4 a ay ih ak PE VA a Lye eg , Las tgie ‘ ¥ 4 a PAG ARG. Wait ia, h - i eae Ph hh oe Mi AT ay : He itn An yc } y THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION wo & 2, JUN 18 1926 > THE IRREPRES CONFLICT IN RELIGION By JOHN HERMAN ‘RANDALL AUTHOR OF “A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE,” “THE CULTURE OF PERSONALITY,” “HUMANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS,” “THE LIFE OF REALITY,” “THE PHILOSOPHY OF POWER,” ETC. 07 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 148-156 West 23rd Street NEW YORK Corrricur, 1925 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IX. CONTENTS FoREWORD AV UNB AN MAW Bat ttn THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT VS. RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY THE CAUSES OF THE PRESENT Con- TROVERSY . THe Doctrines In DIspute: WuereE Is tHe TrutH? THE REALIZATION OF Gop As ‘CREATIVE LIFE Was JEsus Onty A Man? Has Jesus Any MEssaGE For To- DAY? | Is TuHere A PLACE For F'arru IN MopEernN LiFe? . RELIGION AND FREE INVESTIGA- TION: Must THry REMAIN THiostitE? . Witt Epucation SUPPLANT RE- LIGION ? PAGE 116 146 174 203 230 CONTENTS PAGE X. Witt RELIGION OUTGROW THE CHuRCH? CORT AGM AMD UH i efleceerrat aa oe BE XI. CoNnvicrion AND KINDLINESS: THE Way to BrorHERHOOD SY sich Matt XII. THe Trutus Men Live By . . 3814 FOREWORD The fundamentalist - modernist controversy within the churches, which came to such open and almost violent expression in the winter of 1923- 24, has been a long time on the way, and it will not be settled for many years to come. That it was inevitable, all who have been familiar with religious conditions in this country know full well. ! The causes go back ultimately to the Protest- ant Reformation; more immediately, however, they are to be found in the wide-spread advance of scientific ideas and methods. ‘That the War has also helped, both directly and indirectly, to force the present crisis is undeniable. But sooner or later, the conflict between the modern view- point and the older conceptions of the churches was bound to come. It is the irrepressible con- flict in religion today. Now that it has been precipitated by leaders on both sides, thus forcing the majority in all the churches to take sides more or less definitely, it is earnestly to be hoped that the primary issues vii FOREWORD may not be glozed over, the “quarrel” hushed up, and the controversy abandoned, for that would only mean another compromise of issues and principles that can no longer be compro-. mised without fatal results to organized religion. It is too late in the day to postpone into some in- definite future the solution of these vexed prob- lems which the increasing intelligence of this age is so earnestly demanding. The need of this critical hour for organized religion is for more light and less heat,—more of the light of calm reason and disinterested inquiry, and less of the heat of prejudice and bitterness, of crimination and recrimination. In the inter- est of that nobler faith that one day will surely be, when the truth will set men free, this book has been written. JoHN Herman RANDALL. New York City, May Ist, 1925. I THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT VERSUS RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY ie eep\\N his recent novel, “The Cathedral,” fe aq) Hugh Walpole puts the following 2%] (cu) words into the mouth of Canon Ron- poses! der, one of the leading characters of the story, “I believe that before many years it will become clear to the whole world that there are now two religions,—the religion of authority and the religion of the spirit,—and if in such a division I must choose, I am for the religion of the spirit every time.” Back of all the theological controversies that are dividing the churches today lies this one fun- damental question: Where is the seat of author- ity in religion? Does it lie in some institution, or in some book, or in some person, or in some creed; or is it rather to be found deep within man himself? This is in no sense a new problem 1 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION in religion, and for those of the liberal faith it has long since been settled, but we are forced to realize that many old issues that we had supposed were buried forever are once again thrusting ~ themselves upon the attention of men, and the struggle that is now on in the orthodox churches for greater freedom in religion is only another phase of the age-long struggle between the re- ligion of the spirit and the religion of authority. ‘Former President J. G. Schurman, of Cornell University, has called our attention to the fact that all religions pass through three stages of growth. First, the chief emphasis is placed upon the cult, the ceremony, the sacrifices, the ritual. These are the important things. The gods are not supposed to care much what people believe or how they behave. So long as they bring the required sacrifices and go through the ceremonies with exact punctiliousness, all is well and the gods are satisfied. But as time goes by humanity reaches the next stage in religious development. The cult still remains, the rites and ceremonies still persist, but the people pay less attention to them than formerly. The whole ritualistic side of religion is gradually crowded into a subordi- nate position, as the chief emphasis is shifted to beliefs. ‘The principal thing now is felt to be 2 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY theology, doctrines, creeds. ‘Then comes the period of creed-making, followed by long cen- turies of theological controversies, with their in- evitable accompaniments of heresy trials and per- secutions of every kind. And then, at last, religion passes into a new phase of development. People may keep their creeds on record in their books or church manuals, or they may discard the old creeds entirely, but they no longer feel bound by them, for they come to feel at last that the only essential thing in religion is the spirit that dominates one’s life,—the sum. total of a man’s - spiritual attitude toward life. It is this second, or theological, stage out of which religion is now passing, not without bitter struggles and great upheavals within the confines of organized religion. ‘The old theological re- ligion, based on its creeds and dogmas, is slowly but surely dying as the true and genuine religion of the spirit is coming to birth in the lives and hearts of men everywhere. But the religions of authority die hard, and we need not be surprised to find that man can only achieve freedom in re- ligion, as everywhere else, through his own per- sistent and heroic efforts to throw off the shackles of external authority in his spiritual life. Let us trace briefly the development of the 3 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION idea of authority in religion as it has been shifted from one place to another in the history of Chris- tianity. In order to avoid confusion let us de- fine authority in religion as meaning the claim to command belief and conduct whether or not that belief or conduct find inward support in the souls and minds of men. Down to the close of the Mid- dle Ages it was generally believed that the seat of authority in religion was vested in the institution, the great and powerful Roman Catholic Church. It was held that the keys of heaven and hell had been intrusted to this institution, and that, there- fore, it controlled the one and only pathway to salvation. ‘The Bible was there in manuscript form, but the rank and file of the people had no access to its pages, and knew little or nothing of its contents. The creeds were there to be believed unquestioningly, and the church alone had the right to interpret these creeds and to tell men what they must believe. With the coming of the Reformation, the Prot- estants broke with the theory of the authority of the church; they refused the claim of the Catholic hierarchy to be sole interpreters for them of the Word of God. If an old historic church, count- ing its members in millions, could speak with one. voice, and that voice represented the truth which 4 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY had been, if not discovered, at least ratified by every individual member, it would be entitled to great respect; it would have great power and in- fluence, but even then it would only acquire these through having found the inward life in those to whom its appeal was made. Even such a voice could not act as an external infallible authority upon anyone without making his life artificial. There is, however, no such voice. Roman Cath- olic dogma today does not represent any such consensus of opinion within the Catholic Church; the more men believe on the mere outward au- thority of the church, the less is the power of their testimony to the value of the truth. The Protestants transferred the seat of author- ity in religion from the institution to the Book, and at the outset enunciated the right of individ- ual interpretation of the Bible. But it was soon found that there was no common agreement as to the meaning of the teachings of the Bible, which was now claimed as the sole authority for faith and practice. So many new sects sprang up, all claiming the authority of the Bible, each one for its own difference from every other, but also from a criticism of the Bible itself, that in- telligent men soon came to see that a Book which carried such widely differing meanings to differ- 5 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ent people was very far from being an infallible authority. ‘The next step was taken when these new sects translated their particular interpreta- tions of the Bible into their respective creeds, thus shutting out all who did not agree with them. So that the Reformation, that started on the right principle of private interpretation, ended in the same fallacy against which it had originally pro- tested. ‘The Roman Catholic Church claimed that the sole authority rested in the one church with its infallible creed. Protestantism now claimed that it was to be found in many churches with their differing creeds, and nothing was left for thoughtful minds but to lose all faith in the claims of both. When the fact is clearly grasped that the Bib- lical literature is the history of a life of growing thought and changing practice, it will be seen that while the Bible retains the value of much in- spired life, it must also contain points of view and standards of life and belief which are contra- dicted and transcended even within its own covers. But in spite of this fact, parts of the Bible are still read solemnly to the people as the Word of God which cannot possibly represent the truth for their lives, nor appeal to them in any real or vital sense. The God of Samuel and 6 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY Joshua is very different from the God of the later Hebrew Prophets. It is this that led Mr. Blatchford to say that we should never make much headway with reform until the truth was told about the Bible. The next step that is usually taken, when the infallibility of the Bible as a whole is abandoned, is to make the New Testament our authority. Many people who have reconciled themselves to the criticism of the Old Testament are fearful of touching the New. It is utterly impossible, how- ever, to shield the New Testament from precisely the same investigation that is applied to the Old Testament and to all other literature. You can- not apply the canons of historical and literary criticism to the Bible as far as the last page of Malachi, and then abandon them when you open the first chapter of Matthew. The New Testa- ment is just as truly a record of developing and changing thought as is the Old. If anyone says that his authority is the New Testament, I would ask him, “Which part of it?” The differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospels, and between the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles are very great and important, —which is to be your authority? ‘There are things in the New Testament, to go back to which | IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION now would be unmistakable retrogression. We have made great advances upon the New Testa- ment point of view in some matters,—slavery, the woman’s question, and almsgiving, for ex- ample. The passage in Corinthians which de- clares the inferiority of woman to man, the theory that woman was made for the man, and not man for the woman, that she must have her head cov- ered in public assemblies, that her glory is her hair, and that she must not speak in meetings, is still read in churches as if it were the solemn Word of God, and yet is there anyone left who believes it? In spite of the contentions of the fundamentalists, the idea of the infallible au- thority of the Bible, in either Old or New Testa- ments, is forever gone from the thinking of in- telligent people. When this is recognized the next refuge is to fall back upon Jesus as the sole authority. The position taken is that historical criticism must do its work upon the New Testament documents to find out what the teachings of Jesus really were, and then make them our authority. But here we are immediately face to face with many diffi- culties. One is that of the different conceptions of Jesus in the New Testament. Who is our . authority? The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel who 8 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY grows in knowledge, or the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel who knows all things from the beginning? The Jesus of Peter’s speeches in the Acts,—*A man approved of God,” one of whom Peter could say, “God was with him,” or the Jesus Christ of the Epistle to the Colossians, “in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”? These con- ceptions are widely different,—which do we take for authority ? ; Another difficulty is that once we take the view to which any historical study compels us, that the mind of Jesus was a growing mind, we can- not take the view that it ever reached finality. At which stage of its growth does it become our authority? If Jesus grew in knowledge during his lifetime, would he not have continued to grow if he had lived longer? If he were among us now, would not his opinions on many subjects be dif- ferent from what they were then? For example, would he now believe in demoniacal possession, as he probably did then? Or would he now say what he did about almsgiving? How can we conceive of a mind as growing, and also as hav- ing reached finality, and able therefore to be a final authority for us? But there is another difficulty. On a consider- able number of important questions which we 9 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION have to decide, there is no clear word of Jesus which we can quote for their settlement. One of the fundamental problems today as we think of the future is that of the proper education of chil-. dren. Jesus is not recorded to have said a single word on the education question, and we cannot cite his authority on any phase of the great prob- lem. Among the crucial questions of our time is: What share of the profits of labor should be given to the manual worker? How to distribute wealth more justly is a pressing problem. What should be the type of social organization to super- sede the old order?’ How can our intense nation- alisms be merged into a true internationalism? Jesus has left no authoritative word on any of the important questions. That there should be justice, that love should be the guiding principle of life, are clearly his teachings, but our difficulty in the practical world begins when we ask in what social or industrial or world systems are justice and love to be expressed, and on this im- portant point the authority of Jesus cannot be quoted. He did not deal with systems as such. He said nothing even of the duty of liberating slaves. How to provide for our old people, how to house the population in decency, what is to be done 10 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY about the crying evils of the land problem, whether women should have political equality with men,—none of these questions were on the horizon of Jesus, and it is no wonder that he has left no decisive word on these subjects. Every business man, every mother, every employee, every teacher is facing a dozen questions every day which cannot be referred to any word or ex- ample of Jesus. That he did lay down funda- mental principles, no one denies; but as to how these principles should be applied in practice, he has left no word. These things show how much of unreality there often is in the use of the phrase: “Jesus is our authority.” 3 A good illustration of the “unconscious” in- sincerity that exists in this claim is found in the discussion on the report of the Divorce Commis- sioners in England a few years ago. The ma- jority report presented a most interesting docu- ment to the Congregational Union of England. It began with laying down the absolute authority of Christ on the question of marriage as final. It also declared that the teaching of Christ on this matter was quite explicit, and that it pronounced marriage to be indissoluble. One would natu- rally expect the document to go on to condemn the recommendations for enlarging the grounds 11 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION for divorce. On the contrary, it ended by recom- mending their adoption. ‘This is an instance of formally bowing to the authority of Christ, for- mally enthroning him in words, and then passing on to obey our own judgment as to what ought to be done. It would be far more honest to say at once that we cannot take the teaching of Jesus on this subject as an external authority for our guidance today. And when we stop to think how vastly different are the problems and needs of our age from those of the age in which Jesus lived, we realize that it is utterly impossible that detailed authority for conduct or for belief should be found in his teachings. It has been this same belief that there must be somewhere an external authority for religion that has led to the formulation of all the creeds that the various churches hold and teach as containing the sole authoritative statement of religious truth which men must believe. We have only to re- member the origin of all these creeds and the sources of the ideas that underlie them, however, to realize how far they are from being the final statements of truth. And the fact that they elicit so feeble a response from the growing, intelli- gent minds of today only proves that man has outgrown these earlier expressions of truth. 12 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY As a matter of fact, there has always been, right down through the centuries, those spir- itually minded leaders within the church who have been keenly conscious of the inadequacy of the creeds, and, in fact, of all doctrinal statements as giving expression to the highest or final truth of religion. Here, for instance, is Bishop West- cott of the Anglican Church, who, speaking of the Thirty-Nine Articles, says: “It is that I object to them altogether, and not to any par- ticular doctrine. I have at times fancied it was presumption in us to attempt to define and de- termine what Scripture has not defined. * * * The whole tenor of Scripture seems to me op- posed to all dogmatism and full of all applica- tion.” Or take the testimony of John Wesley, after one of the fullest experiences ever given to mortal of the action of religion in human life: “Tam sick of opinions. I am weary to bear them; my soul loathes the frothy food. Give me solid, substantial religion; give me a humble, gentle lover of God and man, a man full of mercy and good faith, a man laying himself out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, the labor of love. Let my soul be with such Christians whereso- ever they be and whatsoever opinions they are of.” Or here is a remarkable statement from 13 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION John Henry Newman, who became a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church: “Freedom from symbols and articles is abstractly the highest state of the Christian communion and the pecu- liar, privilege’of ‘the: primitive: church,)* ,*)% Technicality and formalism are in their degree inevitable results of public confessions of faith. * * * When confessions do not exist, the mys- teries of Divine truth, instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church far more fruitfully than is otherwise possible.” These witnesses, remember, had all signed creeds; they all belonged to churches that bristled with dogmatic propositions. Yet what is clearly evident is that at the back of their minds lay a consciousness, not formulated, and therefore all the more powerful, that the strength and vitality of religion lay quite otherwhere than in the doc- trinal creeds of any or all of the churches. The creeds arose out of the speculative, not the re- ligious spirit. The “heretics” speculated first, and the church met them with counter-specula- tions of its own. The ages that produced the church formularies were the least vital; the periods when they had the fullest sway were those 14 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY of the greatest license and degradation of char- acter. It is the glory of the Unitarian movement that it dared to place the ultimate authority in re- ligion within man’s own soul, and not outside; and it remained for James Martineau, in his monumental work, “The Seat of Authority in Religion,” to set forth in unanswerable terms for all time the great truth that the real seat of authority is not outside, but within man himself; not in any institution or book or person or creed, but deep in the soul of man lies the only authority that religion possesses. The religion of the spirit which is today grad- ually superseding the older religions of authority gives up once and for all the fruitless quest for any external authority in religion; first, because it cannot be found. The search has been proved to be a vain search; no such authority exists any- where outside of man’s own being. That it can- not be found is a profound blessing; that men have professed to have found it outside them- selves, has been one of the most fruitful sources of mischief in the world, resisting the progress of thought, fettering the minds of men, compel- ling them often to walk through fire and blood to their natural and legitimate possessions. If 15 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION all men could but see and admit this truth, it would mean the emancipation of religion from everything that now keeps it from becoming the dynamic regenerating power in human life. Manifestly it was never intended that we should be saved the trouble and effort of personal discovery in religion, nor the task of solving our own ethical and social problems. Every man of us has his own burden to carry and his problems to solve. Every age must build up its own the- ology and must keep it ever open to revision with the coming of new facts. It must also frame its own standard of righteousness, which should in every age be higher than of any previous age. The task is never ended because the world is ever growing, man’s range of experience is ever widen- ing, and the new facts are constantly multiply- ing. But the religion of the spirit gives up forever the search for an external authority because, in a still deeper sense, it knows that if it could be found it would prove fatal to the religious and moral life of man. The principle involved is uni- versal in its application. At every point at which a man obeys an external authority, without feel- ing an inward response to and ratification of its command, the act of obedience is not a moral or 16 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY spiritual act. To obey any authority without this inward response makes man a slave. Such aman has surrendered his inalienable right to freedom — asaman. And to believe the creed of any church simply on the authority of that church, instead of because one’s whole inner being, mind and spirit, responds confidently and joyously to the truth of the creed, is to become a mere puppet in the hands of others,—and in the realm, too, of the inner life which belongs forever to oneself. The great weakness of organized religion today lies in the fact that there are so many beliefs that are accepted nominally by multitudes, while the heart and mind within men have long since re- jected them. Are we then, in these important matters of morals and religion, left wholly to ourselves? Is every man to do everything in religious think- ing and in the sphere of morals for himself and by himself? Is every man to be his own author- ity, and can there be therefore as many different authorities as there are different individuals? Surely not, for that would mean chaos and utter confusion in the result, and despair for the in- dividual in the process. What is there to prevent this, if there is no external authority? The fact is that no man is a mere individual; 17 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION the content of his individuality is partly a social content; he is rooted in society and in history. He must think for himself, but he cannot think at all without the help of many others; he must _ find the authority for his life in his own nature, but he will find that others share that nature and the inner authority speaks to them also. So far from the man being his own authority, he comes to feel that he is only one interpreter of an au- thority which is much greater than any individ- ual, and greater than all individuals taken to- gether. He finds it even greater than he can comprehend. He needs other interpreters to help him understand it more fully. This is the experience that has led men to believe in “the Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteous- ness.’ And this same experience has brought them inevitably into groups and societies and churches that they may help one another to know that Power better and realize it more fully in their lives. Those who know most, who have had the broad- est experiences and possess the deepest insight, naturally come to be the greatest helpers of their fellows. And this is what we need most in the religious and moral life,—teachers, interpreters, helpers, sources of vital inspiration,—not infal- 18 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY lible guides or final authorities. Instead of look- ing to the church for anything of an infallible nature, men ought to turn to it naturally for help and inspiration and fresh light on life’s problems. If the church could only forget all idea of any “infallibility,’—a thing that has never existed, and put away from itself all ideas of any “au- thority,” and simply be willing to become the helper and friend of mankind, then the days of its true power would begin. The richest personali- ties are the greatest helpers. How long would any intelligent man be content to listen to one in the pulpit who believed that he spoke with an infallible authority to men? When religious or moral teachers are looked upon as absolute au- thorities, they put men in bondage; so long as they are willing to remain as helpers and inspirers they lead men into the broader places of life and truth. When the prophet becomes the oracle, men become slaves; so long as he remains the prophet he leads the march of God’s free men. But still more concretely, just what do we mean by the religion of the spirit? We recall the old words, “The Lord is the Spirit.” These words may be reversed to get their true meaning, “The Spirit is the Lord.” We all know that there is in our lives a Spirit that works for the 19 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION high and good, a something that will not let us be content with ourselves as we are, or with con- ditions in the world as they are, a Spirit that forever reaches out and on and beyond to heights we descry in vision, a power that struggles within us with our lower selves and constantly aspires toward a nobler, purer, more unselfish life. And we know that there is the same Spirit of power working in the same way in all other lives. We may call this power the Divine Spirit, who is in some mysterious way one with our spirits, and yet greater than we ourselves, a power that fills all life. Spiritual life lies in the interaction of this Spirit of Good with our own spirits. This is the Spirit we seek to obey, not in any mechanical way because the Spirit is vital within us. We may call this Spirit within us our “higher self,” or “God,” or ‘“‘the Christ,” or ““Buddha,” or ““Abdul Baha,” or by any name we choose. 