams Brown in this country. These and other eminent
Christian divines in one way or another represent RitschPs viewpoint, so that it
is apparent that he has exercised an enormous influence in Protestant
Christianity. 11 He was the first theologian of high standing to catch the
significance of the new situation, and like most epoch-making Christian thinkers
he succeeded in wresting from the Time Spirit fresh tributes for Jesus Christ.

“The rising tide of social emotion,” to use Benjamin Kidd’s phrase, swept
Ritschl back

11 Cf. H. R. Mackintosh: Some Aspects of Christian Belief, Chapters VII and VIII
for a sympathetic and critical estimate of Ritschlianism; also, John Baillie:
The Interpretation of Religion^ p. 282ff. into the oceanic content of the New
Testament itself. There he perceived anew and lifted into clarity the three
organic concepts of Fatherhood, Sonship and Brotherhood, which found
authoritative expression in the Kingdom idea. The renewed study of the mind of
the Master, on the lines laid down by Bitschl and by those who developed his
teachings, has given a marked emphasis to the message of Christianity, not for
the individual alone, but for the individual in social relationships. This is
brought out in the thought of the Christian community, which is a fellowship of
believers inspired by the consciousness of Christ, who for them is at once
unique and supreme.

Ritschl’s bold religious positivism, inherited from Luther, Calvin and
Schleiermacher, assumed that the spiritual experience of believers is the heart
of reality which truly explains everything else. From its data Christian
thinkers may construct the total view of the universe in terms of a spiritual
idealism, which magnifies the redemptive purpose of the love of God in Jesus
Christ, for the moral organization of humanity in the universal Kingdom of God.

Professor Josiah Royce, one of America’s noblest philosophers, perceived the
value of the Ritschlian method, and its agreement in a measure with his own
thinking. That which Jesus meant by “the Kingdom of Heaven,” St. Paul by “the
Body of Christ,” and St. John the Seer by “the New Jerusalem,” was for Doctor
Royce “the Beloved Community” or the Community of the Loyal. He conceived it as
the end and aim of the cosmic process, a Brotherhood wide as the world in its
command, fixed as the stars in the “loyalty” which is its integrating force.
Jesus is its everlasting center. His death on the cross gave supreme and
authentic expression to that “loyalty to loyalty,” which is the ultimate law of
the race and its sure path to the highest good. One of Doctor Royce’s “practical
maxims” is an epitome of wide areas of modern thinking upon the whole issue. He
says that men and women should “judge every social device, every proposed
reform, every national and every local enterprise by the one test, Does this
help towards the coming of the universal Community?” 12 If his maxim had social
and political power commensurate with its ethical authority it could regenerate
the life we know.

Ritschl and Royce, however, but accelerated a tendency already prevalent among
Christian leaders. So far back as 1865 Sir James Seeley published in England his
Ecce Homo, in which Jesus was presented as one who possessed a boundless
“enthusiasm” for humanity. To disseminate this “enthusiasm” he created a
commonwealth that “claims unlimited selfsacrifice on the part of its members,
and demands that the interest and safety of the whole shall be set by each
member above his own interest, and above all private interests whatever.” 13
Seeley’s volume was described by Doctor Marcus Dods as a boon to the Church
because of its restatement of the halfforgotten truth that what Jesus gave to
man- 12 The Problem of Christianity, Vol. II, p. 430f.

18 Ecce Homo, Chapter XXIV. kind had significance for the here and now. The core
of Seeley’s contention was repeated by Matthew Arnold. After showing that the
Old Testament’s governing ideal is personal and public righteousness, the author
of Literature and Dogma insisted that Jesus accepted this ideal, gave it its
concrete content, realized it in His own person, and showed others how to
realize it by obedience and love.

“Nothing will do,” said Arnold, “except righteousness, and no other conception
of righteousness will do except Jesus’ conception of it.” 14

Bishop Westcott, already acknowledged as a worthy successor in Durham’s historic
episcopate to Joseph Butler and John Barber Lightfoot, published in 1895 a
volume of Addresses discussing Christianity and the collective principle. He
pointed out that the Evangel of Jesus is concerned with the individual and also
the society of which he is an integral part.

“The thoughts... that men are ’one man in Christ,’ sons of God and brethren
suffering 14 Literature and Dogma, p. 219. and rejoicing together; that each
touches all and all touch each other with an inevitable influence; that as we
live by others we can find no rest till we live for others are fundamental
thoughts... which the Christian teacher is empowered and bound to make effective
under the conditions of modern life.” 1B Doctor J.

Scott Lidgett, a disciple of Wesley and of Westcott, and a theologian of
outstanding merits, has given further cogency to this interpretation of the
social Gospel by showing that the principle of the atonement is the perfect
expression of the filial and fraternal spirit which is creative of social
progress. Divine sonship is at once the reason, the obligation and the
inspiration of human brotherhood. Its fuller realization has immediate effects
upon all human interests, and orders them in conformity to the Mind of Christ.
The welfare of mankind is thus assured only as we carry out Christ’s teaching of
service, which is to be ungrudgingly rendered in the freedom of the sons of God,
and in behalf of their fellow men, 1B Addresses, p. 231ff. even at the cost of
the self-sacrifice which is the dictate of love and righteousness. 18

Enough has been said to show that the Christian preacher is justified in
rejecting the pious slogan that the Churches have “nothing to do but to save
souls.” Jesus is in open conflict with all palpable injustice and wrong, whether
personal or communal, national or international. “The Son of God goes forth to
war” against the unfair distribution of life’s benefits and opportunities. He
requires that flagrant violations of Christian brotherhood shall end, since they
afflict the very soul of the Church Universal, and do despite to the Spirit of
His grace. The fearless and equitable application of the New Testament teachings
to the actualities of morals, education, politics, business, peace and war is
therefore one of the essential features of the minister’s program.

18 Cf. J. Scott Lidgett: The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, p. 414ff.


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  CHAPTER 7: 05.     THE CHRIST OF TO-MORROW
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CHAPTER V THE CHRIST OF TO-MORROW THE recent determination of the Churches to
make more intimate contacts with every phase of life is aggressive because it is
healthy. Not without meaning does John A. Symonds sing, after surveying the
divine program for man, These things shall be, a loftier race Than e’er the
world hath known shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls. And light of
knowledge in their eyes, They shall be gentle, brave, and strong To spill no
drop of blood, but dare All that may plant man’s lordship firm On earth, and
fire, and sea, and air.

