Read Ebook: Some Christian Convictions A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking by Coffin Henry Sloane

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From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian convictions, with much else, these items:

The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding His new and completer entrances into the world's life.

The thought of development or evolution as the process by which religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and grow in a changing world.

The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.

And not from nature up to nature's God, But down from nature's God look nature through.

A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.

A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to light.

We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian thought to these scholarly investigations:

The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that falls in with the idea of development or evolution.

The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history, science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.

An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from Humanitarianism. Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antaeus, has always drawn fresh strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact with the Jesus of history.

We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them:

This study of comparative religion has gained for us:

A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity, and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.

A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God in Jesus Christ.

It has given men a new interest in religion. The intricacies of social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, "nine-points of belief." The social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts have been touched with a passion for social righteousness. A recent historian of the thought of the last century, after reviewing its scientific and philosophic tendencies, makes the remark that "an increasing number of thinkers of our age expect the next step in the solution of the great problems of life to be taken by practical religion."

It has made us realize that religion is essentially social. Men's souls are born of the social religious consciousness; are nourished by contact with the society of believers, in fellowship with whom they grow "a larger soul," and find their destiny in a social religious purpose--the Kingdom of God.

It has taught us that religious susceptibility is intimately connected with social status. Spiritual movements have always found some relatively unimpressionable classes. In primitive Christian times "not many well-educated, not many influential, not many nobly born were called"; and in our own age the two least responsive strata in society are the topmost and the bottom-most--those so well off that they often feel no pressure of social obligation, and those without the sense of social responsibility because they have nothing. It is the interest of spiritual religion to do away with both these strata, placing social burdens on the former and imposing social privileges on the latter, for responsibility proves to be the chief sacrament of religion.

It has brought the Church to a new place of prominence in Christian thought. Men realize their indebtedness for their own spiritual life to the collective religious experience of the past, represented in the Church; their need of its fellowship for their growth in faith and usefulness; and the necessity of organized religious effort, if society is to be leavened with the Spirit of Christ. Church membership becomes a duty for every socially minded Christian. And the social purpose renders Church unity a pressing task for the existing Christian communions. John Bunyan's pilgrim could make his progress from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem with a few like-minded companions; but a Christian whose aim is the transformation of the City of Destruction into the City of God needs the co?peration of every fellow believer. Denominational exclusiveness becomes intolerable to the Christian who finds a whole world's redemption laid on his conscience.

We have by no means exhausted the list of quarries from which stones, and stones already prepared for our purpose, can be and are taken for the edifice of our Christian convictions. The life of men with Christ in God preserves its continuity through the ages; it has to interpret itself to every generation in new forms of thought. Under old monarchies it was the custom on the accession of a sovereign to call in the coins of his predecessor and remint them with the new king's effigy. The silver and the gold remain, but the impress on them is different. The reminting of our Christian convictions is a somewhat similar process: the precious ore of the religious experience continues, but it bears the stamp of the current ruling ideas in men's view of the world. But lifeless metal, however valuable, cannot offer a parallel to the vital experiences of the human spirit. The remolding of the forms of its convictions does more than conserve the same quantity of experience; a more commodious temple of thought enables the Spirit of faith to expand the souls of men within. In theology by altering boundaries we often gain territory. We not only make the map of our soul's life with God clearer to ourselves, so that we live within its confines more intelligently; we actually increase the size of the map, and possess a larger life with God.

RELIGION

Religion is experience. It is the response of man's nature to his highest inspirations. It is his intercourse with Being above himself and his world.

Some have sought to discredit religion as a surviving childishness. A baby is dependent upon its parents; and babyish spirits, they say, never outgrow this sense of dependence, but transfer that on which they rely from the seen to the unseen. While, however, other childish things, like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be "incurably religious," and the most completely devout natures, although childlike in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity. When one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus. Although apparently successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow. On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain. Again and again religion has been pronounced obsolete, but passing through the midst of its detractors it serenely goes its way. When men laboriously erect its sepulchre, faith,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, Will arise and unbuild it again.

Its indestructible vitality is evidence that it is an inherent element in human nature, that the unbeliever is a subnormal man.

that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on.

Others give prominence to the r?le of the intellect. God is the most reasonable explanation of the facts of life. Religious truths and men's minds harmonize as though they had been made for each other. The thought of Deity gives them perfect mental satisfaction. Dante tells us: "The life of my heart, that of my inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought which went many times to the feet of God, that is to say in thought I contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed." And a present-day English thinker, Mr. F.H. Bradley, writes: "All of us, I presume, more or less are led beyond the region of ordinary facts. Some in one way and some in another, we seem to touch and have communion with what is beyond the visible world. In various manners we find something higher which both supports and humbles, both chastens and transports us. And, with various persons, the intellectual effort to understand the universe is a principal way of their experiencing the Deity."

