BX S . S 6 7 S oderblom, Nathan, 1866- 1931 . Christian fellowship Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/christianfeilowsOOsode CHBISTIAN FELLOWSHIP THE CHRISTIAN UNITY HANDBOOK SERIES Edited by Peter Ainslie, D.D. ANNOUNCEMENT Never was the call of unity so urgent upon the conscience of Christians as in these times. It is the struggle of the twentieth century. It is both a necessity and a possibility. The Chris¬ tian Unity Handbook Series is the first Ameri¬ can attempt to get together a series of books dealing with Christian unity. The authors are from various communions and of various na¬ tionalities. The first in the series is “IF NOT A UNITED CHURCH — WHAT ?” BY PETER AINSLIE This volume is now in its second edition. The second in this series is the present volume on “CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP/’ BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF UPSALA Other volumes are in course of preparation. THE CHRISTIAN UNITY HANDBOOK SERIES Christian Fellowship OR THE UNITED LIFE AND WORK OF CHRISTENDOM BY NATHAN SODERBLOM ARCHBISHOP OF UPSALA PROCHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF UPSALA SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITIES OF UPSALA AND LEIPZIG Author of “La Vie Future d’Apres le Mazdeisme,” etc. New York Chicago Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1923, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY Printed in the United States of America New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street CONTENTS I. The Unity of Christendom Duty or Problem. “We Know in Part.” II. The Divisions op Christendom . Those WTio Were Put Out. Those Who Went Out. III. The Divisions of Christendom ( Cont .) . The Nations as Keligious Units. The Effects of War on Church Unity. IY. Ways to Unity . The Method of Absorption. The Method of Faith. The Method of Love. V. A Brief Survey of Some of the Efforts Already Made ...... YI. Immediate Aims ...... PAGE 9 37 81 115 183 203 THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM I THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM DUTY OR PROBLEM WHO dares write of Christian unity, on our belief in unam sanctam cafholicam et apos- tolicam ecclesiam, on its reality, on its pangs and needs, without plunging himself and all those who will read such a bold essay into the prayer recorded in the seventeenth chapter of St. John? Let us humbly and obediently penetrate our souls with its words and spirit : ‘ ‘ That they may all be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us: that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me.” This prayer of our Saviour, so often repeated by us, but never pondered seriously enough, contains three clauses: First, the disciples of Christ shall be one; secondly, where they are to be united — in the Father and Son ; thirdly, why they are to be united — that the world may believe that God has sent Christ. Unity Necessary Are not these divine petitions, as it were, so many accusations directed against ourselves and the entire Christendom of our day? Jesus prays that His dis¬ ciples may be one. Moreover, it is said of them in 9 10 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Acts 2:44 that “all that believed were together.’ 9 The heathen said, “See, how they love one another.” What does the world say now when it sees the dis¬ ciples of Jesus? “See, how often they suspect and misinterpret one another.” What Dr. Arthur C. Headlam, in his book on ‘ ‘ The Doctrine of the Church and Christian Reunion,” has recently written is quite true, that the sections of Christendom are wrongly called Churches, for they do not serve the cause of unity. They do not gather together. They are, in¬ deed, marks of separation. Instead of Churches they ought to be called schisms. The world says, “See, how those Christians oppose one another.” See, how they compete with one another at home and abroad, instead of uniting in loving co-operation. The united Life and Work of the Church of Christ is more needed in our day than ever before. The Christian’s strife never ceases. Jesus exhorts us to watch and pray. The evil, the lovelessness, and the disunion are nearest and most dangerous foes. Each one must fight that fight by himself with the help of God and the help of Christ. The prayers and the example of others, together with the strength pro¬ ducing love in their souls, are also helpful. But self¬ ishness, lust and untruth lord it mightily in the world. The campaign against them must, therefore, be conducted with united forces. Divided, we are pitiably weak. United, we should be stronger. Not seldom the cause of Christ is forwarded in jerks by one person or another, one communion or another. Instead of this, Christians must unite their forces and march forward patiently and irresistibly behind THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 11 the Master with closed ranks. The whole present world situation, as well as new special problems aris¬ ing every month, nay, every week, in some part of the Church, intensify the need, that all communions of Christendom should possess an organ for common action in word and deed, an effective expression of our fellowship around the Cross of Christ, helping us to serve our common Lord with strengthened hands. The Place of TJnity Where are the Christians to be united? Jesus speaks of a far deeper unity than is implied by any joint action for the purpose of common service in His cause. He speaks of a spiritual fellowship. This exists already. No organization can create it where it does not exist. And where it exists it is worth more than any organization. Our eyes see the dis¬ union, the many confessions, the many forms of rit¬ ual, the many differences. But our faith sees the unity, the One, Only, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, a temple not built by human hands, but erected by God Himself on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, whose corner-stone is the Lord Jesus Himself (Eph. 2: 20-22). This temple is thus nothing less than a dwelling for God Himself. It reaches from earth up into the highest heaven. Of what material is it erected? All sincere souls in all Christian congregations are living stones in the Lord’s house. Praying and loving hearts — those who have fallen asleep as well as those yet living — form that house of God which is the true Church. Consequently the unity of the disciples of 12 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Christ does not coincide with any existing body or communion in Christendom, neither the largest nor the smallest, and least of all with any body, great or small, which in a sectarian spirit separates itself from others. We are brought together by the aching sense of separation and we meet united wills that are zealous for the holy name of God. No organization can be equivalent to the true Church of Christ. Only faith, which sees the invisible with the unclouded eye of truth, is aware that it belongs to the one flock which Christ has redeemed and which one day shall be assembled from all peoples and nations. To be sure, that unity of Christians is not without witness. It is seen, first and foremost, in deeds of love — in the abandonment to love, in its forgetfulness of self, in its patience and self-sacrifice. Further¬ more, our Christian unity is visible in our common recognition of the same Holy Scriptures, in faith and in prayer — above all, in the Lord’s Prayer and in the Holy Sacraments. The one body and the one Spirit (Eph. 4 : 4), in the words of St. Paul, are found every¬ where, in all lands. Short-sighted eyes see only the differences. Dis¬ tance teaches us a useful lesson. In the cathedral close to my window, beside the relics of the beloved king and patron saint of Sweden, St. Eric, men are buried who considered veneration of saints a dan¬ gerous thing. Mediaeval prelates, until Archbishop Jacob Ulfson and others, who considered the begin¬ ning of the Reformation the ruin of religion, repose there peacefully with King Gustaf Vasa, who adopted the Reformation for the realm, and likewise THE UNITY OP CHRISTENDOM 13 his great Archbishop Laurentius Petri, our Church Father, who devoted a long life in introducing the evangelic 1 spirit into the Church and nation. King John III, the learned Erasmian believer, his gentle Roman Catholic, Polish queen, and Emanuel Sweden¬ borg, the revealer of a new dispensation, have found their last dwelling-place with the sturdy Lutheran prelates who thundered against them from the pulpit of the cathedral. The dead rest in many great sanctuaries in mute protest against exclusiveness. In Westminster Abbey sleep cardinals and Puritans. There “lie Mary Tudor and imperious Elizabeth, Margaret Beaufort, patroness of learning, and CromwelPs daughter. Here lay the great Protector himself till in ‘mean revenge’ his corpse was disinterred. Here were buried High Church and Low Church divines. Here is a tablet to John Wesley and a memorial to the great Nonconformist hymn-writer, Isaac Watts. Here we cannot renew old disputes or continue ancient ani¬ mosities. In Church there must be forgiveness and peace.” 2 Many of those dead are not mute. They still speak to us to-day but without controversy. In the hymn- book Jewish and Christian, the ancient, mediaeval, and modern Church, Greeks, Roman Catholics and 1 The word “Evangelic” is used in this volume because some of the foremost thinkers and writers in Europe have recently adopted it for the special purpose of distinguishing in the Church its three main sections — the Orthodox Catholic, the Roman Catholic, and the Evangelic Catholic. — Editor. 2 E. W. Barnes. 14 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Evangelics, mystics, orthodox and pietists, monks and patriarchs, troublesome witnesses to the truth, burnt heretics and solid Churchmen, outcasts and ornaments of society, praise and pray in one single harmonious choir, specimens as it were of the host who sing a new song before the throne. Forgetting their disputes in life, our hearts find expression dur¬ ing the same service in the hymns of those who once stood against each other. The devotional literature of the Church often re¬ veals religion purer and richer than theology. We enjoy Erasmus and Sebastian Frank as well as Luther, Tersteegen as well as Bengel. John Bunyan impris¬ oned in Bedford gaol wrote “The Pilgrim’s Prog¬ ress,” second only to the Bible in circulation — but we are indebted also to Lancelot Andrewes and to Jeremy Taylor for guidance in holiness. St. Augus¬ tine’s “Confessions,” “The Imitation of Christ,” and the “Theologia Germanica,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “The Serious Call,” George Herbert and John Keble — are common property to all Anglo- Saxon denominations. The whole literature of mys¬ ticism, which means prayer in its widest sense, trans¬ ports us into a religion where differences of time, place, language and cult count for hardly anything. The task of reunion is not to stitch together a patch- work quilt, but only to repair a coat which has burst at the seams.1 We ought not, therefore, to say the Church of Eng¬ land, the Church of France, the Church of Sweden, nor the Anglican, the Lutheran, the Wesleyan, the i W. R. Inge. THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 15 Roman, the Greek Church, as if there were several Churches. We ought rather to say the Church in England, in Germany, in Sweden, in Rome, just as the New Testament speaks of the Church in Jerusa¬ lem, in Corinth, in Smyrna, in Philadelphia. And while by this we must imply all true believers in that place, we still look toward the time when they shall be more visibly one. The Johannine mysticism says of the Father and the Son, “Even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us.” So intimately was Jesus united to His heavenly Father. He cannot put Himself beside His Father as has been done in Christian imagination and art. The Father was in Him. Whoever saw Jesus, saw the Father. Jesus lived His life with God, in God. Just as intimately does Jesus desire to unite His disciples in the Father and Himself. Those who live in God are one. They all are one, just as the Father and the Son are one. It cannot be denied that there is in our time much activity and zeal for religion. Many faithful hearts are eagerly and self-sacrificingly at work to alleviate the great distress caused by the war and to uphold the work of Christian charity and missions. The modes of expressing the unsearchable secret of salva¬ tion, the mutual relations of the peoples, the social and economic situation of society — in all these matters the counsel of God is seriously sought. But what of the soul ’s life in God ? How many live their life in God? How many give themselves time to listen to the still voice which here prays for His own? In God the soul is tried, subjected to a searchlight so 16 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP that nothing can be hidden. In God the soul is cleansed and renewed. It is saturated with the grace of God. From eternity the Son had felt the tender beating of the Father’s heart. The same infinite love meets us when we commune with the Lord. It is with Him as with other friends. The more we are with Him, the better do we get to know Him. Oh, the awe ! Oh, the bliss of life in God ! Thus where are we to be united ? Meeting-places might be mentioned — the church, the chapel, Christian work, common en¬ deavours and organizations, Christian thought, agree¬ ment in Faith and Order, in Life and Work. But Jesus names here the only meeting-place which can really unite us as His disciples. We are to meet in God and Christ. ‘ ‘ In the purely religious sphere there has been no schism. No form of Christian piety has separated itself from Christ; and therefore, there is nowhere any real obstacle to prevent Christians from returning through their fellowship with Christ to fel¬ lowship with each other. The unity of Christendom is unity in Christ, the unity of members with their Head; and this unity has never been broken for any who Gove the Lord Jesus Christ in uncorruptness.’ 