'The name does not matter if only we know the reality and respond to its eall. For all practical purposes, this Spirit of good within us is the Lord of our lives, before which we bow in loving reverence. The principal reason for shaking off the fetters of any theology, regarded as final, is that we may not be hindered in our experience of this Divine Spirit within us. 20 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY Wherever a body of opinion of any kind is in- sisted upon, religion as an inward experience is not left free to become its rich and abundant selicy’ It is, unfortunately, in the power of thought- forms to cramp and narrow the experiences of the soul, and here it is that their greatest mischief lies. The function of thinking in religion should be not only to formulate the outcome of experi- ence, but also to widen the realm of possible ex- perience, for we do not get experience without ideas, and the larger the ideas, the wider the field of possible experience. It is quite true that through all popular forms of religion, forms of service and forms of thought, the Eternal Reality has in some measure reached the souls of men. But the range of experience is always narrower whenever finality has attached to the form. Religious experience is like a perennial spring of the water of life. Men have brought their theological, ecclesiastical and ritual cups to the spring and filled them, and then, unfortunately, they have gone away believing that their little cups contained all the water there was. ‘To make the church an exclusive authority, and the Bible the only Word of God; to make any symbols the only tokens of the Divine Presence, and Jesus 21 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION the only Saviour; to point to any body of opinion as the only Divine truth, whether this is done in Roman Catholicism, in orthodox Protestant or in liberal churches is to make it more difficult for man to experience God outside these things. Thousands of Roman Catholics could never find God in a Protestant Church, and thousands of Protestants could never find God in a Catholic Church. Very few Christians would find Him in a Jewish Synagogue and perhaps still fewer Jews would recognize Him in a Christian Church. The ecclesiastical limit even if it included all the churches and synagogues and mosques and pagodas throughout the world would still be too narrow. ‘The flower of the common garden, the cowslips in the meadow, the glorious stars of the midnight sky, ought to awaken as genuine re- ligious feelings in us as the sight of any altar, or the bread and wine of the communion service, or any other ecclesiastical symbol. When Lord Tennyson said to a friend with whom he was walking through the woods, “On your knees, man, here are violets,” he was addressing the in- ward soul that had escaped the tyrannies of spe- cial symbols and was therefore free to find God everywhere. We find a beautiful suggestion as to the true 22 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY place for a creed, in science, for science has its creed as well as religion, only it discovers it dif- _ferently, and it uses it very differently than the church uses its theology. For one thing, science has reached its infallibility by persistently refus- ing to be regarded as infallible; by making mis- takes and not being afraid to acknowledge them; and by leaving all its conclusions open to every species of test. It does not forbid, but earnestly welcomes free investigation. And when some one comes forward with a new or different view from that which has been commonly accepted, science does not try him for heresy, but only asks for his evidence. And theology will only regain _ the ground it has lost, and secure once more the world’s intellectual respect, by following in this track. It will have to renounce its bogus in- fallibility, and gain its new certitudes where alone they are to be found. But this part of the method of science, impor- tant though it be, is not the chief lesson it has to teach. ‘That comes when we study the way science uses its creed. It is not, we discover, oc- cupied in incessantly repeating it. It does not sing, chant or recite it. It does not impose it as a test on anyone or require a subscription to its articles. Yet its creed is ever present at the base 23 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION of all its operations. And it cannot afford to be incorrect in it, for the slightest error throws all its operations into confusion. Observe an engineer as he plans and builds his. bridge. His entire working belief is there. His theory of statics and dynamics; his convictions about currents and wind pressures, about lever- ages, about the properties of the arch and of its thrust on buttresses; his views on the relation of beauty to utility, all are there. He has not sung them, or repeated them, or “subscribed”’ to them. He has built them into his bridge. His creed is embedded and incorporated in his work. And men, when they find the work good, proclaim the creed to be sound. There is no place or need for any “heated controversy” over such a creed. Our engineer, it may be observed, has, outside of his work, all manner of interesting theories. He may have something to say on the ultimate properties of matter; he may even doubt, with Berkeley, whether matter exists at all apart from mind. But the world will take his ideas on these speculative questions rather lightly. They are at least “pious opinions,” which he may hold or not hold, and no one is either the better or worse for them. What men insist on is that his beliefs on bridge-building and the other things he con- 24 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY tracts to do shall be sound. In that sphere they will tolerate no “heresy.” In this way of using its creed, science, we re- peat, has at the present time a lesson of supreme importance to teach theology. If the church is wise today, it will also discover that its beliefs are given it, not for incessant subscribing and chanting and repeating, but as a plan to work by. Its creed should be a program. No article of it should be allowed that cannot be expressed in the form, not so much of words, as of works and institutions. When the church has found this way of ex- pressing itself it will have no further trouble with heretics. When we put our creed into a word, straightway our neighbor is instantly ready with a counter-word. The ring of our “shibboleths” irresistibly invites opposition. But when we put our belief into our character, into our deed of kindness, into our heroic sacrifice and service to humanity, then there is no slightest room for argument. And whatever of our creed cannot be expressed in these ways, what of it remains as mere words, untranslatable into deeds and things, may just as well be left out, or at least rele- gated to the realm of each individual’s specu- lative opinion. 25 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION When the religion of the spirit shall have fully come to this earth, there is little doubt but that the church that then exists will organize itself along these lines.. The coming creed will be a practical program; it will be a statement of the laws of the moral and spiritual forces in human life, and of their application to the regeneration of men and the transformation of society. And the business of the church will lie in that applica- tion. Its life will be found, not so much in any of its verbal affirmations as in the institutions it develops and the characters it creates. The great prophets and apostles of the race have always instinctively gone upon these lines. John Wesley accepted the theological concep- tions of his time, but his real power lay in a creed which was a practical program for service to hu- manity. The church began without any creeds, and it has no more need of them today than in its early stages. ‘The prophet of God will go forth now, as then, equipped with a power and a program,—and his power will come through his program,—and he will find them enough. The religion of the spirit, which is struggling for fuller, freer expression in all the churches today, will issue in a life dedicated to the truth, not to mere opinions about the truth; it will find 26 THE SPIRIT vs. AUTHORITY expression in the spirit of love that dominates thoughts, words and deeds; and it will constantly seek to translate that love into practical forms of service. The life of truth, the life of love, the life of service,—is there any higher conception of religion than such a life? This religion is ever new and never grows old; it can never be out- grown; no discoveries of science or formulations of philosophy can ever disturb it. There are no hampering creeds or ecclesiastical limitations to check the growth of man’s life into truth, love and service. This is what all the religious aspira- tions of the world have aimed at as the one thing to be desired, and, at length, realized. And when this life is found and lived by men, the world will have discovered the only true and universal religion, 27 Il THE CAUSES OF THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY (setae) which is now dividing the churches = 4 of American Protestantism is of vital concern to all, regardless of creed, if for no other reason, simply because “nothing human can be foreign to us,” and the war within the churches is one of the great human struggles that char- acterize the present age of unrest. Even if our sympathies are on the side of modernism, still this ought not to prevent us from seeking to un- derstand and interpret aright the basis and the motives of fundamentalism. The struggle we are now witnessing may indeed prove to be one of the most significant phenomena of the new century,—far more important for the future than are the present economic and imperialistic wars. It may mean the utter disintegration of Protestantism. It may lead to the coming of a new and revived Catholicism. If the leaders on 28 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY both sides firmly stand their ground, if they re- fuse to evade the real issue at stake, if they set their faces resolutely against any compromise of their respective principles, it may mean even- tually the death-knell of the theological and sec- tarian Christianity we have known in the past, and the coming of a new form of religion, more rational, more universal, more ethical and more social, and therefore more truly adequate to the needs of the new day that is dawning on the world. To claim, as many do both within and without the churches, that the whole controversy is, after all, scarcely more than a tempest in a tea-pot and that it will soon blow over, that the differ- ences of opinion are mere surface differences and do not touch the deeper foundations of Chris- tianity, that the whole trouble is due to hot- headed and impetuous individuals on both sides who, on second sober thought, will get together and harmonize their differences in a perfectly friendly way,—this is to betray one’s utter ig- norance of the real situation. In the interests of truth and real religion the time has come to say openly and frankly that the differences between fundamentalism and modernism are not mere surface differences that can be amiably waved 29 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION aside or disregarded; they are foundation differ- ences, structural differences, amounting in their radical dissimilarity almost to the differences between two distinct religions. ‘The fact that. the modernist and the fundamentalist groups both call themselves Christians, both profess to derive their theological standards from the his- toric traditions of the Christian Church, and are both sheltered under the roofs of the same established ecclesiastical institutions, should not blind anyone to the profound disparity which characterizes not only their respective intellectual processes, but their objective goals, and even their spiritual experiences. Modernism and funda- mentalism represent two opposing world-views, two antagonistic moral ideals, two radically dif- ferent personal attitudes; and it is only a case of ostrich-like stupidity blindly to deny and evade the searching and serious character of the issue. Christianity according to fundamentalism, is one religion. Christianity according to modernism, is an entirely different religion. Differences can be glozed over, compromises can be made, ami- able words can be given to the public and pious resolutions on Christian unity can be passed, as has been done so many times in the history of the churches, but all this can never bring into 30 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY harmony these opposing world-views, these an- tagonistic moral ideals, these widely divergent attitudes. Neither does it change the facts for us to be- wail the present situation in the churches as a tragic scandal in view of the critical conditions that now fill the world. When the world is cry- ing out for spiritual vision and moral leadership, without which it can never solve its great prob- lems, what a pity, we say, that the time and energy of the churches should be given over to | mere doctrinal controversies that seem to us a thousand leagues removed from the actual press- ing problems of man’s life today! And, indeed, it is a tragic pity. But how can we ever expect any real moral leadership or spiritual vision from churches that are so hopelessly divided against themselves, until they have frankly faced the is- sues involved and settled their problems in ac- cordance with truth and right? The moral leader- ship we have the right to expect from organized religion will never appear until some of these deeper issues from which the present controversy proceeds, and which have for long vexed the in- ner life of the churches, threatened their peace and weakened their influence, are fought out to a finish. 31 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION It would seem as if the world had had enough of wars of all kinds; but if another war must come, I want to say frankly that I would rather see it take the form of a free, open and above- board struggle within the churches between the forces of fundamentalism and modernism, a struggle in which there is no evasion or com- promise of the principles involved, and which is carried on, so far as possible with human na- ture what it is, without bitterness and personal rancor. For such a struggle, if carried to its finish, would clear the air of confusion and un- - certainty, would emancipate the churches from the many chains that bind them to a dead past, would set religion free at last to play its right- ful part in the unfolding life of humanity, and would make possible a moral and _ spiritual leadership that we now seek in vain. My per- sonal attitude, therefore, as I contemplate and seek to interpret the present war within the churches is one of hope, not of despair, for out of it all I can see the coming of a new and better day for religion. In one respect, the fundamentalists are pro- foundly right. Modernism, if its meaning is clearly grasped and consistently accepted, goes to the very roots of religious conviction, and in- 32 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY volves the basic purposes and even the very genius of traditional Christianity as it has come down through the centuries. The more intelli- gent fundamentalist leaders see this more clearly than do most of the modernists. This is their great fear,—that Christianity as it has been will be superseded by something new and different, and thus religious continuity with the past will be broken. And their fears are not groundless, for modernism is much more revolutionary than our present-day modernists. ‘The modernist has not yet been fully transformed by his own modernism. But in another respect, the modernists are just as profoundly right. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Christianity can hardly last much longer half fundamentalist and half mod- ernist. It is not merely the aggressiveness of fundamentalism that is forcing a choice; it is the inherent nature of the issue itself. A Chris- tianity that is content to clothe itself in terms of an outgrown science and an obsolete theology is hopelessly doomed in this modern age. And this is what the modernists see much more clearly than do the fundamentalists. All other ques- tions involved are trivial as compared with these 33 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION fundamental convictions of both parties to the struggle. It is not my purpose to enter the field of the present controversy. What is needed just now is. more light and less heat,—more careful and exact exposition and less of the bitterness of contro- versy. Who is to blame, or what are the causes that lie back of the present situation in the churches? We shall not begin to grasp the gravity of the situation or be in a position rightly to interpret the war within the churches unless we come to see that it is only the culmination of forces that have long been at work in the life of organized religion. It is not a new or recent thing. Mr. Bryan, Bishop Manning, Dr. Straton and the — other fundamentalist leaders are no more respon- sible for these wide differences that now divide the churches than are Dr. Grant, Dr. Fosdick, Dr. Parks and the other leaders of the modern- ists. They are all of them but mouth-pieces of ideas and principles that have had their place, either openly or implicitly, in the various churches for many centuries. The limits of space forbid our tracing the development of Christianity from the beginning, but we must go back as far as the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth cen- 34 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY tury if we are to understand the sorry plight of present-day Protestantism. The popular view of the Reformation held and taught in every Protestant church is very different from the view held by the scientific historian. According to the popular view the Reformation marked a great stride forward in religion. It was the modernist or radical re- ligious movement of that day. In breaking with the Roman Catholic Church it set itself free from the “infallible authority” of the old insti- tution, and made possible the frank and full de- velopment of the religious principle. Martin Luther stood forth in the sixteenth century as the prophet of a new freedom for the individual, a. new interpretation of religious truths in harmony with the new light with which the Renaissance was flooding the world, a new and untrammeled development for religious institutions. Since the Reformation the only Christianity worthy of con- sideration has been that of Protestantism, as it alone has had the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for the world. These were the ideas that I was taught and that I imbibed from Protestant books and sermons, along with all others in Protestant churches. According to the scientific historian of today, 35 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION the facts of the Reformation were very different. As subsequent events have proved, instead of being a distinct stride forward, the Reforma- tion turned out to be a decided step backward in religious development. The Reformation leaders were the real fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic leaders were the modernists of that time. In breaking with the Roman Catholic Church the Protestants did not free themselves from the idea of an “infallible” external authority in religion; they simply transferred the “infal- lible” authority from the institution to the Bible. In reconstructing the truths of religion they were utterly uninfluenced by the new light of the Re- naissance period. ‘Their thought remained theo- centric; it revolved around God and was entirely untouched by the new humanism that, a little later, realized that all things, even religion, were for the sake of man. They substituted for rea- son in religion, faith, inspiration, the inner light, subjective experience, and thus threw the door wide open for an indefinite multiplication of sects, for all kinds of vagaries, and for limitless absurdities. Martin Luther, great man that he was, knew nothing about freedom in religion as we understand that term, and succeeded in bind- ing Protestantism to a mental slavery to the let- 36 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY ter of the Bible from which present-day modern- ists are frantically seeking to escape. There were two great contributions, however, that the Reformation did make to religion whose importance cannot be over-estimated, though their full implications were not to be realized for several centuries: (1) the idea of the right of private judgment, and (2) the notion that some things in religion are more important than others. These seeds were planted in the sixteenth century and they contained tremendous revolutionary possibilities for the future; but the seeds did not begin to germinate until two centuries later; and what we are witnessing in the churches today is simply the coming to flower,—the full expres- sion of the implications of those seed-ideas which, for the most part, have lain dormant for so long. The Deists in England and France, and a little later the Unitarians in England and then in America, were the first groups to translate the new spirit of humanism and the new knowledge of science into religious terms. But for a hun- dred years they constituted a pitiful minority, and the modernists of today are but just begin- ning, in any thorough-going way, to give ex- pression to the spirit of free inquiry in religion, for which the two germinant ideas of the Refor- 37 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION mation paved the way. In other words, the Reformation, in these two revolutionary ideas, sowed the seed for the critical spirit of free in- -quiry whose growth in our own day has begun to prove a serious menace to the integrity of organized Protestantism. As Professor Brewster points out, the simple fact is that the Protestant Reformation came al- most two hundred years too soon to accomplish the reforms that we now see were needed in re- _ligion. It belongs, therefore, to the late Mid- dle Ages, instead of to the early modern period, and so is on the wrong side of the great gulf that separates the darkness from the light. It was absolutely untouched by the new ideas and scientific conceptions of the universe and of life that a little later were to flood the world. The practical result was, that while the Reforma- tion did clean up a few obvious abuses into which the Roman Catholic Church had fallen, it left the entire sub-structure of mediaeval thinking untouched, and when the creeds of Protestant- ism came to be formulated they gave expression to the truths of religion on the basis of, and literally in the terms of, the old pre-scientific and mediaeval thought. Luther threw his inkstand at the Devil, and the Calvinists required their 38 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY pastors to confess the finger of God in every word of the Bible. “It is no disparagement of the greatness of Martin Luther to say that he came upon the scene too soon to accomplish a genuine and thor- ough-going reformation of religion. He was not to blame for that. If his famous theses could have been nailed on the doors of Witten- berg Cathedral at about the time, let us say, that Halley was figuring the orbit of his equally fa- mous comet, the situation in the religious world might be very different today. The dogmatic mind was then, for the moment, loosened up. The critical spirit of science and the new hu- manistic spirit were abroad in the life of the eighteenth century. The theological world might then have really assimilated the new science and the new philosophy and given us some sort of consistent world-view that should include every- thing. At the very least, something of the new learning might have so penetrated into the old theology—that Protestant thought would have looked forward instead of backward. “But as it was, the church and the new world failed to synchronize. Protestant thought crys- tallized into its creeds and doctrines nearly two hundred years too soon, with the inevitable . 