Nation with nation, land with land, Unarmed shall live as comrades free; In
every heart and brain shall throb The pulse of one fraternity.

Man shall love man with heart as pure And fervent as the young-eyed joys Who
chant their heavenly songs before God’s face with undiscordant noise.

New arts shall bloom of higher mould, And mightier music thrill the skies, And
every life shall be a song, When all the earth is paradise.

Sophisticated adherents of the past and pessimists who are chief mourners at the
hearse of Time may deprecate the rapturous unrestraint of such glowing stanzas.
Yet these are no more confident that Christ owns the future than He was Himself;
and their vivid images but reproduce in other words the forecasts of Biblical
prophecy. These furthermore denote what might be described as Christianity’s
latest Social Creed, born again in our day of the spirit and precepts of its
Risen Head. This creed contemplates the establishment of those conditions in
society which secure equal and speedy justice, and the full and untrammeled
exercise of their legitimate rights for all members of the human race, wherever
found.

Truly the social conscience of institutional religion has been amazingly
revived, educated and disciplined during the past decade. In the United States
that conscience is increasingly sensitive concerning non-social methods and
practices which afflict the well-being of the people. Thanks to its
remonstrances, these ills are very much less than they recently were. But
despite this relief, they are still monstrous and unendurable in the estimates
of those whose vision has been purified by the Light Giver. A growing number in
the Churches, and among the young people of both sexes whom the Churches have
yet to win, recognize that it is the mission of our religion to preach and
practice at any hazard the brotherhood of man. Until this is done, the doctrine
of God’s Fatherhood is little more than a speculation in divinity. Hence the
increasing body of believers who are resolute for the maintenance of the moral
ideals of Jesus, which recreate and develop the noblest instincts and
aspirations of our fellow creatures. This gratifying phase has been reached
through the arduous labors of pioneers in thought, word and deed, whose
sacrifices in its behalf enhance their social importance. When their names are
recalled those of Josiah Strong, Richard T. Ely and Washington Gladden should
not be omitted. In 1895, a date now long ago and far away, measured by the
rapidity of our ethical progress, President DeWitt Hyde of Bowdoin College,
Maine, published his Outlines of Social Theology, in which he insisted that
Christ’s Christianity and that of His Apostles was “preeminently a social
movement,” based upon principles which generated the present disposition to
regard everything from the communal rather than the individualistic viewpoint.
Seven years later Henry Churchill King’s Theology and the Social Consciousness
appeared, and challenged some traditional positions of the household of Faith.
The Ex-president of Oberlin College declared that “the social consciousness is
so deep and significant a phenomenon in the ethical life of our time, that it
cannot be ignored by the theologian who means to bring his message really home.”
The series of books by Professor Francis G. Peabody of Harvard breathe the
passion for humanity which the Master displayed. Doctor Peabody’s Jesus Christ
and the Christian Character, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, and The
Christian Life in the Modern World manifest a comprehensive appreciation of the
actual facts of life, combined with a deeply spiritual understanding of their
crying needs. Professor Walter Rauschenbusch may not have been a trained
philosopher nor a technical theologian, but his volume, A Theology for the
Social Gospel, restates and amplifies the ideas he had previously advanced in
his two works on Christianity and the Social Crisis, and Christianizing the
Social Order.

These works, without exception, were offered to the believing world when it
relied, in the main, upon the spread of the Gospel by sacramental or
evangelistic agencies. They flamed with the light kindled by a Christlike love
for mankind, and fed by the wisdom due to persistent and searching reflection.
That light played on the semi-darkness in which not a few sincere but mistaken
Christians had hidden themselves from their Lord’s more perfect will. It
summoned the Churches to a more strenuous and beneficent interpretation of the
Evangel than they were wont to exemplify, and one which indicated its
superiority by the opposition it aroused among those who sat at ease in Zion,
supposing all was well with others because all was well with them. I should like
to make extended reference to such telling contributions as The Church and the
Changing Order, by Dean Shailer Mathews, Social Idealism and the Changing
Theology, by Gerald Birney Smith, Christianity and Social Science, by Charles A.
Ellwood, and similarly excellent books, too numerous and important to be
dismissed in this summary fashion but for lack of space. They signalize the
reluctant passing of the pure individualism of American methods of
evangelization, and also the mergence of its better qualities in Social
Evangelism. The process is tardy because traditionalists cling to the old wine,
and hesitate to quaff the new.

They still adhere to the erstwhile victorious strategies which a revolutionized
situation has seriously impaired. Meanwhile, a vacuum abhorrent to lovers of
God’s Kingdom prevails in many Churches, and this transitional period has its
symptoms in lessened attendance upon and interest in their ministrations.

Nevertheless, Christianity’s institutional forces are at last face to face in
this Republic with Christ’s redemptive designs for the children of men. In their
realignment theology will be rejuvenated, and a brighter era dawn. The
consciousness of man’s sins against his brother man, and of the sufferings these
sins create, is no more keen or clamant than the longing for peace through the
righteousness of Christ in millions of hearts which accept the social
implications of His message. 1 The claim that the tenets of His Gospel are
susceptible of incorporation into the social structure, and that they were
originally intended so to be, does not rest on forced meanings or esoteric
allusions. The Acts of the Apostles itself validates it. These earliest annals
of the Apostolic Church record 1 Cf. Francis J. McConnell: Humanism and
Christianity, 63ff. the new Faith at work in the old world which it was destined
to overcome. Its conquests were not confined to individuals whom it so
conspicuously changed. A social consciousness embracing revolutionizing ideals,
principles and forces, hitherto unknown to contemporary Jewish thought or to the
Roman rule, was plainly perceptible in the converts of Pentecost. The story of
how they lived to love and serve in the transforming life of their Risen Lord is
familiar to readers of the New Testament. His Spirit preempted them. Beneath His
welcome constraint they threw off supposedly fixed habits of thought and action,
discarded ancient dogmatisms, set aside for a time the laws governing property,
looking upon it as no longer sacrosanct for themselves, but as a means of
service for brotherhood. 8 In this manner the original Christian Community rose
above the formidable barriers of social caste and imperialism. It became in word
and deed a Divine society, patterned after the fellowship of Heaven, and one in
which the good 2 Acts 2:42-47; Acts 4:32-37; Acts 5:1-16. of each was the
concern of all. Its members displayed a forbearance and a confidence created by
their mutual love; a good will given to infinite expansion; and a general
disposition of heart and mind toward their fellow men which, could it be
universalized, would fulfill the Ideal of which William Morris sang centuries
later, Then aU Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no more shall any man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to Fetter a friend for a slave. 3