5,1 Reason for Unity Why are we to meet and to be made one? The Lord’s answer is, “that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.” Union in Life and Work, in Faith and Order, in Spirit and Truth, is hard to at¬ tain. Is it not easier to let the old order continue with its weakness and division? When the Lord i W. R. Inge. THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 17 comes, we can say to Him, “We knew that Thou art an austere Master. Every communion has its own particular talents, one having more, the other less. Each one of us has looked well to his own talents, but we found it quite too risky to venture on a com¬ mon management of the gifts Thou has given us.” It is our curse that we so easily accustom ourselves to what is wrong. Absurdities which cry aloud for improvement are left undisturbed, with the explana¬ tion, “It’s a pity, but it has always been so, and it can’t be otherwise.” So it is with our divisions. We regret them, but there is nothing to be done, men often say. It was part of the strength of Christ that He never accustomed Himself to what was wrong, but suffered under it and attacked it, however ordinary, deep-rooted or self-evident it might be. Is disunion among Christians really a crime and sin? Is union a duty? Is not union rather a lovely dream to which one may, of course, grant one’s approval? It is a matter for consideration and discussion; but would it not be wise to postpone it to the future? Who are those troublesome fellows who strive for unity? Di¬ vision is the normal state. It is always disagreeable to be disturbed in one’s habits. Why are the disciples to be one in the Father and the Son? The answer is, that the world may believe that God did send Christ. Why did Christ come, speak, suffer, work and die ? So that the world might believe that God did send Him. By our divisions we Christians are a hindrance to our Saviour in His work of salvation. We prevent men from believing in Him. Christian unity is imperatively needed that the world 18 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP may see and acknowledge the Lord. Our divisions crucify Him anew. They expose Him to derision and contempt. Our divisions are not merely a drawback: they are a crime. Unity is not only a beautiful idea. It is Christ’s plain commandment and our uncondi¬ tional duty. When you once perceive this, your con¬ science can never more be reconciled to division. The lack of unity will burn you like fire. The desire for unity is not a fashion, a phenomenon of the time, nor a pious wish whereby men seek to conceal from them¬ selves and others the hard reality, the cleft which his¬ tory and the world crisis of our time have driven between men. No, unity is a sacred obligation. The way to it is long and steep and stony. It leads through many hardships, great and small. Each one of these by itself seems impossible to overcome. But faith overcomes all hindrances if only we are gen¬ uinely penitent — if we are aware of our guilt and ask forgiveness for our omissions, which the Saviour judges with still greater severity than our offences. As it is rightly said in the general confession of the Anglican ritual, first, 4 ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,” and then, “We have done those things which we ought not to have done. ’ 9 The Two Calls If we are one in the hidden life in God, how shall we realize this unity? Listen to Christ’s two calls, that go out over the world with ever fresh significance. In our day Christendom is summoned together with new sacred earnestness by the same two calls. They THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 19 seem to be different, but both are necessary. The one runs : ‘ ‘ Let ns sit at the Master ’s feet like Mary, listen to Him, quietly pray and talk together about what unites us and what divides us. Thus we shall come to an agreement at the end.” But union around the Saviour cannot wait until such agreement has been reached. The Lord has another distinct call: “Rise and follow Me.” This call goes now to every one of us, to every Christian communion. Let us rise and follow Him in His footsteps. The world is craving for love and justice. One morning, as we knelt in peace together in the cathedral of Peterborough, the wind was howling and screaming against its mighty walls and spires. What was it? An evil power that wanted to disturb our devotion? No, it occurred to me that the screaming and howling wind meant the unrest, the bodily starva¬ tion, the spiritual anguish of martyred humanity, that asks more widely and more loudly than ever be¬ fore, “Where is the Church of Christ, where are the followers of the Master, of the Prince of Peace?” We are asked to come out. Let us rise and follow Him — healing, helping, learning, teaching. In follow¬ ing Him and forgetting ourselves, onward bound, we shall come nearer to our Master, and thus inevitably to each other, and become one. “we know in part” “We know in part, and we prophesy in part,” thus speaks Paul. Perhaps there is some one who says, “I know perfectly and I prophesy perfectly, and 20 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be clone away” (I Cor. 13). Has per¬ fection appeared in the world now after Paul? No. This cannot be held by any one who knows Christian¬ ity and evolution. So, if any individual Christian or a small group of Christians or, let us say, a great and powerful Christian communion, perhaps the greatest of all, should say, “My knowledge is perfect. My prophecy is perfect, unlike all others’, so that I can¬ not have anything in common with other Christian communions, no mutual brotherly recognition or co¬ operation,” we must at least realize that this Chris¬ tian, this sect or this communion shows pretensions and a pride that Christ’s greatest disciple, the Apos¬ tle of the Gentiles, thoroughly rejected. But if all Christians and all communions that are faithful to the Gospel and to Paul must thus say of themselves, “We know in part and we prophesy in part. That which is perfect shall come and then that which is in part shall be done away,” it follows that the Chris¬ tian groups and circles must not in self-righteousness cut themselves off from one another but must help and learn from one another. The consequence of this is by no means indifference or false tolerance. Each of us must strive after cer¬ tainty. Each of us and each communion to which we belong must defend with all our Strength the truth that God has entrusted to us, against everything that appears as error, as a distortion or a diminution of Christian truth. But if we are Christ’s disciples, we must acknowledge one another as brothers, con¬ scious of our own imperfections. THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 21 Unity , not Uniformity There are differences between the Christian con¬ fessions both in essentials and nnessentials. Different experiences, different national characters, the decisive influence of great personalities, and the course of his¬ tory have produced different types of Christian piety, different forms of Christian life in the individual and in the organization, and in the common worship of the religious communion. No one can ask one or the other of the Christian confessions to do away with its peculiarities. Devo¬ tion to their ancestors, fidelity to an accepted and precious inheritance, forbid it. It is not only a ques¬ tion of habit and predilection, but personal convic¬ tion has its say. Just as the same overcoat can be used by many, although it does not really fit them all, so common formulas become an approximately correct and indispensable expression for all who belong to the same religious group, although such symbols or confessions do not exactly or completely cover the convictions of the individual. For many a one it becomes a bounden duty not to fail his own confession in small and great things. One seldom considers that the very idea of unity forbids lack of faith to the confession, for the unity of Christians and mutual understanding and co-operation of the Church of Christ must be a unity in variety; not a total of many greater or smaller numbers, but a body with different members, all nec¬ essary for the life of the whole. Unity is measured not quantitatively but qualitatively. Each new con- 22 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP tribution will mean not only a higher number — that is, a subordinate or indifferent matter — but a greater spiritual wealth. Thus the idea of unity does not demand that the different confessions shall abandon themselves but that they should be, and be more and more, themselves. One and all must develop their special gifts they have received, more and more clearly, powerfully and abundantly, for the benefit of the whole organism. Everything living is characteristic, individual and concrete. Only the artificial and mechanical stop at general qualities. Real life, nay, even the products of art as far as they are brought forth by a creative genius, is distinguished by such individualization that there are no two identical beings. Only by ab¬ straction from less essential features can beings be grouped under large basic types. The same is true in the history of religion. No single religious per¬ sonality who deserves this name is quite like another in his piety. Differences and nuances shade imper¬ ceptibly into each other. But in the eyes of our spirit the different groups within Christianity collect into great characteristic types of religion. It would be the greatest disservice to the idea of unity if we were in any way to weaken or plane away these con¬ fessional or traditional types of piety for the sake of a colourless and rather dull universalism. What we and Christianity and the whole world need is not general ideas but the vital growth of the Spirit in the depths and in the heights. The question then arises: How are we to deal theoretically with dif¬ ferences ? THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 23 Apologetics and Polemics How have they been dealt with in Christendom? The answer can be expressed in two words — apolo¬ getics and polemics. Both have a bad or at least an ambiguous sound and rightly so, for apologetics gen¬ erally produces no really truthful works — I mean what is usually called apologetics. It is often at vari¬ ance with Jesus’ rule in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere about incorruptible sincerity. One knows beforehand what is to be proved. One has views or a system in readiness. One accepts the whole thing in the lump, no matter whether a communion or a party or any other corporation furnishes the goods. Then it is to be proved that just these goods are the best. The apologist is tempted to use the bagman’s tricks. In the work of what is commonly called apologetics there is as a rule no trace of the ex¬ ploring sense, no hunger and thirst for truth, but it is necessary, skilfully and convincingly, to present the result as issuing from investigation and proofs, while it was really ready beforehand. One has to smile sometimes when one sees how clever the apolo¬ gist is at finding, even in the smallest detail, that just his own confession is the best, and not only the best but in the end the only possible one. I need not enter here upon other meanings of the word apolo¬ getics. The claims may be slighter. If apologetics does not desire to be more than pedagogical guidance and spiritual assistance for those who seek support and help, then nothing but good can be said about it. But that which usually passes under the name of 24 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP apologetics wounds the sense of truth and the sincerity of the questing soul. If we add to this polemics — religious, theological, and clerical polemics — it is certainly no honourable memorial we shall write on the Church. In order to make the task easier, the opponent’s ideas, words and deeds are usually misinterpreted. One turns against a caricature instead of taking reality as it is and, ac¬ cording to the Christian commandment, puts the best construction on everything. An Anglican friend said to me many years ago that it would be a good service to the cause of religion if all clerical papers could be abolished. There is truth in his paradox. It seems to be not unknown for a paper that has especially announced its Christian character to get a reputation for methods that are condemned by ordinary jour¬ nalistic morality. This is of course not always the case. We can also understand with a good intention that the passions and the human element in mankind are tempted and set in train worse when it is a ques¬ tion of that which is more vital than anything else — religious conviction — than when less important things are concerned. But in this case tout comprendre is not tout pardonner , even though our Saviour asks forgiveness for those who know not what they do. Even when the polemics between the confessions have not been waged with prison and torture, with the sword and the stake, but with the pen and the tongue, they have generally been a disgrace to Christianity. This would be the place for a description of the mental discipline that the spirit of the Gospel has produced. I could show how earnestness and perti- THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 25 nence in mutual discussion is a sign of nobility in confessions and individuals that have attained further than the others in Christian culture. From different times, but chiefly from our own days, I could show conversations, carried on in exemplary love of truth, peace and harmony, about such things as separate us in doctrine and life. The well-known method of ex¬ plaining diverging opinions as being due to moral defects is still employed in certain quarters. Facts are distorted. Religions, like political frontiers, un¬ fortunately often mean frontiers for confidence. I know some one who, when travelling, never fails to obtain the country’s school-books in history. They are illuminating. One gets to know the national dog¬ mas and one is depressed at the ability to colour and distort involuntarily. One also gets to know some¬ thing of the nation’s culture. A few years ago I bought some Danish text-books for the elementary schools. I turned to the most bitter conflicts with Sweden. I found that exactly the same exposition could be used in our Swedish schools. The same ac¬ curacy and culture do credit to certain theological productions which are concerned with depicting an opposed party. Unfortunately this does not alter the general observation that, even when we rise from the lower level of ephemeral periodical literature to the learned dissertations of theologians, polemics in Christianity is generally lacking in essentials. It does not try to understand its opponents. As a rule it cannot understand them, but tries to crush them, though perhaps with pleasant words and honourable sincerity. Behind this method we find, if the line is 26 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP extended, the very idea of uniformity that we have just rejected in the name of life itself. At best polemics between confessions, even if it does touch essentials, becomes a discussion on incom¬ mensurable greatnesses. We shall give only one exam¬ ple, but one that concerns the most profound differ¬ ences in Christian religious life. What do genuine mysticism and intellectual contemplation know of the pathos of the prophetic and evangelic communion with God? And what does the latter understand of the former? Schleiermacher’s View Friedrich Sehleiermacher, the greatest architect of the Evangelic faith, transformed the sense of the words apologetics and polemics in accordance with the spiritual structure that he raised up. Already Paul saw that gifts are of many kinds. God has not