39 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION result that it did not change, but only perpetu- ated, the old theology of the Middle Ages. The Protestant Reformation proved only a false dawn, and the one great fact that the present. war within the churches reveals is that the whole reforming job has to be done over again from the bottom. ‘The only question is whether the second reformation, unpleasant as it will un- doubtedly be, shall be gone through with now, or again postponed to “a more convenient sea- son,’ when, indeed, it may be too late.” Another tragic weakness in the Reformation that is clearly apparent today lies in the fact that its principles and ruling ideas led to a divorce between religion on the one hand, and science, art and social effort on the other. ‘This was bound to result increasingly in a separation of religion from the whole, all-around life of men, with the result that Protestantism has become thin and superficial and out of vital touch with man’s deepest thought, his sense of apprecia- tion of the beautiful, and his social aspirations and strivings. At the close of the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had appropriated and made its own the Aristotelian science which was the only science of that time. It knew no conflict between “science and religion’’; it did not seek 40 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY to belittle or set aside the function of reason in religion. It accepted reason fully and gladly, and through reason it worked out its great sys- tems of scholasticism, notably that of Thomas Aquinas, in which Roman Catholic theology was frankly based on the Aristotelian science. Mar- tin Luther, on the other hand, derided reason; he called it “that little hag,’ and he referred contemptuously to the mind as “that old strum- pet.” Not reason but faith, and a blind faith at that,—the blinder it was, the better for religion, —was to be henceforth the guiding principle in religion; and the Dr. Stratons of present-day Protestantism are the logical descendants of Martin Luther in their hostility to reason. In the same way, the Catholic Church accepted art in its many different forms and employed it in enriching and ennobling the life of religion. It eagerly sought out the great artist, it subsi- dized him and set him to work in architecture, in painting, in sculpture. It gave to the world the noble cathedrals of Europe, the beautiful paintings and the magnificent statues, which we journey afar to see and admire. If the Church’s patronage of art and the artist limited the range of art during the Middle Ages, it nevertheless resulted in a vast enrichment of religion, both 41 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION in its thought and practise. Protestantism, how- ever, from the beginning, has spurned art even as it has derided reason. If reason was of the Devil, art belonged only to this Devil’s world, and the heart of the true believer must be set on the beauties and joys of “the other world be- yond this vale of tears.” Protestantism as a whole has been ascetic as the Catholic Church never was. Under Puritanism in England, re- ligion was denuded of the beautiful in every form. Churches were ugly, statues and paintings were a sacrilege, music was a sin, the services were barren and cold, preaching was formal and austere. Only recently have the Protestant churches dared to employ some of the beautiful things of life from which Protestantism had di- vorced religion. The Catholic Church also believed firmly in the organic conception of religion, rather than in the individualistic. ‘The Church was the Kingdom of God on earth; it was gradually to spread un- til it embraced all mankind. It held that the spiritual was above all civil authority, that God was the real ruler of this world, and that, there- fore, religion was vitally concerned with all that had to do with the life of men. This viewpoint leads up to our modern conception of social 42 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY religion far more truly than does the general ' official teaching of Protestantism, which has never tried to grasp, until quite recently, the organic conception of religion. The whole trend of Protestant Christianity may be said to rest upon the idea that the world is not only too much with us, but also too much for us. The promise of a day of judgment when “the last shall be first” is the open confession that the business of religion is not to save the world,— for that is hopeless,—but only to save as many individuals as possible, and see them safely through this wicked world to some distant heaven of bliss, while the world itself goes down to utter destruction. The difficulty that every preacher of social religion has in keeping his pulpit in even the more liberal churches only proves how out of harmony social religion is with the funda- mental principles of Protestantism. The “Kind of the World’”’ sermons, and the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ, which play so large a part in the preaching of the fundamentalists, only prove that they have never grasped the idea that religion is to save and transform this world here and now. With this divorce of religion from reason and science, from art, and from any intelligent social . | 43 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION striving, is it any wonder that Protestantism as a whole has gradually lost its hold upon the in- tellectual classes on the one hand, and the work- ing classes on the other? Is it strange that religion — as taught in so many of the churches seems like a little back-water, far away from the main stream of life? Should we be surprised that to an increasing number of people religion seems to deal only with the outer fringe of life, and not with its central needs and problems? Or, should we wonder that a religion presented in terms of a pre-scientific and obsolete theology should offer no appeal whatever to the young men and women of the new generation who have been educated to the modern world-view, who have caught more or less of the scientific spirit, and whose sym- pathies go out more or less intelligently to the great social movements of this modern age? It is such conditions that have forced the present issue upon the churches,—an issue that it would be criminal to postpone any longer. If these considerations throw any light upon the underlying causes of the war within the churches, let us now proceed to summarize the weaknesses of both fundamentalists and modern- ists, weaknesses that have led to the precipita- tion of the conflict in its present form. 44 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY The fundamentalist rejects reason in religion and substitutes for it what he calls “faith.” But he does not use the word, “faith,” as expressing the sum total of a man’s final attitude toward the universe and life. By “faith” he means a blind acceptance of the literal authority of state- ments made in a certain book,—the Bible,—and the equally blind and unreasoning acceptance of particular interpretations of these statements found in doctrines formulated by the Councils of the Church. This attitude means the closing of the door on the spirit of free inquiry, the negation of any critical investigation, the obsti- nate refusal to accept the conclusions of modern science as they apply directly to theology, and the utter abandonment of the search for truth in the sphere of religion. In an age that glori- fies science, that is characterized through and — through by the spirit of free inquiry, that is bent on the fullest possible investigation of everything traditional, even those things regarded as most “sacred,” that is compelled to the search for truth as the only source of the solution of the complex problems that confront mankind,—in such an age, is there any possible hope for a religion that rejects reason, that refuses the new learning, that turns its back deliberately on 45 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION everything that most deeply and most nobly characterizes this modern age? 'To ask this ques- tion is to answer it for all intelligent men and women. If fundamentalism is to persist in re- ligion, the churches will be left to the ignorant, the untrained, and the superstitious, and the main stream of life will flow on without them. Growing out of this attitude lies another grave weakness of fundamentalism. It is static rather than dynamic. It rejects any possibility of progress either in knowledge or in morals. It would hold the world to the present status quo. In an age when everything is in flux,—when po- litical governments are weakening, and social in- stitutions are crumbling, and moral ideals are changing, and educational systems are being radically modified, and the whole of our in- dustrial civilization is being gradually trans- formed, the fundamentalist would keep the church intact just as it has been in form and teaching. In a constantly changing world it would hold religion rigidly static and un- changed. ‘The present conflict in the churches only proves how utterly futile all such attempts must be in a world like ours. If there is to be growth, there must be change. If progress is to be made there must constantly be the passing 46 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY away of the old, and the coming of new knowl- edge. Life, just because it is life, consists of continual readjustments, as conditions change and new light comes. To remain static, to re- fuse to make the new readjustments, is to cease to live. All static things are dead things; they only cumber the ground and should be put out of sight as speedily as possible. When intelli- gent men see clearly that the only hope of the future lies in the full and free assimilation of the new knowledge in religion as well as everywhere else, and in the achieving of a new and nobler morality than the past has ever known, what place or influence can a static church have in the future? When fundamentalism confesses that the world is too much for us, and all that is left us is to save our own little souls and get them out of this Devil’s world as quickly as possible, it espouses a narrow and selfish individualism that is utterly foreign to the social spirit that is at last awake in the world. The “other-worldli- ness’ of fundamentalists is even farther away from this modern age than the golden streets and jasper walls of their distant heaven. If religion cannot bring to bear upon the problems of dis- ease, of poverty, of war, of injustice and wrong A IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION of every kind, a practical moral idealism that it also knows how to apply intelligently to the world that is, if it cannot bring a quickening spirit of lofty enthusiasm and confident hope to the cyn- icism and pessimism of today, if it cannot lead the way to the establishment,—perhaps far off,— of God’s kingdom here upon earth, then religion has no reason for existence. And more than that, if anything stands out more clearly than all else it is that we shall never save our own souls, here or hereafter, except in just the degree that we lose ourselves in helping to build that better world for men. There is one other thing in fundamentalism that seems to be a defect of temperament more than anything else, and that makes it seem hope- less to look for any speedy ending of the con- flict. The fundamentalist seems to be lacking in a sense of imagination. There is little or no poetry in his soul, or, at least, he finds no poetry in his religion; it is all dogma, and prose dogma at that. If he could only read his Bible and see these stories as they really are,—beautiful poetry, —instead of missing the poetry utterly and mak- ing of it all only hard literal prose, how dif- ferent his view of religion might be! But if these weaknesses of the fundamentalist 48 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY position have made inevitable the present out- break of the conflict, the modernists are equally responsible for the present situation. In his in- troduction to “Painted Windows,” Kirsopp Lake calls attention to the fact that the modernists or liberals in the church fall into two distinct groups. ‘There is a left wing, which speaks frankly, with clearness and decision. Once con- vinced that a doctrine or belief is obsolete or false, the members of this left wing discard it. They do not attempt to cloak their non-con- formity behind the futile effort to “re-state’’ or revamp the old doctrine. They frankly let it go and leave it out of their preaching. The mem- bers of this left wing, because of their outspoken honesty, sometimes lose their pulpits by expul- sion by “the powers higher up,” as in the case of Dr. Crapsey of Rochester. More often they are crowded out by the sentiment raised against them; occasionally, because of peculiarly favor- able circumstances, such as an unusually intelli- gent or influential congregation, or a strong per- sonal following, they are able to retain their pulpits, at least for a considerable time. And, then, there are the right wing modern- ists, whom Kirsopp Lake describes as follows: “There is probably little difference in the mat- 49 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ter of private belief between them and the left wing, but they are more concerned with safe- guarding the unity of the church. They en- deavor to do this by using the old phraseology © with a new meaning, so that, for instance, mem- bers of this party feel justified in stating pub- licly that they accept the old creed, though they admit that they do not believe in it in the sense which was originally intended. This is techni- cally called ‘reinterpreting,’ and by a sufficient amount of adroit ‘reinterpreting’ all the articles of the creed can be given whatever meaning is desired. . . . Performed with skill, this dialecti- cal legerdemain is very soothing to a not unduly intelligent congregation and prevents any breach in the continuity of the Church’s belief.”’ These words of Professor Lake give us a fairly accurate picture of the right wing mod- ernists, who considerably outnumber the left wing in the churches, and whose attitude, however they may seek to justify it to themselves, is far more responsible in the minds of the intelligent public for the Churches’ loss of intellectual in- tegrity and moral honesty than are all the absurd and unscientific statements of men like Dr. Straton. I would not question the personal sin- cerity of any man, and I know full well the subtle 50 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY arguments that this right wing modernist em- ploys to justify him in remaining in a church in whose creed and ritual he no longer believes, however he may “accept them in principle.” Whatever he may label this mental attitude or however satisfying to himself his motives, the fact is clear today that an increasing number of intelligent men and women are calling it, in their thoughts if not in words, by that ugly name, “hypocrisy.” ‘This policy has involved for the right wing modernist, almost unconsciously, an evasion of vital issues rather than a frank facing of them, a covering up of distinctions with specious phraseology, a glozing over of contra- dictions, a lulling to sleep of the minds that have begun to question and doubt. During the last generation the religious read- ing public has been flooded with books, sermons, magazine articles of all kinds, by modernists of this type, all devoted to the “reconciling process.”’ To many laymen and laywomen in the churches whose mental training and equipment did not permit them to formulate a new philosophy for themselves more in accordance with the new knowledge pressing in on every side, this method of dealing with the problems served for a time to quiet doubts and conciliate minds that were 51 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION growing restless. But the tragedy of the situ- ation is revealed today in the fact that this policy of temporizing, evading and glozing over the real questions involved has left the bulk of the mem-_ bership of all the churches uneducated and ut- terly unfit and unprepared to face intelligently the controversy that has arisen. It is not in the spirit of condemnation but rather of deepest pity that we point out these facts. The minister himself, trained to the mod- ern viewpoint in college or university, at the beginning equipped with the materials for a thor- oughly modern faith but shrinking from the haz- ard and labor of frankly speaking it, now in this critical hour finds his leadership hedged about with inhibitions of various kinds which he can- not break through, and in this crucial hour to which all the churches have now come, he finds in his care a congregation utterly without un- derstanding, which would be equally responsive to the appeal of reactionism and fundamental- ism, on one side, or modernism on the other. If all modernists had been of the left wing va- riety, the present situation might not have arisen in the form it has taken, or if it had come, the ‘rank and file of the membership of the churches would have been able to face it with intelligence 52 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY and decision. As it is, multitudes are in utter - confusion of mind as to which side of the con- troversy they ought to take. The veil has now fallen from this whole specious method of deal- ing with truth in religion. What we are now witnessing is only the inevitable penalty that must sooner or later be paid as the price for holding one set of beliefs privately, as esoteric, and teaching, either openly or by implication, an entirely different set of views. Eventually, the truth will out, in religion as well as everywhere else. The war within the churches today means at bottom that the time of _ neutrality is past. Evasion, sophistry, specious arguments, “reinterpretations,’ conciliations, that have succeeded thus far in postponing the real issues, will no longer suffice. Two different worlds have crashed, the world of tradition and the world of modernism. One is scholastic, static, authoritarian, individualistic; the other is vital, dynamic, free, social. There is a clash here as profound and grim as that between Chris- tianity and paganism. Amiable words and pious resolutions can no longer hide the differences. The churches can sing until doomsday, “Blest be the tie that binds,” but it can never bind these two different worlds together. We might . 53 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION as well face the facts. The God of the funda- mentalist is one God; the God of the modernist is quite another. ‘The supernatural, dogmatic Christ of the fundamentalist is one Christ. The historic Jesus of Nazareth of the modernist, with his great message and his spirit of love, is quite another. The infallible Bible of fundamental- ism is one Bible; the Bible of the modernist, that has given to the world the great literature of a unique people, is quite another. The ideas of the church, of the kingdom of God, of salva- tion, of the consummation of all things,—these are one thing to fundamentalists, and entirely different things to modernists. Christianity can- not endure half fundamentalist and half mod- ernist. It must become either all one thing or all the other. Glenn Frank in a recent editorial in The Cen- tury states the case clearly, when he says: ““Mod- ernism in religion has not been, up to date, a particularly effective movement. Of necessity it has had to pass through its negative phase. We must wage war against the false gods before we can release and make clear the new gods. And war, even in a good cause, is always a spiritually destructive thing. We must pay the price of a period of idol-breaking before we can realize 54 THE PRESENT CONTROVERSY the community of free spirits. But the liberal churches together with the new knowledge of science have done a pretty thorough job of icon- oclasm. ‘The old idols of pagan theology that have been binding the churches to a dead past have been pretty thoroughly pounded until they are cracked and tottering. If the modernists of both wings will now dare to come out into the open, if they will stand together without fear or equivocation, if they will cease to be mere critics and will have the courage and intelligence to become crusaders of a new and positive religious faith, if they will take the raw materials of a genuine religious liberalism that are today lying all about us in confusion, and challenge and blend them together in a constructive religious philoso- phy, touched into life by enthusiastic and ag- gressive leadership, they can usher in a new and glorious day for religion. It will be far from smooth sailing for the new reformation. It may, for a time, have to cry its message from street corners or from secular platforms, but if so, it will not be the first time that real religion has been driven from the churches and synagogues.” What this age hungers for is a positive faith that will, as Kirsopp Lake puts it, “satisfy the _ soul of the saint, without disgusting the intellect 55 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION of the scholar.”’ I am neither a saint nor a scholar, but that is the kind of a faith I am looking for; that is the faith we are all seeking, just because we belong to this modern age, with all its con- fusion of thought and all its uncertainty in be- lief. It is a new synthesis of religion with sci- ence and art that is so sadly needed today, a synthesis of free research, imagination and faith which the modern world is so blindly seeking. ‘To achieve this new synthesis, now that the hour has struck in the struggle within the churches, is the solemn and glorious task imposed upon all modernists, whether within or without the churches, for upon what we do now depends the religion of the future. 56 ITI THE DOCTRINES IN DISPUTE: WHERE IS THE TRUTH ? Fe MID the many questions of difference Whi between fundamentalists and mod- | ernists, both ecclesiastical and theolog- = ical, [ imagine the average man and woman is preéminently interested in finding out where the truth really lies. Is it possible, amid all the smoke and din of controversy, to separate the essential from the unessential, the permanent from the transitory, the truth from the error, and thus to obtain a clear understanding of the real issues involved? In attempting this delicate task I would avoid everything savoring of dog- matism. The writer was born and reared in the atmosphere of orthodoxy, but from the time he entered college he ceased to believe in the old doctrines as interpreted by the fundamentalists. In attempting to answer the question, Where does the truth lie? I am therefore, simply bring- ing you those conceptions of the truth to which 57 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION my own experience has led me through these years,—the result of my study and reading, my observation and reflection and thought. I am speaking, therefore, for myself, and in no sense for others. We are all seekers after the truth, but we do not always see things eye to eye; and this should not be necessary if we accept the principle that accords to every individual full and complete liberty of thought on all questions of belief. There are four of the old doctrines that seem to be chiefly involved in the present controversy within the churches: (1) The Infallibility of the Bible, (2) The Virgin Birth of Jesus, (3) The Physical Resurrection of Jesus, and (4) The Second Coming of Christ. For some reason ~ we have heard very little of the Doctrine of the Atonement, although a generation ago a fierce controversy was waged around this particular belief of the churches, and, of course, the funda- mentalists hold as tenaciously to the old doctrine of Vicarious Sacrifice as they do to these other doctrines about which there has been most dis- cussion. Before beginning our search for the truth in these old doctrines, however, I want to emphasize two general principles which may help to clarify 58 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? our minds as we approach the specific problems. And the first principle is this. The truth of re- ligion does not lie on either side in this con- troversy. ‘These four doctrines that are being so hotly debated today are theological, not religious questions. As such, they do not touch the heart of religion. ‘Theology belongs to the intellect- ual realm, religion to the realm of the spirit. As Dr. Parkhurst pointed out so clearly in a recent public address, religion is an experience, theology is man’s rationalization about that experience. ‘The experience persists; our ration- alizations, or theologies, are constantly chang- ing. The form our theologies take grows, or should grow, naturally out of the degree of men- tal, moral and spiritual development that we have attained, out of the actual knowledge we pos- sess of the universe, of life, of ourselves and of our fellows. There are multitudes of people who know the experience and who live daily the re- ligious life, but who are utterly ignorant of all theology and who could not define a single doc- trine of the creeds. On the other hand, there are multitudes who are letter-perfect in their knowledge of the creeds but who know hietle or nothing about real religion. For those who like to reflect upon such ques- . 59 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION : tions, or whose mental habits run in the direction of rationalization, some sort of a theology is in- evitable; but for many others of a different men- tal make-up, theology plays no essential part. whatever in their religious lives. If discussing, debating and arguing theological questions ap- peals to you as interesting or worth-while, then that is the sort of thing you like; but the thing to keep constantly in mind is that intellectual ideas or beliefs about religion in no sense con- stitute religion, neither do they necessarily lead to religion. In fact, the present ‘controversy with its criminations and recriminations, its bit- terness and lack of sympathetic understanding on both sides, proves only too clearly that theol- ogy as such, whatever its brand may be, is apt to lead away from the true religious spirit, and become the utter negation of the religious ideals. As these four doctrines are being debated to- day within the churches they are purely theolog- ical questions; their religious value or meaning is scarcely being considered, and, to the great majority, is completely lost sight of. This is only another way of saying that they are being debated, pro and con, merely as questions of fact. As such, science has rendered a verdict that is opposed to the verdict of the old theology. 