Here the three characteristics of Christ’s teaching were expressed for the first
time in ways congruous with the modern demand for a religion which shall enter
into definite and saving relations with human society. The first characteristic
is His emphasis upon the absolute worth of man. In an age notorious for its
callousness, cruelty, and contempt for human life, He repeatedly verified the
fixed and unalterable values of every soul. A man, said he, is better than a
sheep; better than a herd 8 The Day is Coming. of swine; better than a holy day;
better than a sacred ritual; better than anything else in the visible world.
From man all things else receive their evaluation; toward him they gravitate for
his moral development. The second characteristic is that of social obligation.
The Master’s avowal of man’s unique supremacy in the creative order necessarily
carries with it his equal obligation to every member of his own order. The third
characteristic is sacrificial love. Doctor Edwin Lewis, who has interpreted
Evangelical theology in impressive and fruitful ways, declares that “we shall
not be far wrong if we say that Jesus’ whole life was dominated by the spirit of
sacrificial love; that He was in the world to make dominant everywhere the
spirit of sacrificial love; that He made the possession of the spirit of
sacrificial love the one sign of membership in His Kingdom; and that therefore
in the degree in which that spirit comes to prevail in the hearts of men, the
Kingdom of God becomes a realized fact” * * Jesus Christ and the Human Quest, p.
lllff. An examination of the whole situation as it exists leaves little room for
doubt that the abolition of social maladjustments and transgressions is found in
habitual obedience to the temper and the teachings of Jesus. It may be asked,
however, whether He regarded His commands as absolute and final legislation, or
whether He was simply establishing a general legislative principle, the
applications of which were left to time and circumstances. This question has
been exhaustively discussed from both viewpoints. Those who support the first
position adduce numerous instances which seem to ratify their contention. What
about his rulings concerning unchastity, vindictiveness, the love of one’s
enemies, the hoarding of wealth, the indulgence of useless anxiety? G If these
“laws” of the Kingdom were binding only upon those to whom they were originally
given, it must be acknowledged that Christ’s ethical teachings reveal serious
limitations.

Those who maintain the second position insist that when Jesus seemed to
authorize specific maxims, He was dealing with particular persons and
situations. For example, His decision that the rich young ruler should sell all
his goods, and give the proceeds to the poor, was intended to correct the love
of wealth which prevented the otherwise excellent applicant’s discipleship.”
Certainly Jesus did not require Zaccheus, Joseph of Arimathea or other
temporally prosperous followers of His to relinquish their earthly holdings.
Similar considerations are involved in His washing of the feet of the disciples.
This act, it is urged, was local to the hallowed scenes of the Last Supper. Its
significance was immediate, and present-day Christians who repeat it do so as
literalists. 7

Furthermore the Master did not expressly forbid human slavery, war, abstinence
from intoxicating liquors, or from other injurious practices. If therefore
Christians are to regard His teachings and mandates as constituting a perfect
code, covering all conceivable 6 /Matthew 19:16 ff. John 13:1 ff. conditions
which may arise, such a code often leaves them ignorant of what they should do.

Relief from this difficulty, we are told, is in the realization that Jesus laid
down a general legislative principle, capable of the widest application, and of
which He gave some striking examples. The truth is that both parties to the
dispute have sufficient facts at their disposal to justify their respective
contentions.

But, as we have seen, the principle in question is that of sacrificial love. It
implicates a believer’s personal interest in the well being of all men. It
further implicates the utmost personal endeavor to promote that well being.

Hence Christian love is not an ephemeral passion. It does not sigh for
wretchedness while shunning the wretched. 8 It motivates the surrender of self
for the good of the race through his eyes, and knows its possibilities for
betterment in the light of His knowledge.

He shows us how boundless a man’s horizon may be, “how vast, yet of what clear
trans- 8 Cf. Coleridge’s poem: “Reflections on Having Left a Place of
Retirement.” parency,” and what an infinite realm to fill with devoted toil
which is its own reward is still left to every responsive soul. Hence nominal
believers, whose hearts are foreign to the sovereign rule of love and sacrifice,
have not yet received the Lord of all true life.

Turn once more to His teachings, in which He repeatedly enforced the primacy of
His sacrificial love. The fatal lack of its governing principle was illustrated
in the Elder Brother of the Parable of the Prodigal Son; in the unmerciful
servant who figures in the Parable of Forgiveness; in the complaints of their
fellow workers against the late comers in the Parable of the Laborers in the
Vineyard; in the rejected souls who appear in the Master’s tremendous
description of the Day of Judgment. He also illustrated its positive
consequences. The heart of God overflows in His Parable of the Good Samaritan.

9 It is the classic example of that Divine truth which entered in through the
lowly door of stories Luke 15:11 ff.; Matthew 18:23 ff. Matthew 20:1 ff.;
Matthew 25:31 ff. taken by Jesus from the daily life of the people. It teaches
that though “religion has many dialects, many diverse complexions, it has but
one true voice, the voice of human pity, of mercy, of patient justice.” 10

Since Christ’s words were first uttered in Nazareth and Capernaum, they have
arrested those who really believed them. To possess the self-sacrificial love
which He poured forth in Galilee and Judasa is to engage, as did its Giver, in
the fight against disease and death; to minister to the necessities of the
outcast and the despised; to champion the cause of the oppressed; to extend a
helping hand to defeated and despairing souls who yet essay to rise again. This
love, which is the height of good, the hate of ill, the triumph of truth, the
overthrow of falsehood, renders its possessors indifferent, as Jesus was, to
personal benefit or prestige. They are concerned only to give service in fullest
measure, pressed down and running over. They are willing, as He was, to endure
discomfort, pain and even death itself, 10 John, Viscount Morley: Recollections,
Vol. I, p. 189. if by their sufferings others can be aided; and to shatter, as
He did, the shackles of error and sin which chafe and burden their fellows, cost
what it may. Such love blesses both the lover and the beloved. It recognizes the
stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked and the downfallen, as
children of the one Father and brethren of the one Christ. It succors all who
are disconsolate or undone because it is the holy love of God, made manifest
through Christ to all men.