given everything to a single person or a single con¬ gregation within Christendom. One communion has developed its charisma during the course of history, the other communion another gift of grace. Is not the divine truth too rich and superhuman to be en¬ tirely grasped by us? Its pure light is refracted and appears in the divisions of Christ’s Church in many colours, which are unlike one another. We should become involved in an endless and fruitless war of words if we tried to decide which is the most beau¬ tiful and which ought to disappear. They are all needed to form the pure and perfect light. This image, like all others, must not be pressed too far. Sehleiermacher has predecessors both within Evan- THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 27 gelic and Roman Christendom. He carried through the idea that the different religious communions put forth or at least have seized upon a certain factor of revelation or of religious life. According to Schleiermacher the task of apologetics' is to discover what is the real essence of each separate confession. This is no easy task. The confession is misunderstood if it is supposed to be completely ex¬ pressed in a number of formulated doctrines. To seek for the essence in each of the typical forms of Christianity is a great scientific task that theology cannot evade, though it is both difficult and delicate. Thus apologetics will no longer be a quibbling in a coarser or finer form, but will be the masterpiece of religious scholarship. The object of apologetics is not to defend one’s own point of view against that of others, but it is to pierce all the deceptive appear¬ ances, all the outworks, all the lumber which in well- meaning, defensive zeal or simply through mental insolence and submission to lower religious inclina¬ tions have accumulated or have been allowed to ac¬ cumulate round the real vital centre of the com¬ munion. Schleiermacher was of course the victim of an illu¬ sion in believing that the fundamental characters of the different forms of religion can be arranged in a systematic whole. History is not decided at any pro¬ fessor’s desk. Schleiermacher ’s chief idea is correct and exceedingly important. It is high time that re¬ ligious scholarship took it up seriously. We Evan- gelics can easily say what offends us, for instance in the Roman Catholic cult and spirit ; it is also easy 28 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP .for the Roman Catholic to say what he finds strange or perilous in the Evangelic faith and confession. It is more difficult to answer the questions: What is the real ideal of Roman Catholic piety, and what is the real ideal of Evangelic Catholic piety? If such questions were even approximately answered the multitude of confessions and religious types in Christianity would get quite a different life and in¬ terest. If we have ascertained the real essence of each communion, Schleiermacher derives a practical task from this. This task he calls polemics. Has a noble disposition that exists in a human being come into its own, or has it been suppressed by all sorts of lower inclinations, by worldly cares and frivolity of idleness ? The same anxious quest can be made to some extent about every human society, especially of a human group that is bound together by a common faith and history. Each part of Christ’s Church displays in its origin, and when its vital nerve is revealed, beneath the strain of history or in its noblest spirits, a fundamental character, clearly conceived from the beginning, perhaps personified in a prophetic figure, or realized gradually during the course of its development, a character that constitutes at the same time its spiritual strength and its real justification within Christendom. But this soul may sully its idealism with lower and slighter claims. It may also become unrecognizable on account of for¬ eign additions, generally relics of primitive religious stages which are ineradicable like weeds and emerge as soon as there is an opportunity. In certain quar- THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 29 ters in Christendom it is made a rule to reform down¬ wards and admit inferior cults and pagan supersti¬ tion so as to get the masses in and make the primi¬ tive instincts feel at home. Luther ’s words in the first of the Ninety-five Theses of 1517, that a Christian’s life shall be a continuous penitence, applies therefore to every religious community that has not fallen into the sleep of death and self-satisfaction. The noble plantation must continually be weeded. From ad¬ joining ground inferior religious phenomena make their way and threaten to destroy the character of the special communion and depreciate its value. It is this operation that Schleiermacher aims at with religious polemics. In each religious community its essence must be asserted against all sorts of de¬ terioration and foreign additions. The very principle in each confession must have an opportunity to grow out in the light of the divine sun in order to display and realize its whole meaning. The different confessions can unite on such polemics as far as they are able to rise from the fogs of sec¬ tarianism and fanaticism to the pure air of veracity. Could not a Roman Catholic unite with an Evan¬ gelic Christian in the combat against superstition which the Roman Church tolerates or favours, or in the airing of the impure atmosphere often attached to auricular confession? Could not an Evangelic Christian unite with a Roman Catholic in condemning the competition that often disfigures and injures the activity of the Evangelic communities or the un¬ emotional dulness that is sometimes characteristic of Protestant worship? Here it is not a question of a 30 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Roman Catholic fighting against Evangelic religion, nor a Calvinist nor a Lutheran fighting against other forms of Christianity, but of helping, within each confession, its better self to a victory over evil in¬ clinations. One human being can scarcely do another a better service than this. We must feel bitter grief when we see in contemporary history how interna¬ tional polemics makes it difficult for the good and blessed spirits of a nation to resist the easily explain¬ able but deeply regrettable inclinations toward un¬ scrupulous nationalism and bitter isolation. Instead of helping the true and dignified soul of a nation to overcome its internal foes, the unchecked enemies of international and national good-will, the actual policy in Europe favours the spirit of suspicion and revenge. The different parts of the Christian Church ought to set a good example. One confession should not try to do the other harm, but with a pure heart should aid it in the hardest of all struggles, the struggle against its own lower self. If I venture to call Gustaf Aulen’s application of such problems in his book, “ Evangelislti och Vormerskt,” masterly, it is in the first place because he is severest against the widespread shortcomings in his own communion. Glubokow sky’s Walls Professor Nicolas Clubokowsky of Petrograd, now in Belgrad, the learned Orthodox patristician, cre¬ ated an incomparable image for this in his Olaus Petri lectures at the University of Upsala. He showed how the conquests made by Rome within the THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 31 region of the Orthodox Church by means of unprin¬ cipled compromise in the form of unions, when con¬ sidered more deeply, are seen to injure the cause of unity instead of promoting it. The unity that our Saviour loves and ordains cannot be brought about by means of mutual propaganda and conquest. It must be sought in the heights or in the depths of the com¬ munion's spiritual being. He took the image from his native country. A Russian house may be divided into several rooms by low wTalls. Up above there are no dividing walls ; down below the people live in separate rooms. Is unity to be gained by thrusting the walls aside so that those who live in the other rooms must either be crushed to death or leave their dwellings and enter the one that is taking possession of more and more of the floor space? Or must they be crowded and quarrel about the space? Glubokowsky indicated another way out of the difficulty. Let the walls re¬ main. Each individual thrives best in his spiritual home. One may of course appreciate another’s home and still remain and thrive best in one’s own. No, the demand that is made of us is greater and more difficult than to increase a little or much at the ex¬ pense of others. That which takes place to the detri¬ ment of our brethren is no real gain. Nations that live on conquests are still at a low stage of political and social culture. So is the communion which uses every means to strive for power and external con¬ quests. Do not move the walls. But let us all grow in faith, hope and love, so that we reach above the divisions and see and show our membership of the same Church and congregation of Christ. 32 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Spiritual Unity and Diversity Each real renewal means the breaking through of the immanent truth and victory over error. The wit¬ nesses of truth accomplish this work wherever they appear. To the Christian theologian Schleiermacher assigns a task that is to a great extent common, as the same evil spirits continually threaten all com¬ munions without exception. In addition each con¬ fession has its special temptations and difficulties. Let the essence come forth in its purity and strength in every part of Christendom where the Spirit brings redemption and eternal life. Apologetics and polemics of this sort counteract an insipid and empty internationalism and interconfes- sionalism. We can seek unity by spreading a sort of covering over all points of separation and pretend, at least for a while, that they do not exist. This may be successful for superficial natures, but not for those who are deeply rooted in the ground of religion. As we have seen, Schleiermacher indicates an opposite method of realizing unity. Let apologetics find out and expound, charitably and sagaciously, what is the real vital essence of each confession. Then let polem¬ ics uprightly and impartially combat and remove everything that prevents what is genuine and valuable from developing into the bloom and the fruit that the Creator has intended. The Christian Church will not then be tempted to suppress and check multiplicity in favour of one type of religion or another. Still less will she let the noble seed of the Gospel be choked by the weeds of primitiveness. Unity will be brought THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM 33 about in multiplicity. The more strongly each divine gift that has fallen to the lot of one or the other communion is developed, the more abundant and beautiful will be the organism of the Church as a whole. The history of the Church shows in many respects how the sincere unity of the Spirit can exist between different creeds if they are inspired with the same religious earnestness. If we examine the religious contrasts in the Christianity of our times and, would it were better, the often stupid dissensions carried on between different Christian movements and com¬ munions, we often find that the oppositions, when looked at more deeply, are not between two types of religion, but on the one side there is the upright zeal of piety and on the other the interests of power or consideration for ecclesiastical policy or rationalism, or parties who imagine that they are contending about religion but who are really looking after other interests. I will mention one example. Martin Luther ’s 1 piety in its full development became a typical con¬ trast to classical mysticism, perfected in Plotinus and continued in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless he en¬ joyed its products because he recognized in them an unworldliness and sincerity that belong to every gen- 1 In this hook I mention Martin Luther and I quote him more often than necessary. This has two reasons. I belong to a section of the Church which has learned much from Luther, and personally I have been a student of Luther dur¬ ing my whole investigation of religion. Further, I think that Luther is less familiar to the majority of my readers. 34 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP nine communion with God. On the other hand he opposed Zwingli at Marburg unreasonably and un¬ happily, although they both belonged to the move¬ ment for reform. At Marburg (1529) Luther was not conscious of different types of religion, but he thought he perceived a different spirit in the others. It meant that, justly or unjustly, he missed in them the all-devouring religious passion that filled his own soul. I hope I have shown with sufficient clearness how thus Christian unity does not mean uniformity, but that on the contrary it must become a unity in variety. We shall return to this subject when we have considered history. n THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM II THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM IN this chapter we shall investigate in what the divisions consist. We shall devote most atten¬ tion to religions causes that have brought about the division of Christianity. We must unfortunately add a word about the oppositions that have been intensified or caused by the war. The one catholic, universal, ecumenical Church has three main parts: the Orthodox, the Roman, and the Evangelic, in addition to minor communions which do not belong to these three great groups. Within the sphere of Orthodox Christendom there are many sects which have separated from the orthodox rite or have been cut off. In Roman Christianity the dif¬ ferent monastic orders, particularly the division be¬ tween the parochial clergy and the monks, correspond in part, at least, to the divisions of Evangelic Chris¬ tianity into confessions, communions, and sects. Schism or division into separate communions has three principal causes; namely, (1) the appearance of prophets (or tension between institutional and per¬ sonal religion) ; (2) separation for the sake of purity (formation of sects) ; (3) the special character of the nations. In other words, we distinguish between (1) those who have been expelled, (2) those who have 37 38 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP departed, and (3) those who have organized them¬ selves according to nations. THOSE WHO WERE PUT OUT The higher religion has essentially two main forms, institutional and personal. They may also be called statutory religion and spiritual religion. We are only able to distinguish them clearly when a prophet has appeared and through him has come regeneration. But even then they are not completely distinguished. To a certain extent they presuppose each other. No personal religion can in the end dispense with the firm f ramework of rules, forms, and religious institu¬ tions. No organization of