60 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? The fundamentalists accept the facts declared in the old theology, while the modernists accept the facts as revealed by science. The difference of opinion between fundamentalists and modernists as to the facts, therefore, is simply the difference between science and tradition. Let me illus- trate my meaning more clearly. The question of the infallibility of the Bible, as it is being discussed, is a question of fact. The Bible is either infallible, that is, without error of any kind, or it is not. According to the sci- ence of historical and literary criticism, both internal and external evidences make it utterly impossible for the intelligent man to accept the Bible as an inerrant Book, and therefore as in- fallible. The Bible nowhere claims infallibility for itself, and the idea of infallibility as applied to the Bible is a late addition to theology, hav- ing its origin at the time of the Reformation when the Protestants threw off the yoke of an infallible church. The limits of space forbid the mention- ing of specific cases of error to be found in the Bible, but the books that contain the conclusions of historical and literary criticism, by the fore- most Biblical scholars, are easily available to all. According to these conclusions, the Bible con- tains historical, scientific and chronological er- ; 61 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION rors and inaccuracies that are incompatible with the idea of infallibility, and even the moral ideals of the later portions of the Bible contradict and go way beyond those of the earlier portions. . This is perfectly natural and inevitable, when we remember that the books of the Bible are the product of more than twelve hundred years of the life and experience of the Hebrew people, and were written by many different people and under very different conditions. The fundamen- talists simply reject all these scientific facts in toto, and continue to declare the infallibility of the Bible in spite of the facts, which anyone can ascertain for himself. In the same way, Biblical scholarship has made clear that there is no historical basis for the Virgin Birth stories. Literary criticism has shown from the internal evidences of the Gospel narratives themselves that the Birth stories as recorded in Matthew and Luke are in no sense integral parts of the narratives, that in both Gospels they stand in actual contradiction to the genealogical chapters that precede them, that the Birth stories in Matthew cannot be made to harmonize with those in Luke, that they are later additions to the original Gospel narrative, and that their literary style stamps them clearly as 62 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? being purely poetic conceptions. Besides, we know that the natural and common way for the ancient and pre-scientific mind to account for any unusually great and noble character was to affirm of him a virgin birth. This was the case with Buddha, with Plato, with Cesar Augustus and others. Biology and the modern scientific conception of the reign of natural law also make it extremely difficult, if not quite impossible, for the modern mind to believe that any being, however great, has ever come into this world except through the natural and biological process of generation and birth. As the Virgin Birth is being discussed in the churches today, it is simply a question of fact. From the viewpoint of science,—biological, historical and literary,— the facts are all against the historicity of the Birth stories. The modernist is inclined to accept the facts of science, though occasionally he ap- pears to be uncertain; the fundamentalist, on the other hand, still clings to his blind faith in the literalness of the stories, in spite of all the facts disclosed. The physical resurrection of Jesus is also be- ing debated as a question of fact. Historical and literary criticism make clear that the vari- ous stories of the resurrection conflict with one 63 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION another, that they contain discrepancies that can hardly be harmonized by the disinterested mind, that Paul, the earliest writer on the subject, categorically denied any physical resurrection, — and in his well-known fifteenth chapter of Ist Corinthians, frankly disclaims any belief in the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body, though he believes profoundly in his spiritual resurrection. From the biological view-point, dead bodies re- main dead; they do not come to life again after being in the tomb for three days, whatever may become of the spirit. Science recognizes the fact of resuscitation, but that is a very different thing. In the one case a body, never really dead, is revived; in the other case, a dead body is lit- erally brought back to life; this last is what the physical resurrection of Jesus means to the fundamentalist; and this, with its idea of the universality of law, science knows nothing about. According to these stories which the fundamen- talist accepts literally, after spending forty days upon the earth, the physical Jesus ascends into heaven and the watchers see his physical body disappear in the air over their heads. ‘There are a number of serious difficulties in the literal ac- ceptance of the ascension. We should be obliged to believe that the law of gravitation was set } 64 | WHERE IS THE TRUTH? aside in order to allow a body, heavier than air, to rise toward the skies. Jesus’s body would have had to penetrate through the fifty miles of the earth’s atmosphere before it would reach the open stretches of space. He would then have been some twenty odd millions of miles from the nearest planet. How far would he have had to rise before entering “heaven”? According to the beliefs of that day, the earth was sta- tionary, heaven was just a few miles over-head, and hell was underneath. But with our knowl- edge that the earth is revolving at a terrific rate of speed, if “heaven” is a localized place in space, it will sometimes be above, sometimes below, de- pending upon the position of the earth at any particular moment. So that if one could ascend into heaven by arising above the earth, the as- cension would have to be very carefully timed. I raise these questions seriously, simply because there are so many people who think they believe in these literal stories who have never stopped to ask what is really involved in them. The doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ is based on a few isolated and rather obscure pas- sages in which the language is highly figurative and which lends itself naturally to various kinds of meaning. Both pre-millennialists and post- 65 TRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION millennialists base their opposing interpretations on the same passages. According to these pas- sages, in that great day, the heavens will be. rolled back like a scroll, and Jesus will appear seated on the clouds, surrounded by cohorts of angels, whence he will proceed to judge the earth; the wicked will be destroyed and the saints will reign with him forever and ever. Literary criticism reveals the fact that all such passages belong to what is called “apocalyptic literature” ; it is all symbolical and was never intended to be interpreted literally, as the fundamentalists ac- cept it. While the doctrine refers to a future event yet to take place, science has nothing di- rectly to say about this doctrine as science does not deal in “futures” of any kind. But it is obvious that the whole spirit of science, with its ruling conceptions of the universe and the reign of law, is entirely opposed to the possibility of any such catastrophic event. Now, what I want to make clear is, that in all I have said on these four doctrines, around which the controversy is now raging, I have been dealing with them simply as questions of fact, as this is the view-point from which they are now being discussed. On the one hand, there are the traditional facts which underlie the old doc- 66 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? trines and which the fundamentalist holds most strenuously and for which he is contending most vigorously. On the other hand, there are the facts of science which no modern man can ig- nore, and which have been making it increasingly difficult for intelligent minds to longer accept the traditional doctrines. From the view-point of science, there can be no longer any shadow of doubt, these old traditional doctrines as they have come down to us from the past and as they have been generally interpreted in the past are not factually true. If one accepts the findings of science he cannot, honestly or consistently, ac- cept the “facts” of these old doctrines in the sense that the fundamentalist accepts them. If he accepts the fundamentalist’s view of these doc- trines, then he must deliberately, or ignorantly, shut his eyes to the clear facts that science has revealed. Whether one accepts the scientific or the traditional view depends upon the indi- vidual and his general mental outlook. But having said this, I want to repeat again for the sake of emphasis: Whichever view we hold has nothing whatever necessarily to do with religion. Theology is supposed to deal with facts, religion is an experience. In our theology we may be fundamentalist or modern, orthodox 67 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION or heretic, old theology or new, and whatever we are, we may be altogether religious or alto- gether lacking in religion; theology and religion are in no sense identical and should never be confused, the one with the other. ‘The tragedy of the present situation lies in the fact that the controversy deals so exclusively with questions of theology that the eyes of multitudes are blinded to the real essentials of true religion. The second principle I want to emphasize has to do with the difference between facts and truth. A. statement which agrees with an outward and objective existence is a fact, or more accurately, it is the statement of a fact. A statement which agrees with a subjective and invisible principle is a truth. Strictly speaking, truth includes fact, that is, all correct statements of fact are true; but all truths are not fact. It is a fact that Cesar crossed the Rubicon; it is a truth that God is love. The one statement is in har- mony with an objective existence; the other is in harmony with a subjective principle. Take, for example, the old story of Prometheus which has found its chief literary expression in the great tragedy of Aeschylus, entitled, “Prometheus Bound.” According to the story, Prometheus stole the divine fire from the gods, and as a 68 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? punishment for his daring he was doomed to be chained to a rock from which there was no es- cape, and where the vultures gnawed constantly at his vitals. In literature we call this story of Prometheus “a myth.” But what is a myth? It is an attempt of a primitive people to state an abstract truth in concrete form. For primi- tive peoples, like children, cannot conceive an abstract truth; they can conceive it only in con- crete illustration. Sometimes to express such truths they take a legend, pour the truth into it, and it becomes a mythical legend; sometimes they invent the story to interpret the truth,— it is then a mythical poem or fiction. A myth, therefore, is not fact, but it may contain truth. The Promethean myth contains no actual facts, but it reveals a great truth which, in its simplest form is this: Humanity, like Prometheus in the old story, has aspired through the light of in- telligence to become even as the gods. But it finds itself chained fast by ignorance and super- stition, by selfishness and greed, by tyranny and oppression in a hundred forms, and yet, humanity never gives up the struggle to shake itself free from these shackles that bind and keep it back from the heights it has descried in vision. The gnawing vultures are only the vivid symbol 69 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION of that spiritual anguish that every man and woman endures in the consciousness of the wide gulf that ever exists between the flying ideal and the lagging real,—between things-as-they- are and things-as-they-ought-to-be. It is this truth contained in the old myth that stirs the heart as we read the tragedy of Aeschylus today. This is why we study the old folk-lore, the legends and myths of early peoples; not be- cause they give us facts, but because they en- shrine truths that these early peoples had grasped but which they were unable to express in ab- stract form. Legend, myth, poetry,—these were the earliest, and the natural forms in which the ancient mind gave expression to the truths it perceived; and this is why we reverence today every legend and myth from the past, and seek to interpret its symbolic meaning. But the same principle holds of all great poetry, modern as well as ancient, of all great fiction, of all allegorical writing like that of James Branch Cabell. We do not read poetry or fiction or allegory for facts, but in just the measure that they are great lit- erature, we do find in them truths as well as _ beauty. And the world would be impoverished immeasurably if we should rule out of life and 70 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? of literature all that was not based on actual, literal fact. Now for the application of our principle. These old doctrines we have been considering and that play so central a part in the present controversy, from the literary and scientific view- point are pure myths, that is, they are not based on facts as such; we of the modernist or sci- entific view-point do not seek to find facts in them; in the factual sense they are no longer true for us. But this is not to say that, there- fore, they are wholly false and without mean- ing. Like all myths, they may enshrine truth, even great truth for us who accept the scientific view-point as to their statement of “facts.” If we are honest, we must say very frankly we do not believe these doctrines. In their literal sense they do not contain facts for us. But, unless our minds and souls are absolutely devoid of all poetry, we must say just as frankly, behind the myth which these doctrines disclose, or con- tained within it, we do see the truth and we seek to interpret its meaning for our life today. With these two principles clearly in mind let us now proceed to discover where the truth really lies in these old myths. What is the religious value of these particular doctrines? aL IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION 1—The Infallibility of the Bible. We have freed our minds of all idea of an infallible book. We have accepted the findings of science as to the many errors of various kinds which the Bible contains. Does it therefore follow that the Bible has lost all meaning for us, that it no longer con- tains truth for our minds and hearts? Let us see. The Bible is primarily a book of history, both in the old and new Testaments. We can- not understand it unless we see it in this light. There are three kinds of history: the factual, © the philosophical and the epic. Factual history undertakes simply to tell the facts. The writer of such history cares about nothing else. He does not inquire what the facts signify; what is . their human interest, what is their moral mean- ing; he only seeks to know what is the fact, and. he will sometimes spend weeks or even months in the investigation of a single date in order to secure accuracy in his facts. The best illlus- tration of factual history is found in an official report of a department or in the records of a census. The philosophical historian is one who is in- terested in facts chiefly because they illustrate . or enforce some theory. The facts are not ends in themselves; they are simply instruments in his 72 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? hands; he summons his facts as a lawyer calls his witnesses, that they may testify on his be- half. Few scholars would go to Buckle’s “His- tory of Civilization” to get an accurate state- ment of the facts of the periods with which he dealt. Buckle wished to demonstrate a certain theory of civilization, and with great ingenuity he brought together the facts that had a bearing on that theory. He wrote a philosophical his- tory. Somewhere between these two is what may be called epic history. The epic historian is not interested in mere facts nor has he some particu- lar theory which he wishes to demonstrate. He is interested in certain phases of human life, and he uses the facts of history as the dramatist uses the creations of his imagination, to interpret hu- man life. Froude’s “Life of Erasmus” is a good illustration of epic history. Now the history of ancient times was epic history. The ancient peoples did not discriminate carefully between facts and fiction, between observation and imag- ination, between what they had‘seen and what they pictured to themselves. They knew noth- ing whatever about writing factual or scientific history. Their poetry, therefore, is historical poetry, having its roots in history; and their his- 73 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION tory is poetical history, portrayed for the pur- pose of interesting their readers in certain phases of human life. The historicity of the siege of Troy has been pretty well established by Dr. Schliemann’s investigations; but to what extent Homer’s representation of the facts of that siege is historically correct it is impossible to de- termine. On the other hand, Herodotus, who is called — the “father of history,” writes for a purpose. He does not hesitate to use tradition, story, legend, fiction, myth,—anything that will help to make his history interesting. His purpose is not factual,—to tell just what happened; neither is it philosophical,—to demonstrate a theory; his purpose is to illustrate certain phases of Greek life and character in which he is profoundly in- terested,—to make clear to all time the renown of the Greek people. To this class Hebrew literature belongs. The Bible histories are epic histories. The various writers were interested in one phase of human life that may be summed up in the single sen- tence, God is in his world. ‘They believed in a living God who dwelt with his people, in a God who was a righteous being, and who demanded righteousness and nothing else from his people. 74 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? They believed in the faith of the prophets that Jehovah was able to pluck up and pull down, or to plant and to build the nation at his own will. They saw in the history of their own people the witness of the presence and the power of this living God. They did not write factual his- tory, nor philosophical history, but epic history, —and epic history from the moral and religious view-point. This is what gives to the Biblical literature its peculiar character. It is of all lit- erature the most religious, because of all other histories, ancient or modern, it endeavors to in- terpret the part the living God took in the his- tory of a great and peculiar people. When we clearly grasp this view of the Bible, we are set free from the slavery of the letter, and are enabled to appreciate its spirit. We do not go to the Bible for historical accuracy, or scien- tific knowledge, or moral philosophy as such. The Bible is one of the greatest books in all litera- ture dealing with the moral and religious life. As Matthew Arnold somewhere says: You might as well expect a man with a sense for litera- ture refusing to cultivate it by reading the great literature of the Greeks, or a man with the sense for art failing to cultivate it by studying the great paintings of earlier times, as to expect a man with 75 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION a sense for the moral and spiritual life refusing to cultivate it by reading the Bible. The great characters of the Bible, epic though the narratives are, are full of inspiration and of warning even for today. ‘The great poetry of the Bible still breathes the universal aspiration of the human heart. The Gospel narratives, regardless of their historical accuracy, possess a simplicity and a beauty of which we never tire. The matchless parables of Jesus reveal truths that no man can deny. And the burning messages of the Hebrew Prophets or the lofty idealism of a Paul or John still stir the heart and arouse the soul of the most modern man alive. As the great literature of a people “gifted with a genius for religion,” the Bible reveals the struggle of this people with the moral and spiritual problems that in some form confront all earnest men and women. The Bible is “inspired” for me in just the degree that it inspires me to nobler striving and better living; it is the great book of conduct. But its “inspira- tion” is no whit different in kind than that which I find in the sacred scriptures of other peoples; nay more, it is the same inspiration that I find in the great poet, the great novelist, the great phi- losopher, of any age or clime, whose writings arouse in me new strivings toward the heights of 716 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? character. This, perhaps, may suggest the re- ligious value of the Bible, of which the doctrine of the Bible’s infallibility is only the merest sym- bol. In refusing to accept the doctrine of an inerrant book, we also refuse to reject whatever of truth or beauty or inspiration the Bible may contain. In striking off the shackles of the letter we enter into the freedom of the spirit in our ap- preciation of this great literature. 2.—The Virgin Birth of Jesus. In accepting the verdict of historical and literary criticism as well as that of biology, that Jesus was born of a human father and mother like the rest of us, does it follow that the greatness of his character 1s therefore dimmed, or that his teachings have lost their power, as the fundamentalists would have us believe? What are the religious values of the beautiful Birth stories, even after we have dis- carded them as factual history? If we were to open the pages of the Gospel narratives for the first time with our minds absolutely free from all the theological implications that have been put upon their statements, and with our modern knowledge of the epic or poetic form in which the histories of early times invariably found ex- pression, also remembering that a Virgin Birth was the usual way in which the ancient mind was a. IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION able to account for the truly exceptional char- acter, what would be our impressions? Would we not feel at the outset that here was a man who, early in his life, took his place with the great prophets, seers and reformers of every age and clime? He lived in two worlds,—the world of ideals and visions and dreams, and the world of things-as-they-are,—whereas most people, then as now, live only in one world. But, unlike the idealist of those times Jesus did not flee from the real world of men and of human problems into some desert fastness or anchorite’s cave, there to spend his days alone with his dreams. He refused to turn his back upon the real world, to separate himself from the life of his fellows, to close his eyes to the wrongs and injustices under which men and women suffered. He dared what only the few great souls have dared throughout all history,—he dared to be- lieve that the ideal world of which he dreamed and the real world in which men lived and toiled and suffered might actually approach each other, and that at length,—perhaps far off,—the two widely sundered worlds might indeed become one. And as this dream gradually took possession of his entire being it came to be the great dominat- ing, all-compelling purpose of his life,—to make 78 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? this ideal world real. The great decision of his life was made when he decided to stay with men and women and little children, to press his heart close to the problems they were facing, to share their bitterest lot, and to realize his dream, if at all, in men and with men and through men. He believed in God, though he never tried to define Him nor did he waste time speculating ~ about Him. He believed that God was the deep- est life of his life, the strongest power within him, the best he knew, the highest he saw. But he also believed that what God was to him, He was to all men, and that the best and highest he knew as God could be known by all men. He believed that the true Kingdom of God was within man, —within every individual being. He dared to dedicate himself to the stupendous task of mak- ing these two worlds one simply because of his profound faith in God and man, or better still, his faith in the God in man. He refused to be- lieve that “you cannot change human nature”’; he knew the limitless possibilities of human nature and he dared to believe that the best in human nature could be discovered and _ developed, brought to the surface and realized, at length, in noble, unselfish character. Just when he adopted his method for making : 79 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION these two worlds one, we do not know, but early in his ministry it is clear that he cared little about organization as such. He knew nothing about any church and he never instituted a new syna- gogue. He gathered a few friends about him, but they constituted a loose brotherhood rather than an organization. He never talked about the- ology. He never referred to any Virgin Birth. He never gave them acreed. He was their friend and companion, their teacher and guide. He talked informally, sometimes with his friends, often with small groups, and occasionally to the crowds, and his constant theme was the making real his dream of the two worlds becoming one. He made it very clear that the forces in which men trusted were as nothing to him in the realiza- tion of his dream, that pomp and power, wealth and success as the world reverenced these things, had no place in his dreams. It was just as evi- dent that he had no confidence whatever in force and violence, in armies and navies, as the solution of the world’s problems. The method he taught and employed was very different. It sounded strange and foolish to the people of his day; it is just as strange and foolish to most people today. He dared to teach that moral and spiritual forces were the greatest forces in the world, and that 80 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? some day they would supplant armies and navies. He taught that kindness and sympathy, leading to mutual understanding, would do more to estab- lish peace than all the armies in the world. He taught that when unselfishness conquered selfish- ness, codperation replaced competition, and love dispelled hate, then justice would become possible and righteousness would fill the whole earth. In a word, he taught that when men came to know themselves as brothers of all who live everywhere, then the spirit of good-will to all would dominate human lives, and peace and happiness would come inevitably to such men of good-will, and through them to all mankind. The best part of it all is, that he himself lived his dream. He not only talked about this ideal life but he lived it every day in thought, in word and in deed. It is no wonder he “spoke with authority and not as the scribes.” It is not strange that “the common people heard him gladly.” Neither is it to be wondered at that gradually the powers of state and church arrayed themselves against him, for the realization of his dream meant the downfall of their petty plans. And so it was quite inevitable that one day he was led forth to the little hill called Golgotha, and there put to death between two thieves. 81 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION As the years passed by, the love and reverence which such a personality had inspired in the hearts of the people, tremendously deepened by his tragic death, found natural and inevitable ex- pression in many stories of what he was and what he did. These stories were told and re-told by word of mouth for more than a generation before they were reduced to any writing. In an age that knew nothing about factual history as such, all of whose historical writing was epic, in which facts mingled freely with poetry, an age that had never heard of science with its reign of law, to which everything that could not be explained was a “miracle,” an age that was accustomed to ac- count for its heroes by a virgin birth, is it strange that when finally these stories were gathered to- gether and put into written form they should have contained fiction as well as fact, poetry as well as prose, so that what we have today in these Gospel narratives is imperishable epic, or poetic history, not one word of which would we change, but which never should be interpreted lit- erally as we would interpret scientific history? We have in the last part of the nineteenth century a clear illustration of the way in which fancy and imagination, reverence and love combine to cre- ate stories about an exceptional character that 82 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? may have had no basis in fact, and yet that give expression to the truth about that character. Al- though he died only about sixty years ago, it is well-nigh impossible today to separate fact from poetry in the many stories that have grown up about the life of Abraham Lincoln. Where lies the truth, then, in the Virgin Birth story? Not, for us, in any literal historicity, but in the surpassing’ greatness of the life that called forth such a story. If we mean by “God” the highest we know and the best we can conceive, then surely “the spirit of God” dwelt in him. How could any virgin birth possibly add to the nobility of such a life? We reverence him not for his parentage or the manner of his birth, but for what he was in himself and for the truth he uttered. The Virgin Birth story, interpreted literally, as the fundamentalists interpret it, sepa- rates Jesus from the life of humanity and makes of him a fictitious being, neither altogether hu- man nor altogether divine; this story interpreted freely and poetically makes him one with all the great religious seers and sages and prophets of the past; nay more, it makes him one with all men in whom the spirit of the highest and best is struggling for fuller, freer expression. The dif- ference between Jesus and other men is not a dif- ; 83 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ference of birth but of spirit; it is a quantitative not a qualitative difference; the same “divine” spirit dwells in all men to some degree, that dwelt in him in a superlative degree. And that is why the human Jesus towers so far above us all in the things of the moral and spiritual life. 3.—The Physical Resurrection of Jesus. All that we have said of the birth stories applies to the stories of the resurrection. Regarded liter- ally as the fundamentalist believes them, we find ourselves involved in contradictions and dis- crepancies, and in statements that to the modern mind seems altogether absurd and incomprehen- sible. ‘Taken poetically, as the natural expres- sion in such an age of the love and reverence which Jesus had inspired, the story of the phys- ical resurrection reveals not a “fact,” but a pro- found and most inspiring truth. Where is the truth? That life is mightier than death, that love is stronger than death, that the highest and best in human personality is never destroyed by death, that death itself is never the end of life but only an incident in life, that the influence of the truly noble life lives on through the ages, that what such a life really is and does remains as the per- manent possession of mankind forever. Jesus died as all men aie and his body was 84 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? reverently laid away in the Syrian tomb there to be mingled with the dust of earth, but his spirit lived on; and it still lives today as the constant source of courage and inspiration to all who would share the life of the spirit. His great dream of one day bringing this old world-as-it-is into closer harmony with the world-as-it-ought- to-be is the compelling dream of our lives today. His noble manhood shames us for our littleness, his unflagging zeal for the Kingdom of God on earth lifts us out of our self-absorption, his dis- interested love leads us away from our selfishness. In just the measure that we share his spirit,— the spirit of all the great and good who have walked this earth,—do we attain to that real im- mortality, of which the resurrection stories are only the faintest symbol. 