II

If therefore Jesus did not vouchsafe maxims sufficiently numerous and explicit
to include all the problems of to-day’s complex life; if He did not definitely
speak upon the modern questions of internationalism, or of economic and
industrial justice and its relative issues, it by no means follows that these
problems, questions and issues are exempt from His jurisdiction. On the
contrary, they cannot be permanently settled by any other ruling or control.
Their understanding and relief now enjoy more favorable prospects than
heretofore, because the contentions they involve are no longer waged in “a dumb,
listless, illiterate world.” It is an open controversy between “the mind which
was in Christ,” and the resuscitated Paganism of unadulterated individualism and
nationalism. The conflict is fraught with moral and religious consequences that
cover the honorable diplomacies of States and the perpetuity of their security
and concord; the social reconstruction dictated by the New Testament temper and
program; the reconciliation of divergent forms of sacred truth; the
simplification of its creedal statements; the maintenance of the essential
spiritualities of the Biblical Faith. In short, it bears directly upon the
building of the Kingdom of God upon earth. The ferocious cruelties of an
unparalleled war have driven home these reflections. That war exposed the
indescribable evils which even knowledge and culture incur when separated from
Christ’s lordship. It also emphasized the social demoralization which is the
inescapable consequence of hate, greed, treachery, pride and physical conflict.
At such a crisis, the magnitude of which baffles imagination, the Church must
restore civilization to those ends from which it has been deflected. She is
“bound by her nature ’to reduce to the One’ the tangled skein of human life.” “
Whatever the errors, the rectifications, the risks or the losses this obligation
entails, Catholic and Protestant, Fundamentalist and Modernist, are alike bound
to gird themselves afresh for its discharge. Had they bestowed the same
assiduous care upon the expression in their policies and deeds of sacrificial
love which they devoted to their respective peculiarities of belief, the world
might have escaped the soul sickening catastrophe which overtook it in 1914. And
if the fires of this infernal -wrath shall purge the Church Universal of her
dross, sanctify her for the noblest ideals of her faith, 11 Ernest Barker:
National Character and the Factors f Its Formation, p. 212. and for the service
necessary to attain them, then even that vial of destruction will not have been
poured out for naught. 12

Mankind will not be Christianized by Catholics or Protestants until statesmen
and nations are convinced that “the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill
deeds done,” and in the strength of that conviction they relegate their
armaments to the scrap heap. This does not mean that war can be straightway
legislated out of existence any more than can marital infidelity, class
prejudice, race discrimination, gambling, drunkenness, the despotisms of capital
and labor or similar iniquities. To be sure, legislation can greatly help, but
it requires the educational backgrounds which spell ninety per cent of genuine
reform, and insure that support of public opinion without which the best laws
fall short of their intention. Professor Alfred Zimmern points out that a great
deal of collaboration hitherto evidenced did not carry far because “the doers 12
Cf. the Author’s, The Three ReUgious Leaders of Oxford, p. 586ff. and the
routineers” who were in control showed scant hospitality to the thinkers. If
power is not to pass in increasing measure into irresponsible hands, and if the
ghastly paradox of reason become the servant of unreason is to cease, there must
be international intellectual cooperation “of the world of thought, the
scholars, the writers, the artists and the educators with the world of action.”
Civilization will thus have control of its environment and prevent the otherwise
irresistible drift to disaster. Best of all there will be established “a society
in which men are free to live a truly human life and to perfect their spiritual
faculties.” ia We have already seen that the program which insures the highest
welfare of mankind is found in the character and teaching of Jesus. It should
therefore be our business to exemplify and disseminate His spirit until He shall
reign in the heart and conscience of all men and women. They dread and oppress
one another because that spirit is not in them.

18 Alfred Zimmern: Learning and Leadership, p. 73ff.

Husbands and wives sever their domestic ties, and frequently visit the results
of marital perfidy upon their innocent children, because they lack His gifts of
forbearance and consecration. Negroes and whites, or dwellers in the Orient and
the Occident, despoil their joint heritage as the offspring of God for the same
reason. It is likewise the explanation of the suspicions and jealousies of
employers and employees. The world’s woes and tragedies, which make history a
melancholy record, are to be largely ascribed to this source. The very monotony
of these tremendous disasters enforces the solemn duty of all who name the Name
which is above every name, to make it synonymous with new life and new hope for
the entire human family.

Destructive absolutisms in any realm, and especially in that of economics, can
only be removed as we have “a more exalted morality, a higher degree of humanity
and a loftier religion,” proceeding from the Ideal and the inspiration of Jesus.
Well may Doctor Thomas G. Masaryk, first President of the Czechoslovak Republic,
insist that “it is our task to make realities of the religion and ethics of
Jesus, of His pure and immaculate religion of humanity. He saw in the love of
God and of one’s neighbor the fulfilment of the whole Law and the Prophets, the
foundations of religion and morality. All else is accessory.” “ The gradual
perfecting of the social order is therefore nothing more nor less than the
gradual enthronement of Jesus as the Christ and Redeemer of that order.
Archbishop Temple of York, England, wisely observes that we cannot say men must
be first made perfect and their social order perfected afterwards; for we must
have regard to the educative value of the political and social order.

“But,” he continues, “we shall pray and work to secure in all citizens the
Christian spirit, with the full and potent expectation that as it grows it will
progressively establish a Christian social order.” 1S It is a common criticism
of the Ideal of 1 * The Making of a State, p. 452. Cf. also Benjamin Kidd’s
posthumous volume, The Science of Power.

1’s Essays in Christian Politics, p. 81.