ordinances and ceremonies can come into existence without the presence of spiritual life, even though later the organism may be¬ come atrophied. Both go together through the ages as the body and soul of religion. Which is to be esteemed the more important ? The different answers to this question mean different types of religion. When within the rigid organism of ‘legal religion fresh personal intercourse with God arises in either of the main higher forms of personal religion, mys¬ ticism or prophetic piety, the question is: How much of the institution will the new life be able to pene¬ trate ? This question applies especially to the prophetic and evangelic, positive and ethical form of piety, because it is, with regard to the quality of the ec¬ clesiastical system, more difficult than impersonal mysticism, which can, in case of need, be content with THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 39 any dwelling-place. The divine intercourse in the spirit of the Bible will improve the world, not merely escape from it. A division and a schism soon arise. The Biblical religion of revelation or prophecy began with Moses, perhaps with Abraham. But a part of the people re¬ mained outside with their heathen cults and customs. After Moses come the Prophets, time after time, like storm-birds. Some of the pious followed the new creative spirits, but others remained in the legal re¬ ligion that crystallized out from Moses’ creation. The Samaritans recognized only the Torah, the Law, not the Prophets. And even in the time of Christ there was among the JewTs a conservative group, the Sadducees, who did not assign the same value to the prophetic writings as to the Law. A similar dif¬ ferentiation took place through John the Baptist. Owing to misunderstanding a baptist sect paid homage to him, even after his real disciples had be¬ come followers of Jesus. It became necessary to say expressly about John the Baptist, “He was not the light” (St. John 1:8). Jesus is the greatest example in the history of re¬ ligion of prophetic revelation opposed to pious ob¬ servance of sacred rules. Many in the Jewish com¬ munity allowed the new spirit to penetrate them. But not all. The Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, became an enemy in the eyes of Judaism. Was Chris¬ tianity a new religion, a deviation, a separation, a sect? Or was it an authentic continuation? Jesus gave the parable about the leaven that ferments the whole dough. But Judaism was not entirely renewed. 40 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP A part of its organism continued in existence, op¬ posed, gradually more consciously and definitely, to the part that adopted the spirit of Jesus. The vital¬ ity which dwelt in Prophets and Psalmists was first set free and came forth in Jesus. To an enormous and increasing extent it gathered non- Jewish human¬ ity into the growth of revealed religion. Judaism is not to be blamed for considering it a violent measure when the young Christian community claimed the Jewish Bible to be the canonical document of Christianity. It is difficult for us to realize the im¬ mensity of such a measure. But still it was true and justified, if we look at the meaning of religious prog¬ ress. It is shown incontrovertibly by two reasons. The Christian community was expelled by Judaism against its will. Nothing was farther from Jesus ’ intention than to leave the religion of His fore¬ fathers. “I came not to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matt. 5:17). In the New Testament the change in the Jewish attitude is reflected. In Acts 3:17 Jesus’ sufferings are described in a way that spares the Jew¬ ish people of which the first Christian community formed a part. Peter says, “And now, brethren, I know that in ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers.” But when the Jewish religion also expelled Stephen, and when by Paul the contradiction had been recognized that revealed itself in the Jews’ perse¬ cutions of the Christians, it is said in Acts 7 : 52, “Which of the prophets did not your fathers perse¬ cute? and they killed them that showed before of the coming of the Righteous One; of whom ye have now become betrayers and murderers.” The move- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 41 ment that followed Christ never severed itself volun¬ tarily from the mother* community, but was excluded. The other fact that I wish to point out is that Christianity is as equally an authentic continuation of the Old Testament religion as Judaism. In the case of the Prophets this is obvious. In the time of Jesus and afterwards Judaism had no figure so con¬ genial with the Prophets as He. What appeared to Judaism as deviation and heresy, was really a re¬ generation and completion of the creative, character¬ istic part of its own classical, religious production. With regard to later Judaism it seemed at first as if a gap existed between Jesus and His Jewish sur¬ roundings — which as a matter of fact was exaggerated by Christianity too, because of Jesus’ demands for ideal truth and the resultant polemics against the Pharisees, whose religious earnestness He shared of course at bottom. It has taken nearly two thousand years before we now begin to realize how Jesus not only drew from the Prophets and Psalmists, but also continued the deeper religious channel of contem¬ porary Judaism. We also see the same thrilling spectacle in the later history of Christianity. Is a new creative spirit to leaven the entire organism of the religious institu¬ tion, or is a part of this to remain outside the dis¬ turbing and vitalizing onset of the new force? This fascinating spectacle occurs whenever original reli¬ gion wells up. In reality the new spirit is never vic¬ torious throughout. The higher divine experience always remains within a limited region. But then arises the question whether this limitation need give 42 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP rise to external division or not. It is a question as to the elasticity and art of government inherent in the Church. Many circumstances play a part, even dif¬ ferences in civilization and national peculiarities. Augustinism with its spiritual problems was never adopted in the East — one of the causes, but not the main cause, of the cleavage of the Church into a Greek and a Roman section. Western Christianity was- able without any schism to assimilate Saint Francis, Saint Bridget and many other reforming spirits. It was able to digest much religious orig¬ inality, but it was not able to digest Martin Luther. Luther on the Church Luther had no dream of forming a new religious community. In the experience and pronouncements of Luther there was no place for sect or schism. The thought of founding an order, society, or any other institution, or of abolishing or deserting the existing order, for the sake of crying abuses, so universally deplored, wras from the beginning as alien to him as to the Master Himself. This apears also in his clumsy idealism, when he was thrust out of the Church against his will, and necessarily compelled to organize new divisions of Christendom. The Church had no more devoted son. Those who have brought about new things in mankind have never been innovators but devotedly attached to their spiritual origins. Luther was called upon to permeate the Church with a fresh prophetic revelation of God’s grace and truth. But the organism was not sufficiently elastic. It THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 43 reacted in a way that expelled Luther from the of¬ ficial institution. Still he could never be brought to the sectarian principle that says, “ Leave the Church, for it is bad; we are superior.” No, the advantage of the Evan¬ gelic movement is, according to Luther, in the pure Word of God. Life and conduct can never become in this world as pure as the Word. Still the Word cannot be in vain. There are some “upright, pious, holy children of God.” Luther never acknowledged the religious validity of his excommunication, and, unlike the sectarians, he always retained a living feeling of the unity of the Church. When his fol¬ lowers in Wittenberg used his absence as an oppor¬ tunity for vehement innovation, destroying images and doing other such things in order to reform in a more conspicuous and outward way, he returned to Wittenberg in spite of the fear of the Elector, and preached in March, 1522, a whole week, warning the zealous separatists and stating that “it is no good to make sects.” If we make a comparative study of the Christian catechisms our astonishment is unbounded at the absence of all anti-Roman polemics in Luther’s Shorter Catechism, which came into existence at a time when the struggle raged most fiercely and which for years was prepared and formulated by a man who certainly has not spared his scoldings against the papacy. Even in the Third Article no separation in the Church is indicated. In order to avoid the possi¬ bility of any particularist interpretation Luther does not even use the word Church, but speaks of “the whole of Christendom on earth.” No distinction is 44 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP made between the visible and invisible Church, still less between the Evangelic communities and Rome. But the universal Church is interpreted religiously. It is “called by the Spirit.” In this Christendom the soul enjoys forgiveness, peace, and eternal hope. There is not a hint of needful separation, not a sign of exclusion. But he speaks of “the Spirit who calls me by the Gospel, enlightens me with His gifts, sanctifies me and sustains me in a right faith, even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, hallows the whole of Christendom in earth, and holds it in the one true faith by Jesus Christ, in which Christendom He richly forgives me and all the faithful, for all our daily sins.” Here the view points neither to an institution nor a doctrine, but exclusively to God’s doings in the past and now; to the Gospel by which the Spirit gathers the flock of Christ. Nor yet is the Gospel to be counted as an institution. In order to exclude all hint of letter worship or shallowness such expressions as “the Word,” “the Scripture,” are avoided, and we are compelled to think upon the contents of the good tidings, the grace of God in Christ. And yet the religious society is in no wise disregarded or unduly spiritualized. It belongs itself to the dispensation of salvation, because the soul lives in it by God’s grace. This is richly commented upon in the Greater Cate¬ chism, where Luther speaks with hearty warmth of the Church as the loving mother of the Christian. But in this classical passage on the Church in the Smaller Catechism itself Luther avoids even the technical term THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 45 “Church”: instead of it he says Christendom, Christ enheit, in order not to narrow the view of his readers. It never occurs to Luther to deny that the Church was the Church of Christ, for of course the Gospel was in it. We need not observe that Luther’s opinion about the Vatican would have been very different if he had known the papacy of our times. Like some of the Franciscan Spiritualists and other zealots in the Middle Ages he got the frightful idea that Anti¬ christ was seated in Rome. But however much an¬ noyed he may have been with the Pope and the Roman institution, of which he says, as they appeared to earnest reformers at that epoch, “It must certainly be the Church of Satan,” he could still write in his drastic way, “The Pope, Antichrist, does not sit in a pigsty or a stable of the devil, but in God’s temple.” Luther’s position is the most important counter¬ part in the history of religion to the separation of the young Messianic communion from that part of Juda¬ ism which cut itself off. Similarly Rome and a por¬ tion of the West sundered itself from the prophetic movement in the sixteenth century. Luther was ban¬ ished from the religious institution against his will. He too followed the classical personages and docu¬ ments of an older epoch — Jesus, Paul, and Augustine. The opposition to the contemporary Church was ex¬ pressed as strongly as possible. Like all epoch-making spirits Luther and his successors were more or less unintentionally unjust to the preceding epoch and to the age in which they lived. Such spirits shed their light in front of them, and their vast forms conceal 46 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP that which lies behind. It is only at the present day that both the Church and investigators have begun to detect continuity and to understand Luther in an unbroken series as completing the positive line in mediaeval mysticism. Formerly he was placed after an evil and gloomy parenthesis which, as the early Church was studied more and more, was made to begin farther and farther back. We now see that Luther was quite as authentic a continuation of the deep religious life of the Middle Ages as Erasmus or Loyola. Erasmus best deserves the name of reformer. He wanted reform. He wished to remove a lot of weeds from life, worship and doctrine. Luther and Loyola were impelled by a deeper pathos, an all-consuming desire for peace of soul. They found it in different ways, and each in his way forms an original religious type. It may be disputed which is the straighter way, that which continues through Luther, or that which continues through Ignatius Loyola and Tridentinum. Com¬ pared with earlier mysticism, and more evangelic, less methodical communion with God, Loyola denotes quite as great a novelty as Luther, and Loyola too has a positive religious ideal. The answer depends on what one attaches greater importance to in the Church, the external or the internal, various religious manifestations or the Gospel. It is high time for Evangelic theology to abandon the unhistorical view of a leap from Paul and Augus¬ tine to Luther. Luther is not a repristinator but a continuator and creator with the material that the THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 47 Church gave him. Even in 1541 Luther emphasized that his part of Christendom, unfortunately expelled, really belonged to the Church too. “No one can deny that both we and the papists come from the holy baptism and are therefore called Christians.” More¬ over, Luther and his friends had the sacrament, the key-power of the Word, the ministry, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the commandment con¬ cerning the powers that be, the marriage state, the same sufferings as their brothers in the world. They did not shed blood, but were like Christ, the Apos¬ tles, and the ancient Church. It is therefore an im¬ pudent falsehood to say that they had deserted from the Church and founded a new Church. ‘ 1 They can¬ not find anything new in us,” said Luther. On the contrary, Luther as well as Erasmus stood up against many practices and cults in the Church that they proved to be decadent innovations. In the enforced cleavage Roman Christendom de¬ prived itself of the mightiest genius in revealed reli¬ gion after St. Paul, but also the Roman part of Christendom was to a great extent, though less than the Evangelic part, influenced by Luther and the Reformation. On the Evangelic (or reformed) side much was rejected and lost that in the Church of Rome has religious value even for an Evangelic Christian and that was consonant with Luther’s free¬ dom and piety to take care of. His successors often lacked both freedom and piety. Luther himself de¬ plored this and even cherished noble components in worship that had fallen into decay and that with curi- 48 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP ous ignorance are now sometimes said to be especially Roman, for instance Church music.1 That the two chief currents of mediaeval religion, the more spontaneous Evangelic and the method¬ ically mystical, should form two communities, with Luther and Loyola as regenerators, was clearly the intention, not of the Reformers, but of Providence. Humanly speaking, Luther should have become the religious renewer of the whole West, and such, in spite of the ecclesiastical division, he has become. Those whom the Church has condemned may after¬ wards be adopted as teachers. Not only are Roman scholars carried away by the originality and power of Luther’s religious genius, but they also begin to see more clearly the connection of the Reformation with what preceded it — sometimes more clearly than the followers of Luther. The Redemptorist, Father Clemens Hoffbauer, made a statement about the causes of the Reformation in Germany that is noteworthy as coming from a Roman Catholic investigator: “The defection from the Church took place because the Germans needed and still need to be religious — not by heretics and philosophers but by men who really desired religion for the heart was the Reformation spread and maintained.’ ’ In his great work, “Les Origines du Protestan- tisme,” Imbart de la Tour has investigated and de¬ scribed, as no one before him had, the broad Biblical Reformation in the sixteenth century, chiefly in France, but also in the whole Church. He calls it i See my book, “Humor och Melankoli och andra Luther- studier,” p. 268. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 49 evangelism and distinguishes from it the mature Lutheran piety, characterized by the doctrine of certitude of salvation, which constitutes, according to the eminent French scholar, a sort of new religion. In the Reformation number of Revue de la Meta - 'physique et de Morale he has portrayed Luther — con¬ trary to the established Roman view — as the great mystic who has proceeded to exaggeration in denying the power of human reason and the human will. How from the syncretism and mysticism of the Church Martin Luther came forth with divine experi¬ ence and a concentrated sense of Cod’s revelation — impelled by the one thing needful, not by the many motives of the religious blending familiar to the Church — all this has been excellently described by a brilliant young scholar, Friedrich Heiler, now pro¬ fessor at Marburg, sometime lecturer in the Uni¬ versity at Munich, earlier known for his acute anal¬ ysis of Buddhism’s psychological method for medita¬ tion and his great comparative work on prayer, which reveals an equally great familiarity with Luther’s writings as with the rich piety in the author’s own mother-church of Rome. There is a curious power in his essay on Luther’s e ( Religionsgescliichtliclie Bedeu- tung” (Munich, 1918, Ernst Reinhardt) in which he reveals the two main currents of the higher religion, methodical mysticism and prophetic revelation, and in which Luther rises above the Evangelic figures that come next in the author’s admiration: Calvin, John Bunyan, George Fox, Carlyle and Kierkegaard. The explanation is that the writer himself, with all the pathos of a man to whom religion is, in the words of 50 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Carlyle, “the chief fact with regard to him,” experi¬ enced the two basic types of Western Christianity and, after a scholarly historical analysis, found in Luther the real renewal of revealed religion. With a proper feeling that the Reformation belongs to and concerns the whole Church, the German Reichs¬ tag decided in 1917, at Herr Traub’s suggestion, to commemorate the quatercentenary of the Reforma¬ tion by establishing an institute for investigating the Reformation period, its members to be composed of both Roman Catholic and Evangelic Catholic scholars. Erasmus , Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola Christendom in the West had its authentic continua¬ tion in the Evangelic faith as well as in the Roman section. It is not like a fir, with one straight stem from which boughs branch out, but the Western Church resembles an oak, which divided itself into several branches. In order to get a survey of the genuine character of the divisions of the Church and thus discern its in¬ herent continuity and unity, it is necessary to con¬ sider somewhat mere closely the three typical heroes of religion in the sixteenth century. For our purpose, in order to simplify the survey, we do not make a special fourth class out of the sympathetic humanistic national type of Reformer in Zwingli, because he never exercised such universal influence as the genius of reformed, presbyterian religion, Calvin. Nor do we make here a special fifth class out of the greatest disciple of Martin Luther, which John Calvin became through his world-conquering, systematizing and or- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 51 ganizing power. Erasmus, Luther and Loyola have of course their roots in the mediaeval Church, pursuing old, different tendencies that in those men revealed their essence and developed characters as Reform, Prophetic Creation, and Ecclesiastical Mysticism. The great majority of Christians live their lives according to the standard of their duties in unshaken belief in God’s grace and power without creating any characteristic types of religious life. But when wTe here turn our attention to the more strongly expressed forms of communion with God, we can distinguish in the mediaeval Church three or four main types. Their characteristics actually appear sharply defined, but in certain combinations, even in the same person, and yet they are silhouetted against the background of the nameless multitude. If the majority of educated laymen had to choose, they would certainly sympathize, now as before, with the type which I rank first here, but which never influenced Church life as deeply as the others, because it implies education and not infrequently has borne an aristocratic or even a learned character in the Church. To this class of piety Christianity has meant true culture, being connected with all noble learning, art and letters. In the name of an enlightened faith it has scorned ignorance and superstition, which the Church has tolerated or sanctioned. Hence the op¬ position common to these mediaeval tendencies towards the mendicant orders, especially the minorities. It has combated irrational doctrines and has denounced with genuine moral indignation worldliness and vice within the Church, particularly among the leaders. 52 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Its watchword was reform of life and doctrine. It was especially toward the end of the Middle Ages that it gathered ideals and motives for denunciations against the Church from Bible reading. The greatest and highest expression of this noble religious type and of its reforming tendencies is to be found in Erasmus, the man who forged some of the weapons which the Reformation used, and who at first sympathized with Luther, but later sheered away from the consuming zeal that he could not under¬ stand. He was repelled by the elementary vehemence of the movement. The Erasmian type of religion has existed, and still exists, in all religious societies which have attained to a higher standard of literary culture. The most learned of contemporary spirits congenial to Erasmus, Melanchthon, became Luther’s brother-in¬ arms, yet not without some involuntary violence to himself. He was forced into a religious world which he could understand and describe, enabled by his intelligence and his admiration for the religious genius he saw in his friend ; but the heights and depths which it contained were never reached by the learned hu¬ manist of enlightened and harmonious piety. Of Erasmus’ disciples, some became adherents of the new movement, some took up the defence of the Church against the prophetic criticism, according to the example set by Erasmus himself. From a certain point of view the nature of such piety can best be expressed by the word reform; for without being blind to the fact that religion is the work and gift of God, it conceives Christianity and describes it as an ideal of life, a new and perfect “law,” according to THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 53 which not only the Church in deterioration and back¬ sliding but also each single heart is to be renewed. As of old, one turns still to ancient times. The Fa¬ thers and the ancient Church were set forth as an example. Erasmus expressly sought for a canon, in the first instance from Scripture, but also from the Fathers. The first five or six centuries, considered as a relatively complete and finished epoch, were made an authority for all times. Though Reformation is an apt word for the work of Luther in his early years, it can scarcely be used to describe his creative continuation of Pauline the¬ ology and of the positive trend of mysticism. It is more significant as a name for those Roman tendencies which during the same century advanced claims for a return to a purer life and doctrine — never silent in the Middle Ages and now more firmly rooted than ever, owing to the decay of the papacy. Cardinal Contarini took an important share in the bulls and commissions for reform issued by Paul III. At the Conference of Regensburg (1541) he seemed to have reached his- goal — the reunion of the Lutherans for the amelioration of Church and doctrine. The pon¬ tificate of Marcellus did not last a month. After that, Paul IV was the second in the papal line to show rigid morals and reforming tendencies. He began his reign in 1555 with the promise of “faithfully seeing that the reform of the universal Church and the Ro¬ man Court should be undertaken in earnest.” It was he who boasted of never letting a day pass without an effort for restoring the Church to its primitive purity. Pius V, the most devout of the reforming 54 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP popes, enforced a severity in his own life and that of the enria in the fulfilment of episcopal and clerical duties as relentlessly as the Inquisition — revised dur¬ ing his reign — executed its bloody work of reforma¬ tion. In our Swedish communion we note, as an echo of this reformation movement, the efforts of the scholarly and artistic King John III. The Reformation had dispelled a crowd of superstitions. But the king abhorred the profanity with which spiritual things were treated in worship. In the preface to the Liturgy of 1575 we read: “As our predecessors had to fight against superstitions, so we will have to fight against the still more savage beast of profanity. ... A great part of piety lies in ceremonies.” In theological con¬ troversy King John offers a warning against the dis¬ putes of the Reformers and refers to the Fathers as rightly expounding Scripture and being opposed to the false doctrines of later Rome. Amongst the Ro¬ man Catholic modernists of our days similar notes have been struck. I am not speaking here of a school or tendency, but of a type of piety that appears in different societies, temperaments and combinations. We have used the great name of Erasmus to describe it. But is not Eng¬ land its native home before all others? It was there first in Western Christendom that enthusiasm for the faith of the Church, combined with classical education, burst into full bloom, to bear fruit in the Carolingian renaissance. It was in England that the first uni¬ versity of Northern Europe was founded. There, at a far later time, the learned Wyclif in his reform of THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 55 Church life and doctrine, invoked that evangelic law which Scriptural research had revealed to him, hav¬ ing at the same time the feeling — unknown to Erasmus and his compeers — of a need for anchoring his poor soul on a bottom deeper than the noblest of human aspirations; that is, in eternal predestination. No idea can possibly enter one’s mind of deducing from a single religious type so rich a growth as that ex¬ hibited by the Church of England. That Church while maintaining her continuity took a definite im¬ press from the Reformation, in her Thirty-nine Arti¬ cles partly translating the “ Confessio August ana Throughout the ages, down to our own time, she is richer in mystics than perhaps any other comparable branch of the Church. But I am nowhere so keenly sensible of the beneficent value of dignified, enlight¬ ened piety, wide of heart and open to reforms, as in the Church of England. Nowhere has respect for the first centuries of the Church resounded with a more genuine conviction. So impartial a witness as Lecky says: “Looking at the Church of England from the intellectual side, it is plain how large a proportion of the best intellect of the country is contented, not only to live within it, but to take an active part in its ministrations. There is hardly a branch of serious English literature in which Anglican clergy are not conspicuous. There is no other Church which has shown itself so capable of attracting and retaining the services of men of general learning, criticism, and ability. ” 1 It has also 1 William T. Manning in “The Call to Unity,” New York, 1920, p. 85. 56 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP been remembered that “the Anglican was the only Church in the sixteenth century which seemed to un¬ derstand the spiritual significance of the Renaissance. . . . The King James translation of the Bible shows the literary influence of the Renaissance, and the com¬ pilation of the Book of Common Prayer is the embodi¬ ment of the new thought of religion expressed not in asceticism but in the fulness of life.” 1 A genuine representative of the comprehensive Erasmian via media in the Church of England, Dr. Headlam, has lately, in an article on Bishop Henson’s brilliant Olaus-Petri lectures in Upsala on Anglican¬ ism, pointed out three main characteristics: (1) Ec¬ clesiastical learning and humanism due to a great ex¬ tent to the importance of the universities in building up the particular genius of the English communion, (2) its episcopal character, and (3) its appeal to an older historical Christianity which is not Protestant in the modern sense nor Catholic in the Roman sense, but something more comprehensive than either of them. Martin Luther and Ignatms Loyola The evangelic mystic and the ecclesiastical mystic, Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola, contemporaries of Erasmus in the sixteenth century, have influenced the life of the Church more deeply than he, because they knew what Erasmus had never experienced; they knew heaven and hell. Both became emphatically men of religion, being led by different paths to entire i Leighton Parks in “The Crisis of the Churches,” Scribner, 1922, p. 61. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 57 devotion to the question of the soul’s salvation. Both subjected themselves to unflinching asceticism which astute confessors could only alleviate temporarily. Both these religious heroes are rooted in the mys¬ ticism of the Middle Ages and are unintelligible if detached (as often happens in the case of Luther) from the various elements in the complicated texture of mediaeval religious life, but neither of them re¬ mained within the sphere of mediaeval mysticism. They represent in a certain degree its two different currents — Loyola, the methodical self-training, which lays stress upon the mystical and visionary experi¬ ences of the soul and its merging into ecstasy ; Luther, the more evangelic trend, in which religion is com¬ manded by the antithesis of human guilt, and the holy, merciful grace of God which generates in man childlike trust and confidence of the heart and the divine service of the daily, earthly calling. But each independently ushered in a new epoch. In Luther the positive tendencies of mysticism fostered a fresh assurance of the divine revelation and salvation. Loyola subjected the mystical training of the soul entirely to the Church. Martin Luther’s Originality It need not be specially shown that with Luther a new period begins, whether one looks upon it as contemporary Rome does, as a deviation from the Church’s right path, or as a continuation of the high¬ road, begun and prescribed by the Gospel in the suc¬ cession of Christ, from which official Rome had strayed. With an increasing number of present-day 58 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP scholars it is observed that the path of Western Christendom divided in the sixteenth century when that which had dwelt together in the broad bosom of the mediaeval Church was brought forth as an unequal pair of twins, one of which — the prophetic interpreter of the good tidings, redemption, and consolation — proceeded on his own path, characterized by the “ Confessio Augustana” and a series of symbols in its spirit ; while the other — the Roman movement — after the hesitation of some decades, followed another path, marked by Tridentinum and the subsequent mileposts that lead to the Vatican Council. If we wish to continue the metaphor we may speak of a third path, denoted by Anabaptists and other lovers of Jesus, mystics and thinkers who did not feel at home in either of these highroads of the Church but chose their own, not seldom difficult, paths. If we listen to those in all centuries, but most em- i phatically those in the sixteenth, who demanded the reform of the Church according to the law of the Gospel, we are tempted to denote the path of Eras¬ mus and the numerous reformers of the same period as the real, direct continuation of the Church’s course. The historical judgment is easily mingled here with a valuation. Both friends and enemies of Lu¬ ther’s action have suggested that Luther’s originality should be summed up in the certainty of redemption, certitudo salutis, the assurance of salvation that has enraptured so many consciences after the melancholy monk of Wittenberg, hungering for peace of soul. Can a 'soul be assured of its salvation? Is it not a gross offence against the key-power of the Church? THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 59 Is it not a bold outbreak of that spiritual assumption which, according to Hellenic and other experience, divine powers enviously punish, and which all delicate minds fear as assurance that goes before a fall? Luther was not calm and confident. Read how his passionate soul was cast into the paroxysms of anguish and despair. But he knew that God was gracious and that Christ was his Lord. Thus the soul could and must be assured and safe. Nothing can denote the difference more clearly. On one side is the personal religion that refers the soul to Christ, the revealed God, to obtain certainty and spiritual freedom in complete submission to His do¬ minion. On the other side is the institution of re¬ demption, which takes charge of the soul and keeps its account with God and finally solves the problem of certitude by the Vatican Council’s decision as to the Pope’s infallibility. The legend of Luther as the advocate of reason and the human will ought to disappear for ever. On the contrary one is tempted to follow Imbart cle la Tour, one of the best modern historians of Roman Catholi¬ cism, and describe Luther as the enfant terrible of mysticism. Luther has drawn the conclusions from the sacred experience of Pauline mysticism as to the pitiful incapacity of human reason and the human will when the salvation of the soul is concerned. Peace, nothing else, nothing less, was what Luther desired. Painful experience taught him that salva¬ tion and peace are entirely God’s gifts. He removed the metayage between God and the soul. God is everything, man nothing. 60 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP We recognize the eonsummator of St. Paul and St. Augustine. Luther belongs to mediaeval Mysticism in the same way that St. Paul belongs to Pharisaism. He is a spiritual son of the deep devotion of the Middle Ages, which nourished his soul with its fruits throughout life. The background of Luther’s “De Libertate Christiana” (1520) still consists of the Platonic-mystical dualism of soul and body, spirit and matter. In her spiritual existence the soul is free and happy, but she is constrained by the body to concern herself with mankind and the world. Thus she must in charity be the servant of all. The same antithesis was stated by Augustine. But against this background are drawn the outlines of quite a dif¬ ferent religious character, its chief features being blissful trust in the forgiveness of sins and fidelity to the earthly calling. The Originality of Ignatius Loyola It is perhaps less universally recognized that Igna¬ tius Loyola meant a new start as well as Luther. That great son of passionate Spanish devotion gave to Romanism a new inspiring genius. We may try to define his relative originality under two heads — spiritual exercise and zeal for the Church as an institution. When the ideal of mysticism has attained a certain degree of independent life, its characteristic feature is a careful self-training in the methods of asceticism. By means of “exercise” ( askesis ) the soul wins its way from one state to another. In Western Chris- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 61 tianity, as earlier in India, Persia, and the Hellenistic world, a series of measures based on psychological experience was skilfully arranged to dispose the mind towards the mood required, to purify and prepare it for spiritual sensations, which nevertheless were ac¬ counted by all sound mystics as gifts of divine grace, not as works of man. After Loyola’s life of chivalry had been checked by sickness, he became inflamed by a desire to live for God. But his unquenchable activity was set in relief by visions and spiritual experiences, gradually systematized into strict methods. The training of the soul has nowhere been conducted with more profes¬ sional skill than in Loyola’s “ Exerciiia Spiritualia.” No educational genius has ever attained his goal with precision superior to his. The free growth of re¬ ligious life is allowed no scope. The soul progresses through mortifications and other measures to favour vivid apprehension of different religious states, along the path of imagination to encounter death, to visit heaven and hell. Loyola’s originality rests not alone upon his talents for regulating the mystical self-training. There is far more importance in the goal he was aiming at in this training. All this cast-iron austerity of exercise, unconditionally and slavishly submitting to rules and superiors, became directed to an independent external object, which grants also personal salvation and com¬ munion with God — the power of the Church. Both personal will and personal conviction alike must be annihilated in order that the individual might be a supple tool for the domination of the Church. 62 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Wrought to a perfect instrument the will is entirely devoted to the service of the sacred hierarchy. You must call an object white with the Church, even if you find it evidently black. The general of the order holds God’s position: locum Dei tenens, he is God’s lieutenant in the company. By the severe subordination of will and visions and oneditations and the whole apparatus of mysticism to the claims of the Church, a relatively new creation came into being. By this combination of methodical mysticism with enthusiastic submission to the Church as an institution, the “Spanish priest,” or the re¬ ligious type of the Jesuit, was separated almost as sharply as Luther from the Middle Ages. In Luther utter incapacity and servitude of the human will pre¬ vailed until God redeemed it and created the new, free man in Christ. In Loyola there was high appre¬ ciation of the human will, its heroic training, and extinction of personal independence for the benefit of the holy institution. Never has institutionalism been sublimated in a more glowing heart. Comparison Both are genuine mystics. The soul is tormented by the absence from God — everything else — suffering and sin — get their bitterness in so far as they alienate from God. The only good and meaning of existence is union with God. But Luther and Loyola conceive that absence, the approach, the union, its cause, its aim, in different ways. Ignatius felt pangfully the distance between worldly strivings and a life in renunciation. His THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 63 ambition was moved by such examples as St. Francis and St. Dominic. The distance was overcome by an accomplished psychological strategy consisting in a long and manifold series of self-training exercises, visions and spiritual states. To Luther the distance was due only to lack of confidence, due to the sense of guilt and anguish. His only ambition was to get rid of that separation. Its only remedy is God’s love, awakening trust in the frightened heart. The methodical self-training used by him without result in the monastery was incom¬ patible with a religious view, dominated by the antithesis of guilt and grace, and by the overpower¬ ing nearness and might of God. The man whose heaven is to feel the embrace of the forgiving love of God cannot conceive of an endeavour to ascend from one state to another by tried ascetic measures. “ Where the forgiveness of sin is, there are also life and bliss.” Luther knew too well the infernal pangs of self-torture and of an anguished conscience to think a moment of training himself for a renewed visit in death or hell. And to heaven he was trans¬ ported by God’s grace in Christ, not by his own will power nor by any system of psychology. Luther despised self-training in an unpedagogical idealism, which has in many less pathetic minds amongst his followers shown its caricature in spiritual laziness. His reason was the same as that which made the Master severe against everything artificial, against affected piety and virtuosite in religion. Trust in God meant to his sensible heart eternal life and the highest heaven. “Much is written about how man is 64 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP to become godlike; then they have made ladders on which one ascends to heaven. But this is mere patch- work. Here, however, is indicated the right and nearest path to ascend, that yon become full, full of God, that you should not be lacking in any respect, but that you have everything in one heap, that all your speaking, thinking, going, in sum, your whole life, becomes quite godlike.” The difference between the soul’s free intercourse with God and the methodical training for experienc¬ ing the divine has never been more striking than in those two great men. In Luther everything is spon¬ taneous; with Loyola everything is calculated. Read their letters. To men as well as to God Luther lets his tender or passionate heart speak with a touching and ruthless sincerity. Loyola warns his friends for writing freely without precautions. One must care¬ fully hide several things on special scraps of paper and not write them in the ordinary letter itself. Luther does not hide anything. Loyola applies strict method to everything in religion. Luther loves truth and nature so fanatically that he is afraid of method, or indeed he is so entirely occupied and overwhelmed by God that there is no place for calculated train¬ ing. Luther, as radically as any of the mystics, made heaven the sphere of the soul’s existence, but he did it in the spirit of St. Paul and St. Augustine. How¬ ever transcendentally Luther experienced and valued the soul’s joy in God, he never left behind him the faithful confidence of the Gospel. As to the aim, Loyola saw it in the Church with its whole apparatus THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 65 and authority. The unflinching self-denial benefits the institution. Luther became more true to mys¬ ticism than that admirable Spanish knight in a monk’s dress, inasmuch as Luther’s goal was never planted in an institution but in the salvation of the soul and its eternal life, to be enjoyed in trustful fidelity to the divine service of the daily calling. The wide dissimilarity between them appears also in the final remedies which they found. Loyola got divine assurance in visions and the utmost exertion of his resolute will. Luther found security in the Word, in something objective, in the revelation of God in history. To a religious hero such as Luther the drama of the inner life expressed itself with an exceeding power that few religious people can adopt without incurring fancifulness or artificiality. But the real thing is the same in them as in him. A characteristic trend of Christian communion with God appeared in Luther showing its real nature and aim with unmis¬ takable lucidity and imposing force. In Luther this peculiar form of unworldliness and spirituality asserts itself in a new evidence; although it had existed in germ before, it was destined after Luther to develop its whole contents. Such were the tendencies, incar¬ nated in two mighty religious minds, which differen¬ tiated Western Christendom into divisions in the sixteenth century. Institutionalism and Spiritual Renewal To sum up. Judaism issued from a creative spirit, from original religious life; so too Christianity, and 66 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP so too the Reformation. But the soul needs a body. The religious institution existed. If no such form exists it is created. If the body of the religious com¬ munity cannot bear the new life, it collapses and a new organism arises. For it too the hour comes when the form, the institution, the ecclesiastical establish¬ ment is no longer a home where the spirit can live free, but a prison which encloses and chokes the spirit. Personal religion becomes institutional. The religion of the spirit becomes statutory piety in one form or another. This has happened in post-Reformation Chris¬ tianity. We see instances of new life penetrating larger or smaller parts of Christendom without these separating into new communities. I may mention Pietism, Schleiermacher ’s interpretations, and modern theological research, which has not stopped before any confessional frontiers, but has penetrated the spiritually alert and the intellectually authoritative in almost every Christian community,1 but which, in spite of attempts and threats from one quarter and sectarian denial from another, has fortunately been unable so far to produce a new, great outward divi¬ sion of the Church. Where such difference has torn a communion asunder, it is now striving once more for unity. It was supposed that German Christen¬ dom, if not held together by connection with the State, would break and divide between Orthodoxy i Let me refer to the admirable statements made by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Canterbury Convocation and by Bishop Gore to the Conference on Scripture teaching in 1922. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 67 and Modernism. Such prophecies have been put to shame in the most conspicuous way. The Church, being deprived of its material support, has achieved what was impossible in the days of prosperity; namely, the Kirchenbund, a confederation of all Ger¬ man Churchmen solemnly established in Wittenberg on Ascension Day, 1922. Catholic modernism, ill- treated by Rome, but in its essence a true and noble offspring of Catholic mysticism not imbued by a Protestant spirit, has not formed any separate com¬ munities.1 John Wesley I will only mention the most important cleavage that took place after the Reformation, when the insti¬ tution, the Church, was not able entirely to take in fresh spiritual life. I refer to Methodism, which arose in England, under the leadership of John Wesley, but which is equally characteristic in North America and fully developed there, as Lutheranism, which arose in Germany, has become in Scandinavia. John Wesley was not a creative religious genius like Luther or Loyola, but he received his new religious freedom and joy from Luther. Methodism is, as we shall see, the most important shoot on Anglo-Saxon soil of the certainty of salvation and religion of trust newly acquired through Luther, if we pay attention not to its organizing eagerness and skill but to its religious content. When Methodist communities arise among us in Scandinavia, it is as when we used to I I may refer to my book, Religionsproblemet i Katolicism och Protestantism Stockholm, 1910. 68 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP buy our whortleberries back from Germany in the form of wine. Methodism was in the first place what its nick¬ name (which has become a term of honour) denotes. John Wesley relates in “A Short History of Methodism’ ’ (London, 1765), how in November, 1729, he and his brother Charles and two other Oxford students came together to study the Bible in Greek and to observe their Christian and civic duties with greater strictness. No doubt they preferred to be called Bible Christians. They were quite conscious of their scrupulous observance of the claims of re¬ ligion in great and small things, ceremonies and con¬ duct. John Wesley in “Advice to the People Called Methodists” (1775), gives strictness of life as one of their characteristics. This is the external side of Methodism, its technique, which contributed to its success, and which was part of John Wesley’s strange gifts. His ability to organize religious conduct by rules and control in individuals and the community was as effective for his success as his rare power of speaking and writing, simply, briefly, in a prosaic but effective matter-of-fact way, straight to the point, vividly and concretely. In this our Swedish P. P. Waldenstrom resembled him. But Methodism has a soul too — a warm and rich soul within its forms. Something remarkable occurred to this man who, with his friends, made up his mind and began to take Christianity seriously. We shall let John Wesley relate this. See his “Answer to the Rev. Mr. Church’s Remarks on the Rev. Mr. John THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 69 Wesley’s Last Journal” (1744) . There he quotes from his diary: “After we had wander’d many years, in the new path of salvation by faith and works, about two years ago it pleased God, to shew us the old way, of salvation by faith only.” Here we hear an Anglo- Saxon echo of Luther’s sola fides, “the faith alone.” As with Luther, mediaeval mysticism had prepared Wesley’s soul too. “By God’s Providence” the “Imitatio,” the book on the imitation of Christ, had previously fallen into his hands as had the writings of Francis de Sales. October of 1735 is as important in the rise of Methodism as the above-mentioned November of 1729, for then John W esley went to America. On the ship there was a band of German Moravians or so-called Bohemian or Moravian brothers, who had been driven from Moravia because of their faith. Amid storms and general panic Wesley admired their confidence. He soon found the explanation in their firm belief in justification by faith and in their assurance of their present pardon and salvation, which his faith, anx¬ iously mingled with the doctrine of good works, did not feel. In America he met Spangenberg. The community of Brethren had revived Luther’s religious experience, with curious additions. “The full assur¬ ance of faith I had not yet, nor for the two years I continued in Moravia. Here after some time it pleas’d our Lord to manifest Himself more clearly to my soul ; and give me that full sense of acceptance in Him, which excludes all doubt and fear” (“The Principles of a Methodist,” 1747). Wesley’s religious 70 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP liberation to Evangelic trust was completed when on May 24, 1738, he heard Luther himself. His preface to the Epistle to the Romans was read in a circle in London. He related to those present what he felt. We have already heard his subsequent description of the change brought about in his divine intercourse that day in London. The fact that Moravian believers transmitted to him Luther's religious insight as to sola fides, “the faith” or “the trust alone,” which is the acuminated expression of Evangelic piety,1 did not cloud Wes¬ ley’s views. In the above-mentioned “Answer to Rev. Mr. Church” he gives an exact account of the exag¬ gerations that Moravianism or Zinzendorf was guilty of. Wesley’s bent was rather in the opposite di¬ rection. Thus we find in “Advice to the People Called Methodists” (1751, dated 1745), the realiza¬ tion of the fact that no group in the whole of Chris¬ tendom is so careful about its principles as the Methodists, no group is so eager about the necessity for thorough sanctification, none attaches such impor¬ tance to a careful observance of the rules of divine service and of life, and so on. In John Wesley there welled forth a fresh wave of spiritual, evangelic experience. It is a notable fact that, like Luther and Paul, he was misunderstood in his rejection of every statutory barrier before the open sanctuary of God’s grace. Like Paul and i See my book, “ Humor och Melankoli och andra Luther- studier ” pp. 309 ff. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 71 Luther he had to oppose antinomians, such as Ralph C’ud worth and James Bellv. V The Anglican priest, John Wesley, was a faithful son of the Church in England. She had at that time no one more devoted than he : scarcely anv one better equipped than he. Wesley did not think of forming anv new religious community; onlv of organizing » v 7 i/ C? CT religious life. In ;‘The Character of a Methodist” (1763 he mentions twelve characteristics, but rejects the idea that Methodists should be separated from others by any views, ceremonies, or any special point. There is no proof that he had “ formed special soci¬ eties against the Church." In 1768 he issued the warning: That they who leave the Church leave the Methodists too. In 1786 he contended that everv- V thing that had been done in America or Scotland was no separation from the English Church. With regard to the momentous importance of Methodism on the condition of the whole of Eng¬ land. even outside the purely religious and moral sphere, we are told in J. Vernon Bartlet’s and A. J. Carlvle’s ;; Christianitv in Historv“ that in several •r V ► respects the Methodist movement became for Eng¬ land what the Revolution became later for France. ‘‘It emancipated the individual, it represented the principle of equality, and taught men the meaning of brotherhood." Methodism was thus in the Church in England an evangelic renewal, translated from Luther’s faith into zeal for revival, moral enthusiasm, and method¬ ical enterprise. During his long life until 1791 72 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP John Wesley succeeded in keeping the movement within the Church. But the Church was too inert. It did not let itself be permeated. And what was still more unwise, it caused the separation of Meth¬ odism, so that it became a new religious community by the side of the mother Church. The same lack of wisdom in the Church has contributed in Sweden to the tendency to separation in the religious movement issuing from Waldenstrom. After Wesley’s death his own preachers helped in the change by which Meth¬ odism passed from a religious society into a separate community. But an essential part of Methodism re¬ mained inside the Church, permeating it and having a blessed effect. In the Church of England it has been called, even in our days, “the kernel of Evan¬ gelic Christianity.” What is Methodism? Is it Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed? The question cannot be answered. Or more correctly, all three questions can be answered in the affirmative — a proof of the unity of Evan¬ gelic Christianity in the spirit. On the whole, how¬ ever, we are concerned here too with the same his¬ torical course of development. A prophetic person¬ ality or a soul moved by the Gospel tries to infuse new life into the religious community which has be¬ come lethargic and has half forgotten the genuine tones of religion, but the official leaders are dis¬ couraging. Division threatens or occurs. Both sides may be to blame. In the history of religion this is the most important form of division in the Church. Strong religious forces are put outside the Church because she cannot suffer them. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 73 THOSE WHO WENT OUT Separation may have quite an opposite cause. A group departs from the historical communion in order to fulfil better the Master’s commandments. Because They Found the Church Worldly and Sinful The Church gets on so well in the world that she materializes herself. Evil spirits enter into the com¬ munion, the spirit of the world, even the spirit of schism. The Pauline Epistles already testify to this. Certain exacting spirits find the Church unholy and leave her external communion to form a communion of the holy. The Church is ungodly. We wish to be godly. The Church receives practically anybody in its bosom. We wish to be a congregation of none but the faithful. Free associations have felt the need of leaving the Church for the sake of their salvation. To them she has become a Babel, nay, a Sodom. The Franciscan spiritualists called the Pope Antichrist long before Luther, and the mediaeval zealots could not find words strong enough to condemn the decadence of the Church. But they did not separate ; at most they finished at the stake. Within Evangelic Christendom such tension has often caused schism. Many such groups consider the existence of the Church unjustified from a strictly Christian point of view. Others have gradually — not without a regeneration of the spiritual life of the Church — learned to see in the Church a useful 74 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP and proper qualification for separate, free Christian activity. Examples of separatism in consequence of the worldliness of the Church, its connection with the state, and its spiritual lethargy are seen in the Scot¬ tish Free Church, now well on its way to reunite with the national Church after its useful reorganization with increased self-government. In the main, two ecclesiastical ideals are opposed here: the national Church and the corporate Church ; or two other ideals: the strongly centralized communion and the congregational type, composed of relatively inde¬ pendent congregations. Because They Disapproved of Doctrines and Rites in the Church They find, perhaps in addition, that the Church is in error. They depart with the intention of better maintaining the doctrine of Holy Writ on a certain point. As a rule such separations start out from a more literal application of the New Testament (some¬ times also of the Old Testament, as is in the case with the Seventh Day Adventists, who wish to make the Sabbath their day of rest). The chief example of separation in consequence of some special doctrine and practice is shown by the Baptists, who in the baptism of believers see a guarantee that the congre¬ gation contains only personally decided and believing Christians, thus combining the ideal of a corporation of exclusively true believers with a literal adminis¬ tration of the baptism of adults as in the New Testa¬ ment. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 75 Reality is richer and has more nuances than onr distinctions. Sometimes it is scarcely possible to de¬ cide whether a group has separated for reasons of principle, or a schism has arisen in other ways. And indeed it is often difficult to state whether a sectarian idea prevailed at the separation, or whether division took place in spite of a confessed adherence to the ideal of Church unity, as may be seen in the scholarly contribution given by Newman Smyth and Williston "Walker to Church unity. 