4.—The Second Coming of Christ. Where lies the truth in the old apocalyptic vision of the heavens opening and Jesus appearing in the clouds with his cohorts of angels to destroy the wicked and establish in person the reign of righteousness on earth? If the fundamentalists possessed any imagination or read these passages with any poetry in their souls how could they con- fuse what they accept as literal fact with the great and inspiring truth which this ancient poetry 85 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION enshrines? If we believe that the spirit of truth and love, the spirit of justice and righteousness, | the spirit of peace and good-will dwelt in him, then every truth bringer, every life that sur- renders to love’s power, every approach to more of justice in human relations, every rebirth of the spirit that makes for righteousness, is in reality the “coming of Christ”? again. What could the personal Jesus do were he to come to earth today more than he did nineteen hundred years ago? He could teach again the same great truths, he might apply them more directly to our problems of today, he could live the life of disinterested love, but he would encounter the same opposition from the powers-that-be today that he did then, and he might meet the same fate.. I say it with all reverence, it is not the personal Jesus come to earth again that the world needs today; it is, rather, the spirit of truth and love become in- carnate in our lives; it is the more earnest and intelligent striving for justice on our part, it is the translation of righteousness into all the mani- fold relations of men and nations. Until we are ready and willing to live the true and loving, the just and righteous life ourselves, the spirit of | Jesus can never come in its fulness. The truth of the old doctrine is found in every form of 86 WHERE IS THE TRUTH? moral and social progress that has its place in the life of mankind,—a truth of which the doctrine is only the merest symbol. Most imperfectly have I tried to suggest where the truth lies in the present controversy between fundamentalists and modernists. From the purely factual view-point, our sympathies are all with the modernists simply because we belong to this age and have inevitably been influenced, in all our thinking, by the spirit and conclusions of modern science. These doctrines as they stand and as they are believed by the fundamentalists are, frankly, only beautiful myths to us; we read them not as the record of facts but as beautiful poetry, and as such we honestly and reverently seek to find the truths they enshrine. It is the moral and spiritual values of these old doctrines that we crave, just as we seek them in all the myths that have come down from the past. And when the present storm of controversy has passed away, it will be these values that will remain as man’s permanent spiritual heritage from the past. The letter killeth and must be superseded by the spirit which alone brings life. 87 IV THE REALIZATION OF GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE (aa NE of the most impressive things, as B) we trace the development of man’s life on this planet, is the way in which he = has continually been outgrowing his older notions of God, and yet for some reason he has never outgrown God. His ideas about God are constantly changing, being revised and left behind, and yet the idea of God persists. Again and again, men have arisen to declare that at last God had been ruled out of the Universe, and that henceforth man was to steer his course, freed from this “old superstition of the past”; and in the very generation that listened to such confident assertions, thoughtful minds have be- gun anew the task of reformulating their concep- tions of God in closer harmony with the deepest thought of their day. It was Emerson who said: “When the Gods . arrive, the half-gods go.” This is just what has been taking place ever since man, “the worship- 88 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE ing animal,” first made his appearance on this planet. Man has been constantly discovering and rediscovering God, as his experience has broadened, as his knowledge of truth has widened, as his insight into the meaning of life has deep- ened. Low and narrow ideas of God have ever been giving way to higher and broader ideas; in- adequate and unworthy notions have disappeared with the coming of more adequate and nobler notions; imperfect and limited conceptions have vanished with the dawning of more ethical and truly spiritual conceptions. The race has very gradually come to its knowl- edge of God through its slowly growing knowl- edge of itself, for we must not forget that every “revelation of God” which has become enshrined in the Bibles of the race, was first of all made in the inner consciousness of some individual. At last we are coming to see that “revelation” does not consist in God’s removing some veil which hides Him from the searching gaze of man, but rather, in man’s removing the veil from before his own eyes, which has been blinding him to the truth and beauty and goodness of God. The true God always “arrives” to take the place of the “half-gods,” as man makes the discovery of his truer, deeper self. . 89 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Everyone believes in God, and no one should refuse to assert his belief in God, simply because he cannot bring himself to believe in the God of some theologian, or as expressed in some creed. Strictly speaking, there is no such person as an atheist or infidel. Atheism and infidelism are relative, not absolute terms. A man may believe in a different God, or he may believe less or more about God than do others, but if he reflects at all he is forced to believe in “something” that con- stitutes God for him. We need to remember that the real God is the God expressed in the universe and in ourselves. The God defined in the creeds is, at best, only an approximation of the real God, the outgrowth of the mental, moral and spiritual limitations of the age that produced the creed. One may think with Haeckel that the Universe is the outcome of the fortuitous interaction of material atoms, without consciousness or intelligence behind them; or one may believe that the Cosmos is the product of Mind, that “it means intensely and means good”; but whether one calls himself a materialist or an idealist, no one can help believ- ing in the Power that is revealed in the Universe, . in the Life Force out of which all-that-is has come. And this belief in a Power, or Life Force, 90 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE even if one attempts to formulate his belief no further, is nevertheless a belief in God. For whatever else God may be, He must be the great Life Force whence all proceeds. We are not concerned just now with the many questions that spring to the mind as soon as we begin to think about God. The theories, specu- lations and philosophies about God are legion, and yet the modern mind has grown less dogmatic and more humble, and is content to confess itself frankly agnostic as to many things men have glibly affirmed about God in the past. More and more it is becoming clear that we approach God more closely through feeling than through in- tellect, that our truest knowledge of God comes through our deepest intuitions rather than through logical processes. To admit frankly that there are many things we do not and cannot know about God, is not to exhibit less but more of real faith than to seek to measure God’s power with one’s little yardstick or compress all the meaning of God into one’s limited definitions. For every definition always defines the person who makes it far more truly than the thing defined, since our definitions do not reveal the absolute meaning of what we de- fine nearly so accurately as they define ourselves, 91 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION that is, our powers of perception or understand- ing. It is for this reason that all our definitions of God are really the expressions of the meaning of God in terms of our own mental, moral and spiritual limitations. It is thus that we are com- ing to see that the sense of God, or the conscious- ness of God, is the practically important thing for our lives, regardless of what theories we may hold or how we may formulate our philosophy about God. To primitive man, in all his ignorance and superstition, the gods were close, near and imme- diate. Nature was man’s first Bible; and in the sun, the stars, the waves, the storm, the rhythmic passing of the seasons—seed-time and harvest— he felt the constant presence of the Great Spirit, or of lesser spirits, and realized their ceaseless ac- tivity. And then, with the gradual building up of religious systems, God was removed farther and farther from the individual soul. Theology embalmed Him in the abstractions of the creeds; ecclesiasticism sought to shut Him up in Temples and Cathedrals and Churches; His means of com- munication with the soul were limited to the sacraments administered by properly ordained. priests; it was decreed that worship of Him must be in accordance with certain rites and cere- 92 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE monies; great institutions thrust themselves be- tween the soul and God, and sought to have men believe that His relation to them was a relation of mediation, and that He never could come into direct and immediate contact with the soul. To quote from an eminent theologian: “God is a being of an essentially different nature from man, between whom and Him there is no kin- ship.” Every great religion has always had its be- ginnings in the consciousness that God was close and near and immediate, but the subsequent de- velopment of every religion has succeeded in erecting barriers between the soul and God that have served to remove Him from any vital re- lationship with the rank and file of persons. And so the fundamental mission of every truly great religious reformer has always been to rescue God from creeds and institutions and bibles, and re- enthrone Him once again in the soul of the indi- vidual; but those who have come after, have usually succeeded in substituting the means for the end, and in making the machinery of religious organization take the place of religion, which is ever and always “‘the life of God in the soul of man.” Man has always been his own worst enemy in religion as well as in everything else. 93 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION And all the time that man has been saying, in his search for God, “‘Lo, He is here, or lo, He is there,” the divine whisper has been sounding, for those who had ears to hear, “Lo, the Kingdom of God is within you.” It is to the credit of this modern age that the human spirit has once more risen in its strength and is determined to find God in the near and immediate. Its demand is not for a God who once was, but for a God who now is; not a God in the skies, but a God on the earth; not a God of some distant heaven, but a God whom we meet and recognize in everyday experiences. It is for this reason that so many people today are be- coming increasingly impatient with creeds and dogmas, rites and ceremonies, sermons and churches. Instinctively they feel that these things do not constitute religion, and that in some way they have come between the soul and its own inalienable right of immediate access to the lv- ing God. It is nothing else than the outraged spirit in man demanding its rights with God. He little understands the religious unrest of these times who does not see that, deeper than all else, is this well-nigh universal thirst for a- real God; that is, a God who is real, who lives, moves and has His being in one’s own personal 94 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE experience. Just as Emerson asked the question in his Divinity School Address in 1838: “Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God?’ so men everywhere today are crying out for an original, first-hand experience of God. Earnest souls are asking why, if God indeed be the living God, it should be necessary for men of today to derive all their knowledge of Him from ancient prophets who lived and died thousands of years ago? Do we not stand as close to the original sources of the knowledge of God as did the ancients,—the world of conscious- ness within and the world of nature without? Why cannot we have our own experience with God, instead of depending so wholly on second- hand experiences of ‘others? Towards the close of his life, Tennyson once said toa friend: “My chief desire is to have a new vision of God.” In these words the great poet has voiced the deepest desire of all seriously minded men and women. If we are ever to regain the “lost sense of God,” -which Tolstoi declared to be the fundamental need of our age, it will only be as in some way we do succeed in catching a fresh vision of God. A few Sundays ago I listened to a sermon on the subject “What does it mean to love God?” —a sermon that was not only beautifully ex- 95 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION pressed, but that was also profoundly suggestive —in which God was construed in terms of “the Invisible.” In this connection I want to ask you to think of God in terms of Creative Life, as also helping towards the new vision of God, that is so sadly needed. And I want you to think of God in these terms, not because they exhaust the meaning of God, but because they are funda- mental and give an expression to the thought of © God which I think we can all accept, whatever may be our different beliefs about God. At least, it may furnish a starting point from which we may pursue our quest still further. In his striking book, “Creative Evolution,” Henri Bergson, the well-known French Philoso- pher, uses these words: “There is in each of us a particle of Life Force which is above intellect as much as it is above our physical powers. ‘This Life Force which we find in every living thing must have come from a source,—you may call it God.” This elan vital, or Life Force of Berg- son, which indwells all things, is recognized and accepted by all scientists and philosophers today, by whatever name they may call it. It is the “infinite and eternal energy from whence all things proceed” of Herbert Spencer. It is the “God in whom we live and move and have our 96 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE being” of Paul. Suppose we take this thought of God, not as a final or exhaustive thought, but as a conception of modern thought that seeks to construe God in terms of creative life instead of in terms of the older metaphysics. ‘Then, what- ever else God may be, if He is the Creative Life in all things, what follows? First, as respects man’s relation to nature, the Creative Life of God is everywhere present. Most people still believe that some time in the far-away past, God made the world; whereas the real truth is that Gud is always making the world. Creation is not an act in the past, but is an eter- nal process that is even now taking place before our very eyes. “Through every grass-blade,” says Carlyle, “the glory of the present God still beams.” It is the mysterious Life Force, always at work, everywhere present, that is silently and continually doing the wondrous work of creation. It is sometimes said that the operations of nature are spontaneous; and that is exactly what they are. This is the meaning of Divine Immanence. “Spontaneous,” used in this sense, does not mean at random and purposeless and undetermined; it means actuated and controlled from within by something indwelling and all-pervading’ and never absent anywhere. The intelligence which 97% IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION guides things is not something external to the scheme, clumsily interfering with it by muscular action, as we are constrained to do when we inter- fere at all; but it is something within and in- separable from it, as human thought is within and inseparable from the action of our brains. Many are blind to the meaning,—to the fact even,—that there is a meaning in nature, just as an animal is blind to a picture and deaf to a poem; but to those whose eyes are open to see, the intelligence and purpose underlying the whole mystery of existence are keenly felt. To them, the lavish beauty of wild nature, of landscape, of sunset, of mountain and of sea are revelations of an indwelling “Presence,” rejoicing in its ma- jestic order. “There is a soul in all things and that soul is God,’”—the creative life in all that is. Every atom, every germ, every living organism, from lowest to highest, has within it a principle, a life force, a purpose, even a degree of conscious- ness appropriate to its position in the general scheme of things. ‘This mind, or consciousness, differs in its different manifestations, higher in the insect than in the vegetable, higher in the ani- mal than in the insect, higher in man than in the’ animal, and highest of all in the great souls of the BACE, 98 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE It is to be questioned how many of the boys and girls, educated today in the mechanistic concep- tions of modern science, really see and feel in nature the “living Presence” that was so actual to men like Wordsworth or Ruskin or Emerson or Whitman or Jeffries, not to mention writers of an earlier day. And yet with all the light that modern science has thrown upon nature, it needs to be remembered that no scalpel has ever yet revealed the mysterious secret of life, and no laboratory has ever yet discovered the source of life. The Life Force that indwells all things is still the supreme mystery. Our knowledge of science,—Botany, Geology, Zoology, Biology, Astronomy, etc.,—has given us new classifica- tions and descriptions, new laws and terminolo- gies that help to explain the outside of things and of organisms, but they have not yet succeeded in explaining the inner life principle that creates things and organisms. And they need not and should not blind our eyes to the mysterious “Presence,” the Creative Life of God, which meets us face to face wherever we turn in nature. When we look for it beneath the outer form,— “the garment of the Infinite,”’—we do see the Divine everywhere, just because we are con- 99 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION stantly in the presence of the Creative Life of God. “Earth’s crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God.” But again, as respects time, if God is the Cre- ative Life, whatever else He may be, there is no time when He is not present in the life of hu- manity. ‘There are many devout people whose sense of the presence of God seems to be almost entirely historic. ‘They believe God was with Abraham and Moses and Joshua, with Isaiah, Amos and Micah, and that over the confused and painful wanderings of the Israelites a divine pur- pose presided; but in the world of today they see on every side the evidences of an evil spirit at work, with few or no signs of a divine order or “Presence” in the life of man. Carlyle, who had a keen historic sense, expressed passionately in his last years the longing that God would speak again. He could hear the divine voice speaking through Knox, Luther and Cromwell of an earlier time, but he could not detect it in the mes- sages of Maurice or Stanley or Bright of his own day. It almost seemed to him that God had vanished out of human history when the stern’ soul of Cromwell took its flight. So there are multitudes of people who believe 100 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE in a past God, but who have a very slight con- sciousness of a present God. They always speak of God in the past tense. Older peoples seem to them to have been divinely led, while they stumble on blindly in a helpless confusion of aims and ideals; other ages seem to them sacred, while this age seems devoid of all divine recognition. And yet if God is the Creative Life, He has al- ways been in the world, is just as truly and fully in the world today as He has ever been in the past. What is the essential meaning of what is going on in Ireland or Egypt or Persia or India or Russia today, if it is not to be found in the deep stirrings of the Creative Life in the hearts and minds of these peoples as they reach out, vaguely, blindly and more or less crudely—and often by methods that we could wish were other- wise—toward what they feel is a richer, fuller, freer and juster life for them and their children? How are we to interpret the deep stirrings of un- rest in the industrial world, if not in terms of the same Creative Life that is seeking, in the hearts and minds of the workers of all lands, freedom from the injustices and wrongs under which they have suffered down through the centuries? What means the lofty dreams of a better World Order, in which all men and nations shall join hands 101 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION in the common cause of service to all humanity, that are stirring in the hearts and minds of multi- tudes throughout the world today, except that the Creative Life is present here and now, and seek- ing larger and fuller expression? The history of the last few years, if we only had eyes to read it aright, would contain for us a disclosure of the Divine Will and purpose as clear and au- thoritative as that contained on any page of the Old or New Testaments. The difference be- tween various ages is not that the Creative Life of God is present in a fuller degree in some than in others, but rather that some ages perceive and realize the Divine Presence more fully than do others, or because some ages are willing to be- come the expression of the Creative Life to a degree that others are not. If God is the Creative Life, whatever else He may be, it is also evident that He must be present in some degree and form in the life and history of all peoples. Here in the western world we have said for centuries that God made the Jews the channel of His revelation to the world, but the Egyptian, the Phoenician, the Greek, the Roman, the peoples of India or China or Africa, worked out a purely human destiny in a purely human way. They had no inspiration from the 102 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE Divine Spirit, and they contributed no revelation of the Divine nature. The history of the Jews, we say, therefore, is divine history, while the his- tory of all other peoples and races is profane. But this is worse than a partial view, it is an actual kind of atheism; it sets about the Creative Life that is everywhere present, the narrow limi- tations of human ignorance and prejudice. For centuries Christianity has taught that it alone was the true religion and that all of the other great world faiths were false, that its prophets alone were divinely inspired while the seers and sages of other religions were inspired by the Devil, and that therefore its adherents alone would be “saved,” while the adherents of all other faiths would be eternally “lost.” But as we read the sacred writings of other religions to- day, we discover that all the essential teachings as to moral and spiritual values are practically the same with those of Christianity, and the great leaders of all religions are singularly at one in their ideals, their purposes and their spirit. How preposterous seem such ideas today! In one breath, theology predicates omnipresence of God, in the next, it claims to find Him only in a “chosen people,” saved out of a vast host of dis- inherited and rejected. It is as if one should dis- 103 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION criminate between the children of the same family and declare that while one son bore the image of his Father, was the recipient of His love and bore his character, all the others were aliens and strangers, cut off from participation in the na- ture which was a common inheritance. It is such limited and unethical notions about God that underlie so much of the racial antagonisms and prejudices and bitternesses of today that are keeping the world torn asunder in the spirit of strife. It is only as we realize that, whatever else He may be, God is the Creative Life everywhere indwelling the life of all peoples, that we can understand the words, ‘““God hath not left Him- self without a witness among any people,” and those other words, “the Light that lighteth every man coming into the world.” So that while we gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to the Hebrew race for its incalculable contribution to the moral and religious life of mankind, we never- theless rejoice to find the truth, beauty and good- ness of the Creative Life of God expressing itself in the life of all peoples. | Still again, if God is the Creative Life, every- where present, then it follows that the “revela- tion” of God is one with life itself. To many peo- ple God reveals Himself exclusively through the 104 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE Bible and the Church. These, they say, are the divine channels; all other channels are purely human. As we read the Bible itself, however, there is nothing to cause us to believe that the message of God came only through the men who wrote the sixty-six books of our Bible. And when we read the story of the formation of the Biblical Canon, there is no reason for believing that God ceased speaking through men when the Canon was closed. Just because God is the Creative Life, we know that He has always been speaking and must always continue to speak in countless ways and through countless lives. So we perceive God’s message to man as contained in all the great Bibles of the race, in the writings of so-called heathen,—men like Seneca and Mar- cus Aurelius,—in the great philosophers, the great poets, the great dramatists, the great novel- ists. And since the Creative Life is as truly in nature as in the soul of the Prophet, the truth of science is therefore as divine and authoritative as the truth of any Bible. Any fact anywhere, if it be a fact, is a revelation of God. But the Creative Life is also revealed in all forms of art —painting, sculpture and architecture—in music that has been called “the divinest of all the arts,” in every form of activity of the human spirit. 