Jesus that it is incapable of application to the actual world in which we live.
Professor Robinson, in The Mind in the Making, refers with some acerbity to the
claim that the practical problems of this day can be solved by such
“sentimentalities” as the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Their
solution, he contends, is to be found in scientific insight and scientific
control. Why then waste our limited gifts on theories which are too vague and
doctrinaire for effective reciprocity with real conditions? No sane interpreter
of the religion of Jesus proposes to dispense with “scientific insight and
scientific control.” But he maintains that they must be baptized into Christ or
encounter the liability of their prostitution to base ends. Science requires
moralization as much as any other branch of human thought or activity. 16 In no
other way can we halt the further enlistment of inventions and discoveries in
the work of devastation they have already expedited. Professor Zimmern reminds
us that modern science has tempted men la Cf. Kirtley F. Mather: Science in
Search of God. to forget the end in the means. His indictment is none too severe
that, “Science has done damage to the spiritual interests of mankind not by what
it has achieved but by what it has forgotten in the moment of achievement.” 17

Nations will one day perceive the reasonableness of Christ’s supremacy in His
revelation of God’s will respecting men, and that their restoration to His
creative purpose is contained in the life and expressed in the teaching of His
Son. They will discern in Him that principle which I have endeavored to set
forth, and will recognize that it is capable of application to every personal
and social relationship. Should they be tempted to put from them what is here
argued because, forsooth, it is a mere dream of enthusiasts; should they set out
to refute it, seducing themselves with the vain conceit that they know more
feasible schemes, and making an idol of the blood-stained past, they will find,
perhaps too late, that the principle of self-sacrificing love cannot be so
easily overthrown.

17 Learning and Leadership, p. 76f. In his individual as in his social life, man
is constituted with specific reference to that great principle. Its essentials
are lodged in the soul beneath all being. A heart of honor, of justice and of
love beats at the center of the universe. The stars in their courses fight for
the establishment of Christ’s law. Hence the Christian outlook, as He created
it, brings humanity into harmonious relations both with itself and with the
actual world. “If we are to serve our fellow-men effectively in the conditions
of modern life, it is necessary through scientific knowledge and the increasing
use of quantitative methods to gain control of our environment in order that we
may subdue it to humane ends. Into this indispensable task of modern
civilization Christians may help tf> infuse the right spirit the spirit which
seeks truth, is afraid of no facts, harbors no prejudices, condones no
injustice, and sets the common good above all sectional and selfish interests.”
18 Professor Hocking of Harvard sustains 18 J. H. Oldham: Christianity and the
Race Problem, p. 240.

Mr. Oldham’s statements in words characteristic of a first class philosopher who
also believes that the true way of life for men is found in the Master. He
suggests that when Jesus commanded His disciples to love God and love man He
actually meant what He said, and that the command itself guaranteed its
possibility. Original Christianity, as Doctor Hocking regards it, has suffered
grievous wrongs at the hands of its alleged interpreters.

Many of these have robbed it of its distinction by reducing its audacity to
their compromising levels. They have sought to bring Christ down to the
naturalistic plane of unregenerated humanity, rather than to lift humanity to
the height of Christ. There is no desirable future for us except as we assure it
by making the life which is of and in Jesus the true life alike of Church and
State, and the recognized norm of individual existence. The professor concludes
that while from one point of view, “Love your enemies” is an impossible command,
it is the only way in which the enemy can be conquered. He is unsubdued until
hilove is won, and love is evoked by love, not by hostility. 19

Hence, “Resist not evil” is not a counsel commending weakness, but strength. The
real reason why so many men and women stand apart and critically survey Christ’s
valiant ethic is because they have not the moral courage to accept it. His
teachings are not milk for babes but meat for the strong. The decisive
enterprise of the Church Universal therefore is to universalize the Spirit of
her Lord, and this is the spirit of “regard for the other,” whoever he may be.
Her priesthood calls for consecrated spirits who shall fill up “that which is
lacking in the sufferings of Christ”; for the complete emancipation of the race
from ignorance, folly and sin. Her chief function is not merely to maintain a
splendid tradition, but to be here and now the alter ego of her Redeemer,
summoning mankind to a glorious adventure in Him, with His own presence to lead
the advance. The things dividing the 10 Cf. William E. Hocking: Human Nature and
Its Remaking, revised edition, p. 372 ff,

Churches to-day are largely inherited, and for the majority of her non-adherents
they no longer have important meaning. It is high time that believers awoke to
the true nature of the Church as priestly in the continuity of her past, yet
prophetic in her determination to launch out into the deep at the behest of the
Shepherd and Bishop of all souls, who is “the same yesterday and to-day, yea and
for ever.”

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GALLOWAY, GEORGE, Faith and Reason in Religion.

GARVIE, ALFRED E, The Christian Doctrine of the Godhead f GLOVER, T. R, Jesus in
the Experience of Men.

GORE, CHARLES, Belief in Christ.

GORE, CHARLES (General Editor), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture.

GOSSIP, ARTHUR J, In Christ’s Stead.

GRENSTED, L. W, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement.

GRIFFITH, GWILYM O, St. Paul’s Life of Christ.

GUIGNEBERT, CHARLES, Christianity Past and Present.

HADFIELD, J. A, Psychology and Morals.

HEADLAM, A. C, The Life and Teaching of Jesus the Christ.

HERRMANN, W, The Communion of the Christian with God.

HOCKING, W, E, The Meaning of God in Human Experience.

HORTON, R. F, The Mystical Quest of Christ.

HUTTON, JOHN A, The Proposal of Jesus.

INGE, W. R, The Church in the World.

JONES, E. STANLEY, Christ at the Round Table.

JONES, RUFUS M, The New Quest.

JOSEPH, OSCAR L, Ringing Realities.

KLAUSNER, J, Jesus of Nazareth.

KNUDSON, ALBERT C, The Philosophy of Personalism.

LEWIS, EDWIN, Jesus Christ and the Human Quest.

LIDGETT, J. SCOTT, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement.

MACKENZIE, J. W, Fundamental Problems of Life.

MACKINTOSH, H. R, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ.

MACKINTOSH, H. R, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness.