Still others lay the chief stress upon the will. Man wills to live; but in a universe like ours where he is pitted against overwhelming forces, he is driven to seek allies, and in his quest for them he wills to believe in a God as good as the best in himself and better. Faith is an adventure; Clement of Alexandria called it "an enterprise of noble daring to take our way to God." We trust that the Supreme Power in the world is akin to the highest within us, to the highest we discover anywhere, and will be our confederate in enabling us to achieve that highest. Kant found religion through response to the imperative voice of conscience, in "the recognition of our duties as divine commands." Pasteur, in the address which he delivered on taking his seat in the Acad?mie Fran?aise, declared: "Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite."

But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is perilous to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight others of equal moment. There is danger in being fractionally religious. No man really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature. Some persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out. Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, "My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without fuel. A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both warmth and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in constant danger of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation."

Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them within carefully restricted limits. Outside these their faith is an unreasoning assumption. Their mental activity spends itself on the details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves the foundations of their faith. They have keen eyes for theological niceties, but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts. Cardinal Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential ingredient of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a dream and a mockery. But he was so afraid of "the all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries" that he placed the safeguard of faith in "a right state of heart," and refused to trust his mind to think its way through to God. Martineau justly complained that "his certainties are on the surface, and his uncertainties below." We are only safe as believers when, besides keeping the heart clean, we

press bold to the tether's end Allotted to this life's intelligence.

It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man's willingness has in his faith. To believe in the Christian God demands a severe moral effort. It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the ultimate wisdom and power in the universe. "The will to believe," if not everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling emotions.

But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God with "as much as in him is." Somebody has finely said that it does not take much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being, that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies:

It shall go hard, But I will delve one yard below their mines.

As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for himself. Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we can no more distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we respect, than the boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah from that of Eli. But we gradually learn to "possess our possession," to respond to our own highest inspirations, whether or not they inspire others. Pascal well says: "It is the consent of yourself to yourself and the unchanging voice of your own reason that ought to make you believe." So far only as we repeat for ourselves the discoveries of earlier explorers of Him who is invisible have we any religion of our own. And this personal experience is the ground of our certainty; "as we have heard, so have we seen in the city of our God."

The capacity for religious experience can be cultivated. Faith, like an ear for music or taste in literature, is a developable instinct. It grows by contagious contact with fellow believers; as "the sight of lovers feedeth those in love," the man of faith is nourished by fellowship with the believing Church. It is increased by familiarity with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High. It is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience. Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting:

An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all, the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit." Such people exclude themselves from the power and peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living God.

Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man's intercourse with the Invisible. Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this intercourse is characterized by

tidal movements of devoutest awe Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt.

And in the world's life there are ages of faith and ages of criticism. Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary. Professor Royce asserts that "a study of history shows that if there is anything that human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt." And in individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is freed from folly and attains reasonableness.

Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to admit that its knowledge is but in part. Our knowledge of God, like the knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack what Keats calls "negative capability"--"that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far as our minds will carry us. We have to accustom ourselves to look uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light. "They see not clearliest who see all things clear."

Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious. God is as real to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master. Men are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the Invisible.

The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.

Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression. There are similar moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the supremely Loving--moments when "belief overmasters doubt, and we know that we know." At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with the living God.

Such moments, however, are not abiding; and in the reaction that follows them the mind will question whether it has not been the victim of illusion. John Bunyan owns: "Though God has visited my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet afterwards I have been in my spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I had been refreshed." Many a Christian today knows the inspiration and calm and reinforcement of religion, only to find himself wondering whether these may not come from an idea in his own head, and not from a personal God. May we not be in a subjective prison from whose walls words and prayers rebound without outer effect?

How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw from it? The Christian thought of God is after all no more than an hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life. May not our experiences be accounted for in some other way? We must distinguish between the adequacy of our thought of God and the fact that there is a God more or less like our thought of Him. Our experience can never guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents are--their characters, position, abilities, etc. But the child's experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living parents. Is it likely that, were God a mere fancy, a fancy which we should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be what it is? An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation. Religion is incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination compass such results?

How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our experience?

Nor are we looking at ourselves alone. We are confirmed by the completer experiences of the generations who have preceded us. "They looked unto Him and were radiant." Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in each century, "lit with their loving and aflame with God," can scarcely have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations.

And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy.

Religion has written its witness into the world's history, and we can appeal to an eloquent past.

Look at the generations of old, and see: Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken? Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him?

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