105 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION The whole material universe,—all history, all philosophy, all science, all literature, all art,— the entire life of man, cannot exhaust the revela- tion of the Creative Life that is everywhere. If we were to put into our Bibles all the great writ- ings, prose and poetry, and all the great art of every kind through which the Creative Life has spoken directly to our souls, it would contain very much more than the present sixty-six books. If we were truly conscious, in the deep realiz- ing sense, that God was Creative Life, always at work and everywhere present, then every day would be for us a sacred day, every task, even the humblest, would be a divine task, and every place would be a holy place. We should feel His near- ness on week-days as well as on Sunday; we should find Him in our daily work as we realized that it was God working in us and through us, whatever our task; we should know that He was present in the home, the office, the factory, the schoolroom and on the street, as truly and actu- ally as He is in the great Cathedral or the Church. For it is not the day, nor the place, nor the task that makes sacred, but ever and alone the spirit that realizes God as Creative Life, everywhere present and always revealing itself. But, in the last place, nowhere do we come 106 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE closer to the real God as Creative Life than in the depths of our own consciousness, and in the lives of our fellows. The modern approach to God is not from without but from within. We do not begin first with God, as did the ancients, but with man; it is through man to God. Chron- ologically, God may come first, but it is not the chronological God whom we seek; it is the living God of the present who alone can satisfy man’s hunger and thirst. So that we do not seek God through logical processes, and then argue from our conclusions as to God’s relations to man. But we discover Him, if at all, in our own inner consciousness. We do not begin by defining Him; in fact we care less and less about any defi- nitions of God, for we realize that every defini- tion always leaves out more than it puts in. But we are intensely concerned with knowing, feeling, experiencing for ourselves the immediate sense of God. Weare learning at last that the pathway to God lies ever and always through man’s own inner being. This is not to disparage the paths that lead through nature to God; but it is to:con- fess that no one sees clearly the paths that lead through nature, until he has first learned to walk in the pathway that lies through human nature. This explains why Prof. James speaks of “the | 107 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION gods of Nature” and the “God of the inner life,” and why Mr. Wells makes the distinction be- tween the “Veiled Mystery” and the “God of the Heart.” For it is the Creative Life, as it finds expression in the inner life, or in the heart of man, who becomes for us the real God. Why this should be so becomes clear when we reflect on the manifestation of Creative Life in the inner life of man. It comes welling up in us, first, as consciousness, whose mystery no man has yet fathomed. Out of this consciousness within, come all our powers of thinking and feeling and willing, which are nothing less than manifesta- tions of the Creative Life of God, individualized in us. But wonderful as these are, it is only when we rise to the plane of the ideals, and come to realize that the power by which we create the ideal and visualize it to ourselves, the source of our aspiration toward the ideal which will not let us be content with anything less, the will by which we determine to dedicate ourselves to the realization of the ideal,—all these are the clearest and fullest expression of the Creative Life of God within ourselves. If I may state it in an- other way: The Creative Life of God, whether without or within, is One, but we become most fully conscious of the real God when the Crea- 108 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE tive Life within ourselves finds expression in our ideals of the good, the beautiful and the true; and we come nearest to God when we surrender our- selves wholeheartedly to these ideals. For in the highest and most spiritual sense, God is the to- tality of our ideals. And what is thus true of ourselves is true of all men. The Creative Life of God dwells in every individual, as the source of consciousness, of mind, of heart, of will, but most clearly manifested in the creation of ideals and the awakening of aspiration toward those ideals. All men are, then, essentially divine, but all men are not equally conscious of the divine Creative Life within themselves, and all men do not equally surrender to its power in the crea- tion in them of the ideals which lift man toward the divine. “Know this, O man, sole root of sin in thee Is not to know thine own divinity.” Or, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it in his “Creed of a Scientist”: “All that exists, exists only by the communication of God’s Infinite Being. All that has intelligence, has it only by derivation from His sovereign reason; and all that acts, acts only from the impulse of His supreme activity. It is He who does all in all. It is He, who, at 109 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION each instant of our life, is the beating of our heart, the movement of our limbs, the light of our eyes, the intelligence of our spirit, the soul of our soul.” Or, in the beautiful words of Josiah Royce: “God is the life of my life, the soul of my soul, the self of my self.” Now if this very imperfect but, let us hope, suggestive thought of God, as construed in terms of Creative Life, be in any sense true, how would it tend to affect our view of life? Suppose, for example, that God is not and never was the transcendent divine Being who dwelt beyond the stars, as so many of the theologians have de- clared. Suppose He did not create the world at some time in the past. Suppose He never has intervened from without in the world’s affairs, and that the old miracles that are recorded in our Bibles are simply the stories of early, ignorant, unsophisticated and superstitious people about things that seemed strange and unnatural to them, but that would seem to us far less strange and perfectly natural if they happened now? Suppose God is the eternal Life Force that has been finding expression from the beginning of be- ginnings, and that has brought forth this uni- verse, like a child born of a mother’s travail, as a means to His own self-expression and self- 110 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE realization. Suppose that this universe is as much a necessity to God as the thought of a God is necessary to us. Suppose God is the in- dwelling life of the universe, of the remotest star and sun as well as of our planet—the indwelling life of the clod as well as of the soul, the spirit, as Paul put it, working in and through all things. Suppose all the struggle of life, sentient and in- sentient, is the struggle of this Creative Life of God for a richer and fuller and completer exist- ence. And suppose that the only way in which this Creative Life of God can find its highest and truest expression is in and through man, as man creates and surrenders himself to the real moral and spiritual values of life—the highest “revela- tion of God.” Suppose modern man with his democratic strivings and his new-born social consciousness, with all his vague dreams of a better world and his aspiration toward a life in which justice may have a larger place, represents the highest that God, as Creative Life, has thus far been able to accomplish in His own self-realization through man. Suppose you and I and others like us, are the instruments and media through which He is even now seeking to realize a larger expression of His life and win greater victories in His creation. 111 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Suppose it is upon the mind and emotion and will which the Creative Life has brought to being in us that He depends for the greater life that is to be, and of which we sometimes think we have caught glimpses. Suppose that what God needs is not our prayers, our incense, and the easy homage of our lips, but our brains, our hearts, our wills, our very life-blood. Suppose that all the struggle we see today, and all that history re- veals, and all that the past that lies behind his- tory hides, is the process, slow and painful and costly, by which a diviner life is unfolding itself on this earth. Suppose it is only by means of this mighty struggle in which we are set—the good against the evil, the true against the false, love against hate,—that the goodness we asso- ciate with the thought of God can eventually be brought to realization and victory. Suppose all this, I say, and is there then no ground for a new kind of faith in a new vision of God? Suppose all this, and is there not visible at once a new meaning in all the struggle and travail of life? If this were all true, would not our strivings for democracy, and the aspirations of organized labor, and every noble movement among men today have a new significance? 112 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE Would we not then see democracy as no longer a mere political experiment, but as a mighty new uprising and outreaching of the spiritual Life Force of the universe, and the struggle of the workers as the expression of the same Creative Life that is ever seeking a fuller measure of jus- tice and human brotherhood? If this were all true, there would no longer be any conflict be- tween religion and science and men would recog- nize and accept them both as the manifestations of the Truth that is One. Then would religion and science become the mutually. confirming voices, pointing the way toward “One God, One Law, One Element, and One Far-Off Divine Event, to which the whole creation moves.”’ Suppose all this, I have said. But is not the supposition highly probable and reasonable in the light of what we know to be the common testi- mony of science and knowledge, and in the light too of the stupendous problems, moral as well as physical, that are left unanswered by the older thought of God? I cannot but feel that it is along the lines of some such thought as this that the world will yet find its way to a new and more vital faith in God, and to a new and truer under- standing of life and life’s meaning and purpose. 113 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Whatever else He may be—and we have in no sense exhausted the meaning of God,—God is the Creative Life of the universe, but we know Him best in ourselves, and we find Him most truly in our highest ideals and in the ideals of the collective life of humanity. As the old proverb puts it: God sleeping in the stone, awaking in the plant, coming to faint consciousness in the ani- mal, coming to fuller consciousness in man, and coming to fullest consciousness in the greatest souls of the race. In the beautiful poem of William Herbert Carruth, entitled, ““Kach in his own Tongue,” we find this conception of God expressed. In the first verse we see the Creative Life of God in its lower forms of manifestation but gradually reaching its truest expression, in the last verse, in the moral and spiritual life of those men and women who have consecrated themselves to the great ideals. “A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where the cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty And a face turned from the clod,— Some call it Evolution, And others call it God. 114 GOD AS CREATIVE LIFE A haze on the far horizon, The infinite, tender sky, The ripe, rich tints of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high; And all over upland and lowland The charm of the golden-rod,— Some of us call it Autumn, And others call it God. Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, When the moon is new and thin, Into our hearts high yearnings Come welling and surging in; Come from the mystic ocean Whose rim no foot has trod,— Some of us call it Longing, And others call it God. A picket frozen on duty, A mother starved for her brood, Socrates drinking the hemlock, And Jesus on the rood; And millions who, humble and nameless, The straight, hard pathway trod,— Some call it Consecration, And others call it God.”’ 115 Vv WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? ore belief in the Divinity of Jesus, 64 ses) under various forms of the Doctrine %9i| of the Incarnation, has always held a <2e=—) central place in the many different schemes of Christian theology. From the theo- logical view-point, it is this question that consti- tutes the real point of contention between the fundamentalists and the modernists in the churches today. And yet, it is quite obvious that the real difference is not so much in the belief in the Divinity of Jesus as it is in the interpretation of that belief. Both Dr. Grant and Dr. Fosdick profess to believe in the Divinity of Jesus, though both have preached sermons in which they disclaim belief m the literal historicity of the virgin birth stories. These modern “heretics” base their belief in the Divinity of Jesus on what he was, what he taught and what he did, while Bishop Manning and the fundamentalists base their belief on the literal- 116 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? ness of the stories of the virgin birth. These lib- erals in the orthodox churches profess to see in Jesus “a portrait,” “a manifestation” or “a reve- lation” of God; the Bishop, on the other hand, using the exact language of the creed, claims that Jesus was God. To these liberals, Jesus was a divine man; to the Bishop, he was a human God. It may seem, at first glance, as if these differ- ent interpretations constituted “a distinction without a difference,” as if the whole controversy that is being waged today around the person of Jesus consisted merely in words and differences of definition in the terms used; but this is a super- ficial view, and those who hold it are missing the deep significance of all that is involved in the present theological controversy. The fact is that the view of Jesus, proclaimed by all the leading fundamentalists as the only correct view, be- longs to an age that is forever past; it grew nat- urally out of the conceptions of the Bible, of God, of the universe and of human life that were widely prevalent in a former age but that have become obsolete in the thinking of intelligent men today. In the light of modern Biblical scholar- ship, modern science and modern religious phi- losophy, the whole approach to the problem of 117 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Jesus has been tremendously altered over that of the creed-makers; the factors that enter into the problem are entirely different, the very terms in which the problem is interpreted are changed. The difference, then, between these liberals and the conservatives in the churches today goes far deeper than mere words; it grows out of a funda- mental difference of view-point in the under- standing of the universe, in the explanation of human life, in the conception of God and His relation to man, and in the interpretation of both human and divine. Let us seek to indicate briefly the influences that have made inevitable the liberal view of Jesus, as held by Dr. Grant, Dr. Fosdick and many others, and that has made impossible to intelligent minds the conceptions still entertained by the fundamentalists gen- erally. Modern Biblical scholarship has shown most conclusively that the virgin birth stories had no place in early Christianity, and that they were not used as arguments for the Divinity of Jesus until about the middle of the second century after Christ. Let me indicate briefly the evi- dence for this conclusion. Taking the Gospels as they stand, and begin- ming with Jesus himself, we find that he is no- 118 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? where represented as alluding to any miraculous birth. On the other hand, there are passages which seem to point to his belief in a purely hu- man origin of himself as well as of the other mem- bers of his family. The language in which he is quoted as addressing his mother positively pre- cludes the possibility of his having regarded her as differentiated from all other mothers. Nor does Mary make any allusion to the birth of Jesus. Yet the earliest Gospel (Mark) aittri- butes to her, as to others, the words, “He is be- side himself,”’—-words which it would hardly seem she could have said of Jesus had she thought of him as miraculously born. The Apostle Paul was the earliest of the New Testament writers. He died about thirty-five years after Jesus. His letters were written be- tween the years 50 and 64 A.D., the first of them (Galatians) twenty years before the earliest of the Gospels. While the scholars are still uncer- tain as to the authorship of many of the epistles ascribed to him, the letter to the Galatians and that to the Romans are generally conceded to be the productions of the Apostle. It is in these, and only these, that Paul makes any mention of Jesus’ birth; and in these passages he makes no allusion to a “virgin” birth, but distinctly affirms 119 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION the altogether natural origin of Jesus. “Made of the seed of David, according to the flesh,” are the words he uses in his letter to the Romans; and in his letter to the Galatians he states the mode of Jesus’ birth in such a way as to indicate that it behooved him to be born in the same way as those who were to be redeemed—‘made of a woman, made under the law.” If, in presenting his view of Jesus as the Saviour of Mankind, he could have backed up his argument with an ac- count of a supernatural birth, what an incalcu- lable advantage it would have given him! If there already existed in his time such a belief, certainly Paul would have known it, for he was, you remember, the guest of Peter in Jerusalem for the space of a fortnight. During that visit he must have learned everything of vital im- portance concerning Jesus, and assuredly of a miraculous-birth story had such existed. It would thus seem that prior to the year 64, the year of Paul’s death, the belief in a supernatural birth of Jesus was not in circulation. When we turn to the so-called “triple tradi- tion,” which is the story of Jesus’ life in which the first three Gospels agree, we find they are not at one regarding the nature of his birth. For while Matthew and Luke contain a virgin-birth 120 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? story, Mark has no birth story whatever. On the other hand, all three contain an account of Jesus’ baptism, and all three agree in representing Jesus as then receiving “the Holy Spirit.” Is it not a safe assumption that if these writers had known of a virgin birth they would have neces- sarily identified his receiving the Holy Spirit with that miraculous event, and not with his bap- tism? Hence the scholars are forced to conclude that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke formed no part of the original text, but were added at a later date. Mark’s Gospel is the next in the order of authorities to be consulted. It is the earliest of the Gospels, and was written about 70 A.D. Here, once more, we find no allusion to a virgin birth. Is it presumable that this earliest biogra- pher of Jesus would have begun his record with the baptism of Jesus and omitted the narrative of a virgin birth, had it been current in his day? Would he have mentioned Jesus as one of four brothers if he believed him to be born in an alto- gether different way from that in which they came into the world? In Mark’s Gospel we read the following version of the familiar proverb: “A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own 121 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION house.” But in Matthew and Luke, where the same proverb is quoted, the phrase and among his own kin is significantly omitted, because to have retained it would have been wholly incon- sistent with the presence in these Gospels of a virgin birth story. A prophet miraculously born would certainly not be without honor “among his own kin.”’ | Passing by, for the moment, the testimony of the First and Third Gospels, which come next in chronological order, let us note the testimony of the author of the Fourth Gospel, written prob- ably about the year 120 A.D. Here, again, no reference is made to a virgin birth, but twice in the course of the record Jesus is addressed as “the son of Joseph,” and on neither occasion does he contradict it. John’s Gospel, so called, is not written as an historical account of Jesus’ life, but rather as a philosophical interpretation of that life, in terms of the Philean philosophy of Alex- andria. The author of the Fourth Gospel, who- ever he may have been, was clearly imbued with the philosophy of the Alexandrian Jew, Philo, and he gets his idea of the logos doctrine, or “the ‘Word Incarnate,” which constitutes the pro- logue to his Gospel, as well as the expressions “the only begotten Son,” “the Eternal Son of 122 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? God,” and many others peculiar to his Gospel, direct from Philo’s writings. What a tremen- dous advantage it would have been to the author of the Fourth Gospel if he could have introduced his philosophical interpretation of Jesus with the statement that he had been miraculously born. The fact that the author believes Jesus to have been “the only begotten Son of God,” and yet never mentions the story of a miraculous birth, would seem to indicate that such a story was un- known to him. : We come next to a group of early Christian Fathers who flourished toward the close of the first century: Clement of Rome, Polycarp of Smyrna, and Ignatius of Antioch. In vain we search their writings for any allusion to a virgin birth of Jesus. All three of these Fathers dis- cuss the doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth was a manifestation of God,—the doctrine of the In- carnation, but none of the grounds on which they - argue in support of this belief concerns the na- tivity of Jesus. How immensely it would have strengthened their position could they have availed themselves of a belief in his miraculous birth! It is in the writings of Justin the Martyr, who flourished about the middle of the second century 123 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION after Christ, that we meet for the first time a ref- erence to the virgin birth of Jesus. But note what Justin says on the subject. He refers to it as a newly presented doctrine, and when asked if he believed it, replied by pointing to the Romans and the Greeks, who held a corresponding belief about the origin of their heroes, and Justin urged this fact as sufficient ground for a like belief in the supernatural paternity of Jesus. Was it not generally believed that Plato was the son of Apollo and Periktione, that Augustus was born of Jupiter and Attia, that Julius Cesar was born in the Temple of Apollo, the son of a God? How much more then might this be contended in the case of Jesus the Christ? This, in substance, was the thought of Justin as he worked it out in his “Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew.” Thus it appears that down to the year 140 A.D. not a single Christian writer, excepting the authors of Matthew and Luke, makes any reference to a virgin birth of Jesus. But when we turn to these two sources, we find that in several important particulars they are mutually contradictory and hopelessly irre- concilable. Close and careful study of their dis- crepancies has led many scholars to the conclu- sion that the opening chapters of the First and 124 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? Third Gospels formed no part of the original record, but were given a place in it after the middle of the second century. Let us consider simply two facts in this connection. In the first place, we note that, while both Matthew and Luke present genealogies of Jesus, they are not only contradictory and mutually ex- clusive, but, what is strangest of all, they both trace the descent of Jesus through Joseph, and not through Mary. This would indicate that the authors regarded Jesus as the son of Joseph, and that, therefore, these genealogies were prepared before the virgin birth story had come into exist- ence. For if a writer believed that Jesus was born of a virgin, he certainly would have no ob- ject in tracing his genealogy through the pedi- gree of a human father. If the genealogy is correct, then the birth story is incorrect, and vice versa. But again, in the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel we read: “And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ.” But in the so-called “Sinaitic-Syriac” manu- script, discovered on Mount Sinai in 1892 by Mrs. Agnes Lewis, and revealing a Syriac ver- sion which is now our earliest witness to the text 125 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION of the Gospels, we find this verse rendered as follows: “Jacob begat Joseph. Joseph, to whom was espoused the Virgin Mary, begat Jesus, who is called Christ.’’ In other words, in this our ulti- mate appeal, so far as manuscripts are con- cerned, we have it explicitly stated that Joseph begat Jesus (as Jacob begat Joseph), thus testi- fying to the belief in the human paternity of Jesus. Thus we have seen that Jesus, Mary his mother, Paul, the triple tradition, the Gospel of Mark, the Fourth Gospel, Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius, make no mention of a miraculous birth of Jesus. Only two of the eleven leading in- formants in the first century and a half of our era report a virgin birth story—the authors of the First and Third Gospels. And in view of the facts mentioned above, the New Testament scholars infer that the chapters containing the birth stories in Matthew and Luke were incor- porated in these manuscripts about the middle of the second century. So much for the historical basis of the idea of a miraculous birth upon which all the fundamentalist preachers and writers lay such stress. | Or, if you take Jesus’ own consciousness as it is revealed in the synoptic Gospels, there is no 126 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? place left for the doctrine that “Jesus is God.” He said, “Why call ye me good? There is none good save one, that is God.” Again he said, “The Father is greater than I’; and it was this consciousness that led him to pray, again and again, to his Father in secret. He disclaimed omniscience explicitly, and there is more than one passage recording surprise on his part, im- possible to predicate of God. There is nothing he claimed for himself that he did not claim for all men. If he was called ‘“‘the Son of God,” he called men “the children of God.” He said, “I am the light of the world,” but he also said “Ye are the light of the world.” If he performed works of healing, he declared “Greater works than these shall ye do because I go unto my Father.” And in that last prayer for his dis- ciples he prayed “That ye all may be one, even as I and my Father are one,” that is to say, he be- lieved that all men might achieve the same kind of unity with God and with one another that he felt he had achieved. If “Jesus was God,” then, there is no escaping the conclusion that he be- lieved that all men could become God, for he cer- tainly taught that all men might become like him, and live his kind of a life. But if the modern critical study of the New 127 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Testament has disproved the historical basis for the literalness of the birth stories, modern science has made it impossible for intelligent minds to accept any such conception as that of a miracu- lous birth. Suppose Jesus, or anyone of equal moral and spiritual greatness, were to appear today, do you imagine for a moment that an age like ours would attempt to explain the unique greatness of such a life by a miraculous birth? Since the times that saw the rise of these birth stories, science has ushered man into a new and practically infinite universe which man knows to be under the reign of laws throughout, and laws which are not broken at the arbitrary whim or caprice even of God. If it were possible for these fundamental laws of the universe and of life to be broken, even in a single instance, there would be no basis for the stability of the universe, no ground for any science, no possible founda- tion for truth. It is safe to assume that even the fundamentalists do not credit the miraculous birth stories by means of which the ancients in all ‘lands explained their heroes; why then should they make an exception in the case of Jesus, when we know that these stories about Jesus grew out of the same idealizing tendencies of a _ pre- scientific age that have produced all such stories? 