MARCHANT, SIR JAMES (Editor), The Future of Christianity.

MATHEWS, SHAILER, The Messianic Hope in the New TESTAMENT.

McCoNNELL, FRANCIS J, The Christlike God.

McGiFFERT, A. C, The God of the Early Christians.

MURRY, J. MIDDLETON, Jesus, Man of Genius.

NAIRNE, ALEXANDER, The Faith of the New Testament.

NEEDHAM, J. (Editor), Science, Religion and Reality.

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD, Does Civilization Need Religion?

OLDHAM, J. H, Christianity cmd the Race Problem.

OMAN, JOHN, Vision and Authority, OTTO, RUDOLF, The Idea of the Holy.

PAGE, KIRBY (Editor), Recent Gains in American Civilisation.

PAGET, R. HAROLD, (Editorial Director) An Outline of Christianity, Five Volumes.

PATERSON, W. P, The Nature of Religion.

PRATT, JAMES B, The Pilgrimage of Buddhism. The Religious Consciousness.

PRINGLE-PATTISON, A. S, The Idea of God in Recent Philosophy.

RAWLINSON, A. E. J, The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ.

RAWLINSON, A. E. J. (Editor), Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation.

ROBINSON, H. WHEELER, The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit.

ROGERS, CLEMENT F, The Case for Christianity.

Ross, D. M, The Cross of Christ.

Ross, G. A. JOHNSTON, Christian Worship and Its Future.

SAUNDERS, KENNETH, The Gospel for Asia.

SCHWEITZER, ALBERT, Christianity and the Religions of the World.

SCOTT, E. F, The Ethical Teaching of Jesus.

SCULLARD, H. H, The Ethics of the Gospel and the Ethics of Nature.

SIMKHOVITCH, V. G, Toward the Understanding of Jesus.

SMITH, DAVID, The Days of His Flesh.

SMITH, GERALD B. (Editor), Religious Thought in the Last Quarter Century.

SPERRY, WILLARD L, Reality in Worship.

STEVENS, G. B, The Theology of the New Testament.

STREETER, B. H, Reality, A New Correlation of Science and Religion.

TAYLOR, HENRY OSBORN, Human Values and Verities.

TEMPLE, WILLIAM, Christ the Truth.

THOULESS, R. H, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion.

ARSCHAUER, J, The Historical Life of Christ.

WHITEHEAD, A. N”, Science and the Modern World.

WIEMAN, H. N, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth.

ZIMMERN, ALFRED, Learning and Leadership.

INDEX Apocalyptist, the, 48ff, 69 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 61 Aristotle, 22, 61
Eliot, George, 131f.

Emerson, R. W, 42 Ethicist, the, 51ff, 69 Arnold, Matthew, 81, 116ff,
Experience, Christian, 49, 141 Augustine, 113, 135 Authoritarian, the, 70 Bacon,
Benjamin W, 91f.

Barton, Bruce, 77ff.

Bergson, Henri, 17, 46 Bowne, Borden P, 34 Bradford, Gamaliel, 82ff.

Bradley, F. H, 47 Brandes, Georg, 52 Browning, Robert, 116 54ff, 70
Experimentalist, the, 70

Faith, 17, 56 Gibbon, Edward, 103f.

Gore, Charles, 96f.

Hagenbach, Karl R, Ill Hall, G. Stanley, 53 Harnack, Adolf, 18, 50 Harrison,
Frederic, 132 Headlam, Arthur C, 94f.

Hocking, W. E, 168f.

Caird, John, 23 Calvin and Calvinism, 108, Hiigel, Baron von, 73 135 Hume,
David, 130 Case, Shirley J, 53, 89 Hyde, DeWitt, 147 Christ myth, the, 19, 52
Church, the, 60ff, 67, 97ff, Inge, W. R, 49

150ff.

Civilization, 103 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 115f.

Coleridge, S. T, 129 Comte, Auguste, 126f.

Creeds, 21 Cross, the, 35

Dante, 32 Darwin, Charles, 32, 65 Dods, Marcus, 140 Dorner, Auguste, 45 James,
William, 34 Jesus Christ, 15ff, 29f, 42ff, 75ff, 106ff, lllf, 123, 144ff, 166
John, St, 71 Jowett, Benjamin, 77 Julius Caesar, 43 Kant, Immanuel, 55, 126ff.

Keats, John, 35 King, Henry Churchill, 147

Lecky, W. E. H, 101 Lessing, G. E, 17 Lewis, Edwin, 40, 153 Liddon, H. P, 80
Lidgett, J. Scott, 142 Lightfoot, J. B, 67 Lucretius, 32 Ludwig, Emil, 85f.;

Mackintosh, H. R, 72, 98, 122 McConnell, Francis J, 19 Martineau, Harriet, 131
Martineau, James, 68 Masaryk, Thomas G, 164 Mill, John Stuart, 47f, 130f.

Morgan, Lloyd, 46 Murry, J. Middleton, 80S.

Napoleon, 105 Newman, Cardinal, 63ff.

New Testament, 45ff, 70, 119 Oldham, J. H, 168f.

Paul, St, 28, 58, 71, 87 Paulus, H. E. G, 88 Peabody, Francis G, 148 Poets, the,
llSff.

Pringle-Pattison, A. S, 46, 136 Protestantism, 63f, 114f.

Psychologist, the, 52f, 69, 121, 133f.

Quick, Oliver C, 76 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 148 Renan, Ernest, 79 f.

Renaissance, the, 114 Ritschl, Albrecht, 136ff.

Robertson, F. W, 129 Robinson, James H, 166 Royce, Josiah, 139 Sabatier,
Auguste, 36, 66 Saunders, Kenneth, 88 Schleiermacher, F. E. D, 122, 127f.

Scholasticism, lllff.

Schweitzer, A, 50 Science, 113, 120ff, 166f.

Seeley, Sir James, 140 Showerman, G, 104 Skeptic, the, 52, 69 Smuts, J. C, 46
Social creed, the, 145ff.

Sophocles, 27 Spencer, Herbert, 133 Spinoza, 24 Streeter, B. H, 96f.

Temple, William, 96, 165 Tennyson, Lord, 115, 117ff.