128 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? The laws that govern human procreation are as sacred, as fixed and as inevitable as are the laws that govern the movements of the heavenly bodies. They cannot be broken or suspended any more than can the laws of physics or chem- istry. So wonderful and universal is the fact of sex, and so increasingly pronounced does it be- come the higher we ascend in the scale of animal life, that we are compelled to regard it as an or- dained condition of being. I do not imagine that the authors of the birth stories about Jesus realized that, while their birth stories seemed to do honor to Jesus, at the same time they cast a slur on all parenthood as we know it. Yet, for us in the modern world, there can be no other view. To think a virgin birth “holier” than that which is ordained as a law of being, as a condition of existence, is to malign both fatherhood and motherhood, and to degrade what, as parents, we all know to be the holiest as well as the most mys- terious experience of human life. ‘To one who knows what science means and all that the idea of the reign of law involves, it is utterly impossible today to accept these stories literally without do- ing violence to one’s own mental integrity. But it is modern religious philosophy as well as Biblical scholarship and science that preclude 129 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION . thoughtful minds of today from accepting the historicity of these stories. According to the pre- vailing ideas of the creed-making period of Christianity, the universe was a very limited af- fair. The earth, upon which man dwelt, was flat and stationary; a short distance above the earth was heaven where God reigned, surrounded by his angels; and hell was a cavelike structure somewhere in the bowels of the earth. God was a kind of magnified individual, localized some- where in space above the earth. God was essen- tially different from man. True, in the begin- ning He made man in His image, but in the sin of Adam the whole race had fallen under the wrath of God, and since then had continued its existence totally depraved and hopelessly cor- rupt. The only way in which God could reach the earth was to stoop down, as it were, from His heaven above and arbitrarily take some part in human affairs. ‘The only way in which He could get into the lives of human beings who had be- come thus hopelessly separated from Him was by breaking or suspending the laws of human procreation—laws which presumably He had Himself made,—and thus enter into human life by a “miraculous birth.” This He had done in the birth of Jesus; and henceforth Jesus was 130 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? God in human form, and the only true manifesta- tion of God in the life of men. It is needless to say that all such conceptions are utterly childish and forever gone from in- telligent minds, and yet they form the back- ground out of which came the interpretations of Jesus that seem so vital to the religious conserva- tive of today. We know today that the universe is infinite, that Heaven and Hell are not places in space, but conditions in spirit, that God is not an individual localized somewhere in space, but everywhere present, the thrilling, throbbing, im- manent life of the universe, that God and man are not separated, but “closer is He than breath- ing, nearer than hands and feet,” and that, there- fore, every birth is a “divine” birth and every babe a “holy” child. Whatever else may be in- volved in the modern thought of God, it as- suredly contains the great idea, which is as old as it is new, of the immanency of God, as the creative life “that rolls through all things,” that wells up in every human being as consciousness, and that finds its truest and fullest expression in the spiritual aspiration and the moral endeavor of every soul. In the ages that gave birth to the historic creeds, the problem of Jesus was primarily a 131 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION theological problem growing out of pre-scientific notions of the universe and of human life. The _ questions that were then fiercely discussed dealt with “‘the substance” of the Divine nature, the metaphysical relation of Jesus to God, on the one hand, and to the Holy Spirit on the other, of how Jesus could be truly God and at the same time truly man, of how the two natures could exist in the same being, etc., etc. Today all these metaphysical questions have faded into the back- ground; they have lost all interest and meaning for the modern man. The problem of Jesus in this age is primarily a psychological problem, for the theological Christ has given way at last to the human Jesus whom we never tire of contemplat- ing. The problem of Jesus in the realm of the moral and spiritual life is identical with the prob- lem of Shakespeare in the realm of poetry, or that of Abraham Lincoln in American life. We can no more “explain” one than the other. No ancestry or training can account for such lives. They simply are; and not even our latest psy- chology can account for their transcendent great- ness. As Dr. Grant has well said, ““What has the birth of Jesus to do with Christianity?’ What difference does it make how or when or where &man is born? It is what he is in himself, what . 132 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? he becomes, and what he does that really counts. If Jesus had not been, in character, what he was, would any virgin birth have made him “divine’’? How long will bishops and theologians continue to quarrel over how he was born when the only question of importance is whether his character, his spirit and his message have any vital meaning for men today? As a matter of historic fact, this present theo- logical controversy quite reverses the original in- terest of the Apostles’ Creed. ‘This venerable document of the second century was born in con- troversy. Its major interest was to assert some- thing which the orthodox in their discussions today seem likely quite to ignore—the perfect humanity of Jesus. In the long discussions on the person of Jesus which came after the formu- lation of this creed, there were few who could say flatly, “Jesus was God,” and these few were counted as heretics. ‘Theirs was the heresy of Apollinarianism. Most of the extremely ortho- dox at present, even including the Bishop of the New York Diocese, would have been excluded from the church of the fourth century for hold- ing this heresy. I know there are many 1n all the churches who say, and quite honestly, “If we give up the theo- 133 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION logical Christ there is nothing left, for then Jesus is nothing but a man.” “Only a man,” they say, and the very tone in which they utter the words betray the low opinion they have of hu- man nature. “If Jesus was not God,” they say, “then he was only human, and his life is shorn of all meaning and his message of all power.” But does this necessarily follow? Let us see. What do we mean by the words, “human” and “di- vine’? Are the terms mutually exclusive? Our newest psychology is revealing mysterious depths of powers and potentialities within hu- man nature of which we have not hitherto ~ dreamed. Is there anyone today who would dare to set limits to the possibilities of human nature, both for good and for evil? Who knows how low it can sink, or how high it can rise? Much as we have learned about ourselves, is not the mystery of human nature still unfathomable? What do we mean by “the divine’? The ereed-makers of the past thought they knew very definitely. To them, “the Divine” defined “the First Cause,” or “the Absolute,” or “the Infi- nite”; and this “Divine,” by whatever name it was called, consisted of a “‘substance”’ that was essentially different in kind from the “substance” _ that made up human nature. But these meta- 134 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? physical conceptions of the past have no place in the philosophical thinking of our times. ‘The whole tendency today is to construe “the Divine” in moral and spiritual terms rather than in meta- physical terms. Formerly men approached the thought of God through Nature, but now the true approach to God lies through man himself, and especially through that which is highest and most distinctive in man—his moral nature and his spiritual aspiration. We can still talk about God, if we choose, in terms of “First Cause,” “the Absolute,” or “the Infinite,” but we recog- nize that all this lies in the realm of speculation, not of knowledge. The God that we know is the God of the moral life, who is revealed to us in moral ideals, and who finds expression through our moral endeavor. And this God, whatever else He may be, is not something or some One apart from human nature, but He is a very part of human nature, the “Divine” in human nature at its highest and best. It is not enough, therefore, to say of anyone, “he is only aman.” The real question is, “What kind of a man is he?” There are men and men; those who represent the zenith of manhood’s pos- sibilities, and those who stand at its nadir. “Only aman, ’—but we must take each man at his real 135 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION value. There are men who sink so low as to make us despise our common human nature, and there are other men whose manhood towers up so high as to touch the Divine and make us conscious of God whenever we think of them. It is the heights of moral character which they have reached, it is the spirit that is expressed through them that makes us feel that in such lives we see a revelation of the God of the moral ideal. In man’s moral nature we see the “divine spark” that Carlyle declared was in every man; and when we find that nature developed into a strong and beautiful symmetry of manhood or woman- hood, we feel ourselves instinctively in the pres- ence of the Divinest we can know. In one of his novels, Hall Caine describes the gambling hells and drinking dens of London, where so-called men, like harpies, are preying on their kind, luring the youth of both sexes to destruction of body and soul, and doing it for selfish gain. “Only a man,” but a man who does that is a devilish man. ‘There was another kind of man. Hugh Price Hughes, who night after night entered these dens of infamy and, by the _ sheer force of his unselfish personality, drew out of these sinks of iniquity, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, and gave them back their 136 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? manhood and womanhood and ‘turned their faces again towards sobriety and purity and the life of usefulness. When he died, thousands followed him to his tomb, and when the service was over and the crowd had dispersed, there was one poor woman who asked permission to lay a bunch of violets on his coffin. He was “only a man,” but to her he was a man of men, for he had saved her from a fate worse than death. Or, compare the Earl of Shaftesbury, who de- voted his life and his fortune to bettering the lot of the factory workers in England, with those factory owners, who, for the sake of private gain were content that their workers should starve and die in ignorance and filth. When he came to die, the great Ear] declared that he could not bear to go out of the world and leave so much suffering and misery behind. “Only a man,” but the dif- ference between the Earl of Shaftesbury and those against whose merciless greed he struggled for years, was well-nigh infinite. Poor indeed, in its sense of moral values and in its spiritual perception, is that age or that indi- vidual that can no longer appreciate the great- ness of Jesus because he has ceased to be the mythical figure of the theologies of the past. Does anyone really question that if Dr. Grant 137 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION and Dr. Fosdick have indeed abandoned the theo- logical Christ, they have not, in so doing, recov- ered the real human Jesus. “Only a man,” but what kind of a man was Jesus? Let us recall the simple facts. Gradually, through long centuries of suffering, there had grown up among the Hebrew people the expectation of a Messiah, some one who should be born as a descendant of David, who was to come and rule the world and set them on high among the peoples of the earth. But this kingdom as it was to be held by them was an earthly kingdom. They did not put it afar off in the skies. It was to be here among men. Its capital was to be Jerusalem, which was to them the center of the world. But he did not come. In the period just preceding the birth of Jesus the ‘air was full of expectation. ‘There were Christs many, for “Christ,” as you know, is only the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah,” and so anticipation was rife, and men were looking for his coming on every hand. Then at length came the gentle Nazarene who did not claim to be the Messiah. He was born of the Jewish race. He was saturated in the history and the religion of his people, and especially in the writ- ings of the great Hebrew prophets. Through 138 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? long years, we are told, he grew and developed naturally and normally in physical stature, in his mental powers and in spiritual perception. And at last he appeared before the people as a teacher. He did claim to teach a reform in the national religion, not by destroying Moses and the prophets, but by reinterpreting and thus “ful- filling” their earlier teachings. He did claim to speak for the universal Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. He never tired of telling of God’s willingness and earnest desire to forgive and fold to His loving heart all His erring, wandering children of the world. He looked deep into his own soul and he dared to be- lieve that he found something of God there. He looked deep into the lives of others and dared to believe that he also found something of the same God in every human life. And so he reverenced all human beings, and he loved all men and women and little children, for he saw in all the same essential life that he found in himself. Out of his faith in human nature and his love for men grew his wondrous dream of the Kingdom of God on earth, when human brotherhood should become indeed a reality, and justice and love should reign supreme. And as time went on he 139 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION talked more continually of “the new heavens and new earth” that should one day replace the wars. and strife, the greed and selfishness, the cruelty and injustice that then filled the world of men. He did not ask men to accept any creed or to join any church, but he did teach that love for God and love for man was the one cure for all the evils of the world, and that only as men learned the supreme lesson of love, and discovered how to translate love into all the relations of daily life, could the Kingdom of God ever be realized upon the earth. This was the life-work of Jesus. But, as in the case of Abraham Lincoln and all truly great men, his contemporaries did not understand him; even the common people were not ready for him. And when he spoke against making the Temple “a den of thieves,” when he touched the self-love and pride of the popular party, when he discredited all the elaborate sys- tem of sacrifices, when he said that the poor pub- lican who truly repented of his sin was better than the most punctilious pharisee who kept the letter of the law but knew nothing of its spirit, then he cut across all their cherished prejudices, and they would have none of hm. And when they came really to understand that he cared 140 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? nothing for all their extensive ritualistic worship at the Temple, and when they saw that “the common people heard him gladly,” and that the crowds that followed him were steadily increas- ing in numbers and enthusiasm, and that there might be complications with the dominant reli- gious party as well as with the power of Rome, then they cried out, “Away with him; crucify him!” And one day, one of the darkest days of all human history, they took this man, so gentle and yet so strong, so true and so loving, and they led him along the via Dolorosa to the little hill beyond the city walls, and there they crucified him between two thieves. This was his life; and his death was the fate shared by all great prophets. 3 “Only a man,” but, what a man! Superficial indeed is that shallow criticism which fancies it has revealed the total truth about these birth stories of Jesus when it has stigmatized them as “the worthless product of an age steeped in su- perstition.” Far from discarding them as worth- less myths, the thoughtful man will treasure them among the supreme proofs preserved to us of the moral and spiritual greatness of Jesus, and of the reverence and love which that great- 141 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ness called forth in the hearts of his contempo- raries and biographers? Had Jesus been a man of smaller mould, no such birth stories would ever have been written of him. Wonder-tales are. never told of commonplace people. It was be- cause Jesus transcended the limits of ordinary, average human nature that there grew up around his personality, naturally, in that pre-scientific age, the significant legends of the Gospels and the “Apocrypha.” Thus, these birth stories, while not at all the historical record of his origin, are yet the spontaneous products of the influence exerted by his own great and singularly unique life. They are not histories of fact, but symbols of the quality of his person. They are poetic expressions of the popular faith that, being so unusual a character, Jesus must have been born in an unusual way. They represent that “truth of poetry” which, as Aristotle taught, is more than the truth of history. When the creed-making centuries came, we can understand today why, in trying to philoso- phize about the person of Jesus and explain his unique greatness, they employed the theological expressions and phrases that finally found their way into the historic creeds. The language that 142 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? seems to us so strange, and perhaps quite mean- ingless, was all there, ready made, with which to interpret this great life. The creed-makers turned naturally to the Jewish categories of thought that lay nearest at hand, or to the terms of Greek philosophy, or the teachings of Philo of Alexandria with which they were familiar, and attempted to define this life of Jesus in terms of these familiar categories. What were some of these familiar forms of thought? “The Christ” (or the Messiah), “the Son,” “the only begotten Son,” “the image of the invisible God,” “the first-born of every creature,” “the Logos” (or the Word). ‘These and many others were the thought-forms in which the writers of the New Testament clothed the personality of Jesus. They were already there, waiting their use. Judaism was full of them and, still later, Greek philosophy furnished many more. They all rep- resent a sincere attempt to interpret and explain the life and character of Jesus in terms of thought, perfectly familiar to the people of that time, but which man’s thinking has long since out- grown. But, just as in the case of the birth stories, the understanding mind today recognizes in these 143 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION old thought forms of the creeds the symbols of spiritual realities. He does not believe them literally, but he accepts them as poetry that re- veals its own truth in its own way. And beneath the form of the story or the statement of the creed he sees the imperishable truth of the moral and spiritual greatness of the life and spirit of Jesus who lived our human life at its highest and best, and whose influence for good in the world is eternal. The metaphysical arguments about the nature of the Godhead are not nearly so important as liberal controversialists and orthodox theologians have insisted, and they have arisen out of con- ceptions of God and of man that are no longer held by persons who have had the discipline of a thorough course of philosophy. ‘The really im- portant question of theology is, after all, not what shall we think of Jesus’ relation to God, but rather, what meaning do the life and teachings of Jesus possess for us today? If the fundamen- talists would only center their attention upon this, instead of upon the virgin birth, there would be more hope for organized religion. Let us never forget that if Jesus has become to us “only a man,” he is, nevertheless, the man of men, in whose universal spirit of love and in 144 WAS JESUS ONLY A MAN? whose ideals of righteousness lies the world’s only hope. “Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us try if we then too, can be such men as he.” 145 VI HAS JESUS ANY MESSAGE FOR TODAY ? Pgs aN EK. of the distinct achievements of the (ey historical scholarship of the last sev- A J enty-five years has been the new light ea it has thrown on the origins of Chris- tianity. When David Friedrich Strauss first published his Leben Jesw in 1835, the Christian world was shocked not so much by the author’s conclusions as to the legendary character of much of the material found in the Gospels as by the fact that he dared to apply the canons of his- torical criticism to the New Testament, and especially, to that part of it dealing with the life of Jesus. It was believed at that time that the Biblical literature was “‘sacred,”’ and that no one had the right to subject it to the same standards of historical and literary criticism that were ap- plied to other ancient documents. Once begun, however, the scientific study of both Old and New Testaments has gone steadily on, and from the time of Strauss until today 146 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY there has been a constant stream of books coming from the press in all countries, dealing in a more © or less thorough-going scientific spirit with the life and times of Jesus. If this critical historical study of the Gospels has tended to weaken the old dogmas about Jesus, as it most assuredly has for all thoughtful minds, it has certainly made more real and luminous the personality and teach- ings of Jesus as they stand out against the back- ground of the times in which he lived. From being the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God by virtue of a Virgin Birth, or the majestic figure now seated at the right hand of God on his throne in the heavens, Jesus has become, thanks to historical criticism, a living, breathing human personality in whom dwelt a spirit so pure, so lofty, so disinterested and uni- versal that all men today are proud to do him reverence. ‘The theological Christ, who was fast becoming a mere phantom to intelligent minds, has become the historical Jesus at whose feet we are still glad to sit as humble learners. We see him today as he really was,—born of the Jewish race in an age of peculiar turbulence and violence, facing with his own people certain very definite and concrete problems, and later on, adopted by Christianity as its Divine Saviour,— . 147 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION and yet towering so far above the provincial ex- clusiveness of the Jew and the dogmatic and narrow sectarianism of the Christian that we are not content to call him either Jew or Christian, but can think of him only in terms of the uni- versal man whose insight went down to the deeps of human nature and whose sympathies were as broad as all humanity. Let us admit frankly that Jesus never claimed to have spoken the last word either in morals or religion. “I have many things to tell you but ye cannot bear them now,” and again, “When I am gone from you the Spirit of Truth will come, and He will be continually leading you into all the truth.” Let us admit also that in some particulars he shared the intellectual limitations of his age and partook of the ignorance of his fellows. We also know that there are many moral problems and innumerable social condi- tions which confront us today about which he knew nothing, since they did not exist in his time. We can also admit with Mary Austin, in her recent article in The Century, that he left no detailed instructions as to the technique or method by which his lofty principles were to be applied to our complex political, social and eco- nomic problems of today. 148 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY But in spite of all these admissions, which modern historical scholarship has proven justi- fied, the question that I want to consider now is, Whether Jesus, regarded not from the view- point of the churches or creeds but simply as an historical character who stands among the fore- ‘most of the world’s great moral and spiritual teachers, has any real message for us today? In attempting to answer this question, I am not thinking of those many specific teachings which have come down to us from Jesus, some of them original with him and some that had found ex- pression long before him, that we all of us know to be true,—true not because Jesus taught them, but intrinsically and universally true. What I am seeking to do in this connection is to get back of all that is obvious and self-evident in his teach- ings to that which was fundamental in his mes- sage, or to that which constituted the source from which all the other teachings naturally and log- ically flowed forth. All the scholars are agreed today that the teachings of Jesus revolved chiefly around one central point,—the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. From the beginning of his public ministry to its close these words were most ~ frequently on his lips. Whether dealing in ab- 149 | IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION stract statements, or employing his favorite par- able form of illustration, the Kingdom of Heaven was his constant theme. But why did he use this phrase so constantly? What were the influences that made it the central theme of all his teach- ings? And, especially, what did it mean to him, what content did he put into these words? While there have been many volumes written in recent years that have dealt with these ques- tions, there is one little book that came from the press last spring that seems to me especially il- luminating, and that to my mind throws a flood of new light on the central message of Jesus. It is entitled: “Toward the Understanding of Jesus,” and its author is Vladimir G. Simkho- vitch, Professor of Economic History in Colum- bia University. The author’s approach to his sub- ject is purely the historical one. He is not interested in how the Greeks or the Romans, the peoples of the Middle Ages or the Anglo-Saxons have at various times conceived or pictured to themselves Jesus and his teachings. This is an interesting problem in itself; it gives us the his- tory of Christianity. But these interpretations are only confusing in our quest for the historical Jesus, and what the author is seeking is that 150 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY definite, concrete, historical Jesus who can give coherence to his teachings. It is only possible, with the limits of space, to give the briefest summary of the vivid picture drawn by the author of the age in which Jesus lived. In the year 70 A.D. the temple of Jeru- salem was destroyed, the city itself was sacked, and the population either slain, crucified or sold into slavery. It is estimated that over a million and two hundred thousand perished. The conventional history usually states that the war between the Jews and the Romans that culmi- nated in the year 70 in the complete destruction of Jerusalem began in the year 66, when the Romans and other Gentiles were massacred by the Jews of Jerusalem. This date is so artificial that Mommsen, the historian, suggests A.D. 44 as the year from which the Jewish-Roman war might better be dated. But our author points out that this earlier date is also artificial, for the revolt of the Jews had long been brewing and had repeatedly broken out here and there long before that time. If we should follow the opinion of a contem- porary historian, Josephus, we should have to date the beginnings back to the revolt of Judas, the Gaulonite, to whose revolutionary activities 151 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION and doctrines Josephus attributes all the ensuing misfortunes of the Jewish nation. The occasion of that uprising was the census of Quirinius for taxation purposes in the year A.D. 6. Josephus tells us that one Judas, the Gaulonite together with a Pharisee named Saddouk, urged the Jews to revolt, both preaching that “this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorting the nation to assert its liberty.” But as our author makes clear, the Jewish struggle for independence and the Zealot move- ment did not begin even with Judas in 6 A.D. Judas himself only continued the work of his father, Ezechias who, with his very large follow- ing, was killed by young Herod in the year 46 B.C. Nor does the rebellion of the Jews begin with Ezechias. The rebellion of the Jews against Rome rather begins with the power of Rome over the Jews; it can easily be traced back for decades prior to the beginning of the Christian era; and in the same degree that the Roman power over the Jews increased did the political reaction against that power, the revolution against Rome, increase and spread. The out-and-out Jewish revolutionaries were called by the Romans, bandits or robbers; they were known among the Jews as the Zealots. But 152 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY it is clear from Josephus that they were in no sense mercenary bandits, but political and re- ligious devotees who preferred death to submis- sion. It is also clear that the Zealot movement was much older than the revolt of Judas, the Gaulonite. The Pharisees were in sympathy with the spirit of revolt that actuated the Zealots, only for prudential reasons they did not un- sheathe the sword or take an open part in the rebellion, whenever it broke out, but they nursed their resentment and bitterness in their hearts. In the year 6 A.D. Judea was annexed to Syria, and it is interesting to note that the Jews themselves petitioned Rome to grant this annex- ation. But why? Where, then, was Jewish pa- triotism, where the exclusive nationalism, clothed in all-consuming religious fervor? The answer of history is simple. The reason they preferred to give up their nominal political independence under the Herod dynasty and accept the rule of the Roman procurator of Syria was because they came to see that the issue was drawn be- tween so-called political independence and their cultural life, especially their religion. As be- tween the two, their religion was the last thing to be surrendered. It was in reality a phase of the nationalistic struggle, although it took the 153 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION curious form of a petition for annexation to Syria. If they should be managed by the Roman procurator of Syria, they still clung to the des- perate hope of complete cultural autonomy and the right to manage their own local affairs. Ruled by a Herodian prince, they realized that they were quite helpless to do so; for the Hero- dians, while nominally Jews, were striving hard to be culturally Romans. Their petition for an- nexation was, therefore, to be an exchange of their sham political independence for what they hoped would be real cultural autonomy. In other words, complete independence looked to the more enlightened part of the population like a forlorn hope; and the struggle was waged for home rule that would not infringe upon religious traditions. We can now, perhaps, realize in its main out- lines the situation that confronted Jesus. Be- tween the time of the annexation of Judea to Syria in the year 6 and the utter destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the year 70, Jesus. lived his life, delivered his message and was cruci- fied on Golgotha. During the hundred years and more prior to the beginning of the Christian era the Jews had been struggling more and more intensely against the Hellenistic tendencies that 154 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY threatened to destroy their own cultural life and weaken their religion. ‘These tendencies were somewhat checked by the nationalistic and re- ligious revolt of the Maccabeans; but they re- vived again under the Hasmonean dynasty. And now that the little Jewish Kingdom was becom- ing more and more a dependency of Rome two tendencies were rapidly developing; that of sub- mission to Rome and cultural assimilation, and that of growing nationalism and religious ortho- doxy. Romanization now threatened the very life of their traditions as Hellenization had for- merly done. It was taking away their political independence, but still more seriously, it was interfering with their religion. It is clear that during the entire period that Jesus lived, the life of the little nation was a terrific drama; its patriotic emotions were aroused to the highest pitch, and then still more inflamed by the identification of national politics with a national religion. The situation was not at all unlike that which existed in Ireland during the years following the Great War; it bears a close resemblance to conditions in India today. Is it reasonable to assume that what was going on before the very eyes of Jesus was a closed book to him, that the agonizing problems of his 155 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION people were matters of indifference to him or that he had given them no serious consideration? Must we not rather conclude, in this age fairly seething with the intensest sort of nationalism inflamed with religion, when the people were thinking constantly of but one problem,—that of their national existence, and when this one prob- lem was the daily theme of conversation, that Jesus in his earlier years of preparation was taking a definite attitude towards the very people that later on he was to teach? After the annexation to Syria it steadily be- came clearer that Rome was establishing herself ever more frankly and firmly as Judea’s avowed lord, with the natural result that the increased national feeling and the bitter national antago- nism of the Jews became equally frank and ag- gressive. ‘The religion of their forefathers be- came the unfurled banner of a nation at bay. From now on, whether in passive resistance or in open rebellion, the only lord and master they recognized was the Lord of Hosts, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with whom they believed they had a sacred covenant, and who must speedily send the great Deliverer, whom their prophets had foretold, to save his people in their hour of direst need. 156 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY As time went on, greater and more tragic be- came the pressure; greater and more imperative became the need. From every heart went forth the cry: Where was the Messiah? Would he come in the future? But there was no longer any future; it was then and there that he must come; the danger was imminent; the hour was now. Yea, if his people were to be saved, he must have come already, must be among them then, only unrecognized as yet,—the promised and long-hoped-for Messiah, the anointed of God, the Christ. Need we longer ask the question under what influences Jesus developed, or what problems absorbed him before he began his ministry? The central problem of his people was so enveloping, so all-absorbing, that we are forced to take for granted that Jesus’ religious and intellectual life revolved around it, and that his own mental and spiritual development consisted in the gradual solution of this very problem. The idea of a coming Messiah who should save his people had long been familiar to the Jews. A century or so before Jesus Messianic qualities had been attributed to the Maccabean leaders; a century after Jesus the last great rebel leader, Bar-Kochbah, was viewed as the Messiah. So it 157 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION was not strange that when this new teacher ap- peared, speaking on his own authority, so des- perate was the external situation, so desperate the inner pain of earnest souls searching for a way out, that many of the people looked upon him as the promised Messiah, the great Deliverer that should come. Even a superficial glance at Jesus’ life shows us the imminence of the great disaster that cul- minated in 70, and how concretely Jesus’ life was bound up with the political destiny of Judea. For was not Jesus born in the days of the tax- enrollment? Did not the same enrollment start the rebellion of Judas the Gaulonite? And did the battle-cry of Judas, “No Tribute to the Romans,” ever die out in Jesus’ lifetime? We know that multitudes followed Jesus, and that “the common people heard him gladly.” Can we possibly assume that his message was in no wise related to the paramount burning interest of the people? What did he mean when he re- iterated that he was sent to save the lost sheep of the House of Israel? What did his followers have in mind when they perceived in him their Saviour, their Messiah? What did the people of that time expect from their Messiah except their national salvation? What that national sal- 158 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY vation meant was clear enough. Luke states it: “That we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all that hate us.” Read again the Gospels and see how luminous become many hitherto obscure passages in the light of this historical situation which Professor Simkhovitch describes. Many passages which the theologians have classed as eschatological, that is, as having reference to the end of the world, are clearly _ intended to refer to the impending disaster at the hands of the Romans, the inevitable end of the tragedy toward which, most obviously, the children of Israel were so rapidly tending. The supreme problem, then, which Jesus was called upon to face, and to solve, was the su- preme and desperately pressing problem of his people,—that of preserving their national exist- ence in the presence of their enemies. Jesus, lke Josephus and many others, saw the inevitable consequences of the Jewish rebellion. Many in- tellectuals probably foresaw and feared the out- come, but they felt powerless against the na- tional passion that was burning in the hearts of the mass of the people. Jesus, like Josephus and others, opposed re- sistance to Rome, though for very different rea- sons. ‘Those who favored non-resistance to Rome 159 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION could be divided into two classes. One class wel- comed and aspired to the universal Roman civ- ilization. Complete assimilation, Greco-Roman culture was their ideal. Their attitude towards religion was, of course, purely formal. This class was neither numerous nor influential, but it un- doubtedly existed. The other type of non-resis- tant was both numerous and significant. ‘These were men who knew enough about the world at large to see clearly what resistance to Rome implied and foreboded. ‘They knew that resist- ance was a physical impossibility and only in- vited complete destruction and ruin. They did not love Rome because they could not fight; they hated her all the more. It was a prudent attitude, but sooner or later it was certain to be swept away by the tide of active resistance. | The solution of the problem which Jesus reached was the result of a unique insight which he gained in an inner struggle with himself, where alone true insight is always gained. I cannot escape the feeling that the story of the temptations of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels are really parables of alternatives, of political and religious choices which he faced in the depths of his own being. One solution can be expressed something like this: Here is the Holy City; here 160 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY is the temple of God; and here are God’s chosen people. Can God allow them to perish? Most assuredly not. Hence even the war with the en- tire world, whose name is Rome, cannot but end with the victory of God and His people. Or, in the words of the Gospels: “Cast thyself down; for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee. ... Jesus said unto him,... Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Thus Jesus could not accept the Zealot nationalist solu- tion that trusted the miraculous power of God to save in the face of certain defeat. There was an alternative in exactly the oppo- site direction: to let the Roman civilization super- sede Judaism. Let the Jews frankly accept Rome and its culture, let them become Romans; then, indeed, the entire world will be theirs. Or in the words of the Gospels: “Again the devil taketh him up into an exceedingly high moun- tain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world .. . and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me. ‘Then Jesus saith unto him, Get thee hence, Satan.” ... Between these two extreme solutions were other alternatives, chief among them the one that had no higher aspiration than just to live, and to live by bread alone. This could have 161 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION made no appeal to such as Jesus. Jesus had made his own discovery of the only solution he could accept, and this solution constituted the core of his message. His first words as a public teacher were these: “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” It was his first use of the familiar phrase which was afterwards so often on his lips. He did not coin the phrase, the Kingdom of Heaven. It had long been in use among the Jews; it stood for their idea of a theocratic state; to the people of his own day it meant very definitely national independence and freedom from the hands of their enemies. When Jesus makes the Kingdom of Heaven his constant theme, therefore, he is adopting a phrase that carries a very concrete meaning to his hearers,—the fulfilment of their deepest hopes, their salvation as a separate na- tion. But for him, as we shall see presently, it had a very different meaning. The word trans- lated ‘““Repent”? comes from a Greek word that means “Change your minds” or “change your thinking,” a very different conception from that of our theological use of the word. Thus at the very beginning of his ministry, it was as if Jesus had said: “The Kingdom of Heaven of which you are constantly thinking and 162 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY which you imagine I have come to establish through the overthrow of your enemies and the setting up of an independent theocratic state, is indeed at hand, but it is something so entirely different from what you conceive as to require nothing else than a complete and radical change in your thinking about life, about God, about yourselves and your fellows.” Later on he discloses his secret, he makes clear his insight, he gives them his solution of the supreme problem that absorbs their thought and inflames their passion. In Luke 17:20-21, he says, “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation; Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” This is the secret of Jesus,—The Kingdom of Heaven isin us. It is not primarily an external thing, it is a thing of the inner life. It is not an independent political state, it has to do with a man’s attitude, his disposition, his understanding, his spirit. It does not mean low- ering of taxes, or freedom from paying duties on commodities, or release of prisoners, or any of these things for which you are clamoring; it is something that has to do, rather, with ideas and ideals; you are thinking only of things. It means, to be sure, the conquering of your ene- 163 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION mies, but not by force or violence as you are planning. Your real enemy is not outside but within yourself; it consists in the spirit of hatred and bitterness and aggressive self-assertion that fills your lives. Conquer that spirit and you have already won the true victory. Think of the amazement with which these hot- headed and turbulent people must have listened to his words: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your father which is in heaven; for He maketh his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” And these words, remember, were spoken when the enemy were at the gate, when they had the most direct application in the minds of his hearers to the Romans who were threatening their little nation with destruction. Turn to the Beatitudes that begin with bless- . ings upon the humble. “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Blessed are they that mourn (naturally one mourns the loss of one’s national independence) ; 164 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY for they shall be comforted.” “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth,” ete. Meekness, humility, hungering and thirsting af- ter righteousness, purity of heart, are all spiritual terms; and to inherit the earth means but a spiritual inheritance. And then in the passage immediately following: “Ye are the salt of the earth.” These words clearly are not addressed to the world at large, for then there would have been no earth left, only salt. It was as if he had said: “You believe that you are the chosen people, but for what were you chosen? Chosen to carry to the world a great moral and spiritual message. If you have no spiritual message for the world, what are you good for? In resorting to force and violence, you are but meeting your enemies on their own ground, you are employing their weapons, you are fighting fire with fire. And in the end you will surely be destroyed. If you could but realize it, you have at your disposal weapons of which your enemy knows nothing. In meeting force with the things of the spirit, you will be invincible. You are burning with national humiliation, but the only balm for that humiliation is humility of spirit; for humility is the one thing that can never be humiliated. You are aggressively seek- 165 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ing your own, but through the spirit of meekness you can even now enter into possession of your own, which can never be taken from you. You are clamoring for revenge, but revenge is a two- edged sword which inevitably slays him who em- ploys it, and only by the spirit of forgiveness can you ever make your enemy your friend. Your souls are filled with hatred and bitterness against your oppressors, but I say unto you, Love your enemies, for your hatred is hurting you far more than it can injure them.” It was at this very point that the great cleavage took place between Jesus and the leaders of the people. The priests and the Pharisees could probably have overlooked the heresies in the re- ligious teachings of Jesus, but they could not accept his teachings of non-resistance to Rome. For this reason the time came inevitably when Jesus was delivered over to his enemies and the rebel leader Barabbas was released. ‘The 100 per cent patriots had won the day. They knew not what they were doing, nor did they realize that they were sealing the fate of their nation. To Jesus, however, it was quite clear, and that is why, when the women of Jerusalem followed him on the way to Golgotha, bewailing and lamenting him, he turned to them and said: “Weep not for 166 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY me, but weep for yourselves and for your chil- dren.” | This is the secret of Jesus, this is the heart of his message, this reveals his insight that led to his unique solution of the problems that absorbed the people of his day. It was not the solution of the Zealots, nor of the Pharisees, nor of Jo- sephus. Historically considered, the problem was very local. Even from a religious point of view it was a provincial problem; and yet Jesus’ solution became the most universal achievement in the annals of all time. _ The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Simple as the words are, they are freighted with an eternal meaning. All the deepest thought of Jesus about God is focused in these words. He never seeks to define God or explain him in philosophical terms. To him, God is not seated on some lofty throne in the heavens. He is not outside but ever and always within the soul of every human being,—the highest we know, the deepest we feel, the best towards which we aspire, ever speaking to us through the voice of con- science, ever calling us to higher and better things. In these same words is focused also Jesus’ deepest thought of man. If the divine dwells in every human being, then every individ- 167 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION ual is inviolable, the human personality is sacred just because he is a moral being, with all the possibilities of moral growth and unfolding. And the great duty of life is to seek the enhance- ment and enrichment of personality, whoever it may be or wherever it may be found. The Kingdom of Heaven, then, is not some- thing foisted upon men from without; it grows up within man himself. It consists in the inner attitude and disposition and spirit of one’s life. I fully agree with those who believe that the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus used the words, contained his dream of a more perfect society that should one day exist upon this earth. But I cannot escape the conviction that in his thought this more perfect society could only be realized in the world at large, as it first came to have its place in the inner lives of men, as they changed their thinking about God and life, about them- selves and others, and as this changed thinking led to such a complete and drastic change in their attitudes and understanding of moral and spir- - itual things that Jesus could liken it to nothing else than a literal re-birth of the spirit. If I am right in this interpretation of the central message of Jesus, has it any application to our life today? It seems scarcely necessary to 168 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY enlarge on the answer in this connection. Eivery- where in the world today we find the fires of intense nationalism burning. The supreme vir- tue today is 100 per cent patriotism,—a _ patri- otism, alas, that too often means that I can love my country only by hating or belittling all other countries. The great nations are consumed by lust of power, dominated by greed and actuated by aggressive selfishness, and the smaller nations are all too prone to follow the example set them by the great. Everywhere fear, hatred, bitter- ness and prejudice are poisoning the lives of men and nations. The imperialistic powers are cling- ing desperately to the territories they have gov- erned in the past, and reaching forth more or less openly for fresh territories to exploit, while the weaker peoples of the earth are wondering in fear and trepidation when their turn will come to be mastered by strong and greedy powers. The situation presented today is closely akin to that which Jesus confronted in his own day, only now we see it on a world-wide scale. Then it was Jews and Romans; now it involves all of us. Those in every land who are earnestly working. for a better world are laying the emphasis on the need of a League of Nations or on a World 169 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION Court or on some plan to outlaw war or on some new organization or third party. All this is good and needed, but these things are only new ma- chinery after all, and in and of themselves will never redeem the world from its present woes. Herbert Adams Gibbons says, in his last book, “Europe Since 1918”: “The League of Nations is impotent, with or without the United States as a member, to restore Europe to peace, until the three Furies—Vanity, Greed and Revenge— cease raging.” Deeper than all.other needs is the need of a new and different spirit in the lives of men and nations. In spite of all the centuries that inter- vene, we need to rediscover the central truth of Jesus, that truth that had nothing to do with churches or rituals or creeds, but that stands forth today, thanks to historical scholarship, as the uni- versal and eternal truth for mankind. We need to hear once again the challenge of his great words: Change your thinking, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The old world of politics, of social and economic institutions, of morals and religion, is fast passing away. The ideas upon which that old world was builded have become ob- solete. They are no longer adequate to the new 170 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY world that is coming into existence. We must begin to think differently about human relations. If Jesus were alive today would he not say to us, as in effect he said to the people of his own time: You must dare to think differently about everything. If you are honestly seeking a better world, in which war and strife are to be banished and more of justice and brotherliness shall come to have their place in human life, do not forget that this better world must begin in your own lives first of all, and then work out through you into all the manifold relations of life. It is for you to conquer all fear, to banish all hatred, to rise above all prejudice, to dispel all bitterness in your own hearts before you are fitted to help in the bringing in of the better world to men. If you would have all wars cease, then learn to love your enemies and to forgive those who hate you. Would you help in the removing of the deep-lying causes of war and strife, then see to it, by a rigid self-discipline, that you have re- moved from your own life every slightest ten- dency to injustice to even the smallest and weak- est. Would you work for the coming of human brotherhood, then live the life of brotherliness, and live it habitually and universally, shutting out no one from your sympathy and love. 171 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT IN RELIGION | The people of his own day did not understand Jesus’ message; they were not ready for it; they could not accept it. Those who followed him in spirit then, constituted only the “pitiable mi- nority.” It is not different today. There are millions of professed followers of Jesus, but how few who as yet have grasped his insight, how few who accept his way of life, how limited the num- ber who believe in his Kingdom of Heaven! To- day, as then, his followers are only “the pitiable minority.” Perhaps it will always be so. But however limited the number may be, it is those ' who have found the Kingdom of Heaven within themselves, who have come to see it in all men, and who are seeking to translate the truths of that Kingdom into the more just and righteous society, that constitute the “salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” The Kingdom of Heaven, the better world of which we dream, and for which we yearn, must begin within ourselves. This Kingdom primarily is a matter of attitude, of understanding, of in- sight and of spirit. But the Kingdom is also like a mustard seed, which is the tiniest of seeds, but which grows in time “so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” 172 JESUS’ MESSAGE FOR TODAY And just so, after all, is human assimilation of all knowledge and all insight and all under- standing. It means the re-education of the mind. It involves the re-birth of the spirit. It is a matter of slow growth. 173 Vil IS THERE A PLACE FOR FAITH IN MODERN LIFE? soe Gay Vv (j NS > N a recent address before representa- Pe pa tives of the Missionary Societies of the