Traditionalist, the, 44ff, 69, 149 Troeltsch, Ernst, 108 Warschauer, J, 50, 90f.

Weigall, Arthur, 87 Wesley, John, lOlf.

Westcott, Brooke Foss, 117, 141 White, Edward L, 104 Wrede, W, 52 Zimmern,
Alfred, 162f, 166


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  CHAPTER 8: S.   A NEW DAY FOR MISSIONS
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A New Day for Missions

God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: by
whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.—Galatians 6:14. The
pivotal conception of missionary, enterprise is the conception of Christ as the
eternal priest of humanity. If any need of the world’s heart is before us now,
it is the need of the Cross. There is a deep and anxious desire in men for the
saving forces of sacrificial Christianity. The ideals of the New Testament
concerning Gethsemane and Calvary are being thrust upon our attention by the
upward strugglings of the people. They, at any rate, have not forgotten the
forsaken Man in the night of awful silence in the garden, nor His exceeding
bitter agony, nor the perfect ending that made His death His victory. The wastes
of eccentricity, whether orthodox or heterodox, and the overcurious speculations
of theologies remote from the habitations of men, have had little influence upon
the multitudes we seek to serve. And if I had to choose a sphere where one could
rediscover the central forces of Christian life and of Christian practise, I
would lean toward the enlightened democracies which to-day are vibrant with the
plea that the shepherdless multitudes shall have social ameliorations and new
incentives and selfless leaders.

We are all very jealous for the honor and success of the propagandism we sustain
at home and abroad, and I hold that its honor and success alike depend upon the
priesthood and redemptive efficacies of Jesus. These sovereign forces are
correlated with His victories for the twenty past centuries, and they constitute
the distinctive genius of the faith.

We shall gain nothing for the rule or for the ethics of Jesus by derogating that
peculiar office of the divine Victim which is, to me, at any rate, the most
sublime reason for the Incarnation and the ineffable height and depth and
mystery of all love and all strength blessedly operative in every ruined
condition by means of sacrifice. The missionary fields confessedly can not be
conquered by the unaided teacher; he must have more than a system of truth, more
than a program, more than a reasoned discourse. Their vast inert mass demands
vitalization; and the life which is given for the life of men, the divinest gift
of all, is alone sufficient for this regeneration.

Moreover, can we rest the absolutism and finality of Jesus upon anything less
than the last complete outpouring of His soul unto voluntary death for men’s
salvation? I do not think we can, and it is a requisite that we place larger
emphasis upon this holy mystery of our life through Christ’s death, the
substantial soul and secret of all missionary progress in all ages of the
Church.

Before we can see the miracle of nations entering the kingdom of God, before we
can dismiss the black death of apathy which rests on so many professedly
Christian communities, before we can dominate the social structure in
righteousness and justice, the Church must be raised nearer to the standards of
New Testament efficiency. And New Testament efficiency rested upon the perfect
divinity and all-persuasive mediatorship of “Christ and him crucified.” The
personality of Christ involves for many of us the entire relation of God to His
universe; He is “the central figure in all history,” and He is “the central
figure of our personal experience,” creative in us, by His inaugural experience,
of all we are in Him and for our fellows. Thus we make great claims for the Lord
of the harvest, and we make them soberly, and we know them true for our
spiritual consciousness, and we are prepared to defend them.

Yet I, for one, do not hesitate to admit that the theological necessities of
missionary work are many, and that they must be recognized and met before it can
fully accomplish its infinite design. Indeed, the rule of Jesus in all these
aspects of His mission clarifies and simplifies the gospel. It is plain that
such a gospel, wherein the living personality of the Christ deals with the
living man to whom we minister, is not to be beset by complications and
abstractions. Its spiritual topography embraces the height of good, the depth of
love, the breadth of sympathy, and the width of catholicity. It was meant for
the race and for the far-reaching reciprocities and inexpressible necessities of
the race. It is attuned to the cry of the common heart. Its interpretations have
the sanctions of an authoritative human experience which has never failed in its
witness. Sometimes I have challenged these honored servants of the evangel who
have come back to us from quarters where they were busy on the errands of the
cross. Almost pathetically, with the painful interest of one inquiring for a
long absent friend of whom no news has been received, I have solicited the
missionaries. They came from the south of our own dear land, where they
administered to the negro; from the arctic zone, from the farther East. Their
wider vision, their more imperial instinct, were plain to me, and my usual
question was, “What do you teach the impulsive colored man and the stolid Eskimo
and the pensive Hindu and the inscrutable Asiatic?” And they replied, “We teach
them that God is a personal spirit and Father, whose character is holiness and
whose heart is love; that Jesus Christ is the designed and supreme Son of God,
who lived in sinlessness and died in perfect willing sacrifice for the eternal
life of all men, that by the will of God and in the power of His spirit men may
have everlasting life and, better still, everlasting goodness, if they will
accept and trust in Jesus Christ for all.” And this gospel obtains the day of
overcoming for which we plead and pray. For. though an angel from heaven had any
other, men do not respond; the charisma rests on no other message. Possest of
it, and possessing it, under the covenant of heaven and led by the Shepherd and
Bishop of souls, we shall go forth determined to give it place in us and in our
presentations as never before. May nothing mar the solemn splendor of such a
message from God unto men. Let us subordinate our undue intellectualism and
place our boasted freedom under restraints, so that the evangel may be preached
without reserve and with abandon. “For there is one God, and one mediator
between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for
all.”

Such in one grand passage is the creed that breathes the very life and spirit of
the most significant and overwhelming missionary period in the history of the
Christian Church.

There is a new day due in missions because of the immense superiority in
missionary methods. The personnel of our administrations has been superb, and of
nearly all the honored servants of God who have labored in domestic and foreign
departments it could be said, “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated
iniquity.” But I presume these seasoned veterans would be the first to show us
how the whole conception of propagandism has been readapted, and its vehicles of
communication multiplied in various directions. The onfall and sally of the
earlier evangelistic campaigns are now aided by the investment and siege of
educational and medical work. The trackways of a policy embedded in the wider
interpretation of the gospel are laid and the new era takes shape before our
comprehension. Travel, exploration, and commerce have demanded and obtained the
Lusitania on the sea; the railroad from the Cape to Cairo on the land, and they
have left no spot of earth untrodden, no map obscure, no mart unvisited. Keeping
step with this stately and unprecedented development, and often anticipating it,
the widening frontiers of our missionary kingdom have demonstrated again and
again how the Church can make a bridal of the earth and sky, linking the
lowliest needs to the loftiest truths. And best of all in respect of methods is
the dispersal of our native egotism. We have come to see that the types of
Christianity in Europe and America are perhaps aboriginal for us, but can not be
transplanted to other shores. “Manifest destiny” is a phrase that sits down when
Japan and China wake up. Not thus can Jesus be robbed of the fruits of His
passion in any branch of the human family. We are to plant and water, labor in
faith, and die in hope, scattering the seed of the gospel in the hearts of these
brothers of regions outside. But God will ordain their harvests as it pleaseth
Him. What will be the joy of that harvest? Throw your imagination across this
new century, and as it dies and gives place to its successor, review the race
whose devotion has then fastened on the divine ruler and the federal Man, Christ
Jesus. For nearly a hundred years the barriers that segregated us will have been
a memory. The Church will have discovered not only fields of labor, but forces
for her replenishing. Then will our posterity rejoice in the larger Christ who
is to be. The virtuous elements of all other faiths will be placed under the
purification and control of the priesthood and authority of Jesus. And though in
these ancient religions that await the Bridegroom, the mortal stains the
immortal and the human mars the beauty of the divine, in the light of His
appearing they will assume new attitudes and receive His quickening and thrill
with His pulse. When I conceive of this reward for our Daysman I protest that
all other triumphs seem as tinsel and sham. The Desire of all nations shall then
see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied. The subtle patience of
China, the fierce resistance of Japan, the brooding soul that haunts the Ganges
valley, the tumult of emotion of the Ethiopian breast, all are for His
appearing; they must be saved unto noble ends by His sanctification. For that
time there will be a Church whose canonization of the infinite is beyond our
dreams, enriched on every side, with common allegiance and diversity of gifts,
and every gift the boon of all, and Christ’s dower in His bride increased beyond
compare. This is the ideal of the new day; may it become our personal ideal.
Then shall we fight with new courage for the right, and abhor the imperfect, the
unjust, and the mean. Our leaders will care nothing for flattery and praise or
odium and abuse. Enthusiasm can not be soured, nor courage diminished. The
Almighty has placed our hand on the greatest of His plows, in whose furrow the
nations I have named are germinating religiously. And to drive forward the blade
if but a little, and to plant any seed of justice and of joy, any sense of
manliness or moral worth, to aid in any way the gospel which is the friend of
liberty, the companion of the conscience and the parent of the intellectual
enlightenment—is not that enough? Is it not a complete justification of our
plea?

We shall do well to remember that no evangel can prosper without the evangelical
temper. The parsing of grammarians is of little avail here, and to have all
critical knowledge of the prophets and apostles of the faith without their
fervor and consecration is profitable merely for study, and useless mainly for
the larger life. Our culture must be the passion-flower of Christ Jesus. To be
more anxious about intellectual preeminence or ecclesiastical origins than about
“the trial of the immigrant” and the condition of the colored races is not
helpful. “There is a sort of orthodoxy that revels in the visions of apocalypses
and refuses to fight the beast,” says Dr. Nurgan. Such barren indulgence is
excluded from any glory to follow. Technicalities, niceties, knowledge remote
and knowledge general must be appropriated and made dynamic in this
life-and-death conflict; any that can not be thus used can be sent to the rear
for a further debate.

Diplomacies in church government and adjustments in church creeds can wait on
this consecration, this baptism of unction. I never heard that the statesman who
formulated the peace at Paris in 1815 got in the way of the Household Brigades
and the Highlanders at Waterloo and Hougomont. They played their commendable
game, but they could not have swept that awful slope of flame in which Ney and
the Old Guard staggered on at Mont St. Jean.

Let us redeem our creeds at the front, and prove the welding of our weapons and
their tempered blades upon every evil way and darkness and superstition that
afflict humankind. And have you not seen with moistened eyes and beating hearts
the pathetic surgings of harassed and broken sons and daughters of God toward
His son Jesus Christ? I have watched them until I felt constrained to cry aloud
and spare not; and while viewing them here and yonder, and refusing to be
localized in our love toward them, have not our spirits been rebuked, have they
not known fear for ourselves, have they not pensively echoed the charge of some
that we have no real roots in democracy, but are as plants in pots, and not as
oaks in the soil of earth? If independency is a barrier to the essence of which
it is supposedly a form, if superiority shuts us off from assimilation with
popular movements and delivers us over to cliques, then these churches of ours
will end in a record of shame and confusion. While we are busy in trivial
things, our energy and our might will be deflected, and the living God will hand
over the crusade to those who have proven worthier and who knew the day when it
did come, even the day of their visitation.

[Note: The special reference is to the Congregational churches. ] We must arise
with courage undismayed, and join in the cry of the ages: When wilt thou save
the people, O God of mercy, when? The people! Lord, the people! Not crowns, nor
thrones, but men.

Flower of thy heart, O Lord, are they, Their heritage a sunless day.

Let them like weeds not fade away;

Lord, save the people.

If our hearts are thus enlarged, we shall run in the way of His commandments;
fatherhood and brotherhood and sonship will not be symbols, shibboleths of pious
intercourse, but ways of God’s reaching out through us for the total
brotherhood. We shall silence the caviler against missions; we shall raise the
negro in the face of those who say he can not be raised; we shall see the
latter-day miracles, and the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate.
Thus may the breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity,
provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook. And thus may the power be
demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation. Let us fear
not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peaceful lot and occupy a
respectable grave. The new world needs the renewed baptism, and the “modernism”
of which medievalists complain is the robe of honor for the Christ of this
epoch. So that there shall come unto the Church the flame of sacred love, and,
kindling on every heart and altar, there shall it burn for the glory of Christ,
the High Priest, with inextinguishable blaze. We can rest content, for, behold!
the day cometh and in its light. Let us go hence.


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/writings-of-s-parkes-cadman/
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