1 The history of separations contains edifying fea¬ tures of Christian zeal. An ardent spirit, a living apostolic faith and love, have not infrequently in¬ spired the groups that have not thrived in ecclesi¬ astical coldness and routine. The men who have hap¬ pened to be leaders of the Church have often treated budding life and spiritual revival with a callousness or unwisdom that pains the heart to think of, but, there is also often Pharisaism in separation. One is easily tempted to apply to modern condi¬ tions what from entirely different historical sur¬ roundings is related in the New Testament about the first Christian congregations. In doing so we not only commit a fatal anachronism, but we also make a law of the oldest Christian conditions in a way that offends against Paul’s view, that the letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life. Here and there Paul had friends and groups of friends whom we call his congregations. If we take the group at Corinth, it caused him especially great 1 “Approaches Towards Church Unity,” Yale University Press, 1919. 76 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP trouble. Suppose that Paul had been able to choose either a cathedral and several other sanctuaries, the religious instruction that all children and adults had to go through at Corinth, and so on, or the small group about which we read in his Epistles. Can any one doubt his choice? For my part I do not think that he would have abandoned the comprehensive community in order to form a little group of his own. This is only my supposition. And I say this in order to show to some extent why I and many others look upon our service in the Church as a sacred task im¬ posed by God in accordance with the principles of the Gospel. Because the Church Did Not Always Grant Necessary Freedom A vigorous organism consists of many small cells, which may have a more or less independent existence in relation to the whole. It is only injurious to both parts if they are completely isolated. The small, fervent groups of believers that assemble around the Word and prayer are thus useful and necessary within the Church as a whole, whether as in Evan¬ gelic Christianity they take the form of a large number of communions and associations, or, as in the Roman part of Christianity, they appear as monastic or nuns’ orders, quite as in the Indian religion. As a rule such orders really differ from one another and have in ecclesiastical history been ill-disposed to one another at least as much as the different divisions of Evangelic Christianity. For my own part I should THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 77 go a step farther and say that the free associations are necessary. Much voluntary Christian activity belongs directly to the work of the Church. She may have her own mission, her associations of young people, her congre¬ gational circles, her works of charity, her training institutions in deaconess homes, Samaritan homes and deacon (Acts 6) homes. The Evangelic diaconia (service) is sometimes organically connected with the office and administration of the Church ; sometimes not. In the latter case the diaconia belongs to a society which, like most missionary societies, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the Salvation Army, the Student Movement and many other unions and activities, quite naturally acknowledge the Church and her justification and live their more or less independent life within her dominion, as in a common spiritual fatherland. If they were to form anything resembling a religious community of their own, they would prove false to their fundamental idea. In Evangelic Christendom the free associations agree with the idea of the universal priesthood of all believers and are an incalculable source of spiritual strength. It seems to me wrong if the Church is exclusive and refuses to acknowledge voluntary work and the sepa¬ rate religious associations. It also seems wrong if such separate Christian groups are exclusive and refuse to acknowledge the Church. Many years ago an English bishop used an illustration taken from warfare. I quote it, although all illustrations taken 78 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP from the war have now become repulsive to us. He compared the Salvation Army to the light, mobile cavalry. Then come the different associations and religious communions, big and small. But if there is to be any lasting victory and possession, the great mass of the infantry is needed. In the last resort it is the Church that we depend on. Owing to mutual failings, callousness, and perhaps chiefly, nay, exclusively, to the inability of the Church to recognize the voice of the Spirit, perhaps also to ignorance and arrogance in the free associa¬ tions, it has, however, happened — would to God it wrere otherwise — that such free groups for common edification and common Christian work have been — or have felt themselves — placed in an external sense outside the bounds of the Church, although from the beginning they never had any idea of separation. in THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM (Continued) in THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM (Continued) NATIONS AS RELIGIOUS UNITS WE really need not count the national Churches as separations, for even the un¬ divided Roman Christendom of the West began in certain quarters, when national conscious¬ ness was aroused in the fifteenth century, to assume the character of national Churches, and since then it has done still more so in the arch-catholic countries. A tendency towards independence and national dig¬ nity against the dominion of Rome has appeared, especially in France, the foremost Catholic nation, and has there created Gallicanism. Ever since Huss the same condition has been among the Czechs, whose independence as a state in our days has to a great extent raised the demand for relative ecclesiastical autonomy. At the Church Meeting in Constance, 1414-18, the voting was by nations. The peoples began to discover their individuality. This process was hastened by the religious revival. Luther, who hated the formation of sects and who, with his concentration on the Alpha and Omega of religion, the peace of the soul, knew very well that too great emphasis on the external institution, whether it was Rome or a group of Christians expelled from 81 82 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Rome, might easily draw the mind from God’s king¬ dom to worldly calculation. Luther had no other pos¬ sibility, with his valuation of the calls of civic life, than to seek a framework and a protection for the congregation of the faithful and for the service of the Word in the existing organization of the State; that is, in the princes and other governing bodies. Unfortunately, on account of this, religion became in certain cases too much a matter for the powers that be and too little a matter for the people. Cuius regio, eius religio was applied by the Evangelic authorities just as well as by the Roman Catholic princes, even if the former never exercised violence like that of the contra-reformation. Sweden was one of the exceptions. After well- intended efforts to restore the Church unity of the first Christian centuries, through King John’s mar¬ riage with a Polish princess, his son and successor on the throne was a Roman Catholic. His uncle, the hope of the national party, had sympathies for a somewhat Calvinizing faith. In that situation the universal, free and Christian Council, which convened at Upsala on February 25, 1593, adopted Lutheranism in its fullest form. “The council, bishops, knights and nobility, priesthood and merchants of the realm of Sweden — as well spiritual as temporal” (so they are termed in the records), sealed an alliance in the faith for themselves and their successors. John Wordsworth, the Bishop of Salisbury, wrote in his excellent Hale lectures, delivered in Chicago, 1910, on “The National Church of Sweden” (Mowbray, 1911) as follows: THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 83 “It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the impor¬ tance of this council as a turning-point in the history of Sweden. The law historians of the country have perhaps hardly realized its full significance and its unique character. It stands out as evidence of what a national Church may do for the people when it is allowed to have a reasonable independence. There are very few, if any, parallels to be found to it in the religious history of mankind. The freedom and the unanimity of the action could only be possible in a nation so much accustomed to the idea and practice of self-government by a large popular assembly, and so ready to be swayed by enthusiasm in making great decisions at critical moments of its history.” Johannes Rudbeekius, the great bishop of Vasteras, said in 1636: “Ever since the Reformation our re¬ ligion has been ill-treated in Germany. As the prince has gone, so the province has had to follow. But, thanks be to God, we have here stood well hitherto. If the government ( magistratus ) has desired advance¬ ment, the clergy have kept the government back. The government for its part has kept the clergy in its eye for the last hundred years. — We must not adopt Ger¬ man manners if we wish to escape their ill-fortune and avoid the peril in which they are.” Now that epoch has closed. The Church in Germany sets an example to all of us in its independence of all worldly supports in its united Life and Work and in its per¬ severing and faithful energy. The national communions are geographical, not con¬ fessional units. The Scottish Church, the Swedish Church, VEglise de France, the Church of England, 84 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP the Church of Finland denote regions in which a spe¬ cial portion of Christendom has, first of all, its being, and, secondly, the task of permeating souls and the life of the people with the Gospel. Thus the national communions are intended to be provinces of Chris¬ tendom, not to dismember it. The right name is, there¬ fore, as Dr. Headlam remarks, the Church in Sweden, in England, in Denmark. No less a person than Gus- tavus Adolphus realized this with admirable clearness and created the right expression when he spoke of “the majesty of the realm of Sweden and God’s Church, which reposes therein.” He did not think at all of any royal majesty but of the majesty of the nation, as free and self-governing. “King and estates, higher as well as lower, form together, in God’s place, the royal, high majesty,” he said on another occasion. The Church of God was to him the soul, the very raison d’etre, of the Kingdom. The national com¬ munions have territorial or national or linguistic frontiers. But this is no schism. It ought to be only a necessary and useful division of labour. The na¬ tional communions really exist in the Evangelic sec¬ tion of Christendom. But when the same feeling for relative independence within a linguistic region or a national culture has manifested itself in the Roman Catholic part of Christendom too, as was observed during certain periods in the religious history, espe¬ cially of France and Bohemia, such a national indi¬ vidualization of the idea of the Church has not been injurious either to Christianity or to spiritual culture as a whole. As the Catholic preacher, Pere Hyacinthe, once did, so it has happened that some servants of THE DIVISIONS OP CHRISTENDOM 85 the Church in Prance or elsewhere applied to the Church in Sweden to belong by consecration or other¬ wise to her unbroken historical tradition without, howTever, formally entering her nationally limited service. Sympathy has been felt for the Evangelic catholicity that, rightly or wrongly, was thought to exist in our Swedish branch of Christendom. Such requests have been declined. This has certainly meant a correct application of the principle of Evan¬ gelic catholicity, for a national communion must not desire to separate itself into a sect or, as a re¬ ligious community, to make proselytes from the ranks of our brethren in faith in other national com¬ munions. We have a special mission within Evan¬ gelic Christendom. This task is essentially uni¬ versal, but our call concerns the children of Sweden and the mission regions of Swedish Christendom. He who wishes to serve his people in another Christian country is referred to the circle of our co-religionists in that country. The Church is to be the nation’s teacher. She has a holy task in the nation and for the nation. It is true that the Church has been infected by national¬ ism, nay, she has sometimes yielded to the temptation to idolize paganly the authority of the temporal com¬ munity and its policy. The name of the State Church is consequently not at a premium in the world. It is fashionable to despise the national sections of the Church or the national religious communities in com¬ parison with Rome or with separated communities. But look at what these Evangelic national Churches, 86 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP which have succeeded the civitas Dei , the cultural In¬ stitution of the Middle Ages, have helped to carry out in the sphere of religion and education. It is useful to read Emile de Laveleye’s book on this. Not in order to encourage Protestant self-righteousness, but to do a little justice, we ought to remember what our despised national divisions of Evangelic Chris¬ tianity have done to train our peoples in knowledge, in a feeling of responsibility and self-determination, and in human existence. Why is it that in Switzerland certain cantons with a Romance population have wide¬ spread literacy and general prosperity, but not others of the same race? Why is it that in Switzerland the same striking difference can be observed between can¬ tons with a Germanic population? The same com¬ parison strikes us in looking at Holland and Belgium. It is not a question of blood or race or geographical and historical conditions, but simply the influence of the national Evangelic Church. It seems to me more important now than ever to emphasize the unity of Christendom and for the sake of this unity let that which divides sink into the background. But what has been stated is a necessary tribute to truth, as it is considered modern to underestimate the achieve¬ ments of so-called national religion which certainly does not represent Christian faith and life in the highest sense. Having the privilege of addressing myself pri¬ marily to American readers I might add a few words on (a) national communions and nationalism, (b) relationship between State and Church — the ideal of THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 87 a national Church, and Free Church ideals, and (c) on the religious idea underlying the national Church. Church and Nationalism Does not the Church need to be reminded of the Gospel of Christ, of Him, Who when reminded of the blood tie, stretched out His hand and said: “He who does My Father’s will, he is My mother and My brother and My sister”? If the union of peoples is to be real the irrational idealism of such a thought must be sustained by a faith and love above the world. A commonwealth of nations deserving such a high name will never be reached by calculation and by cautious balancing of existing interests. When in the fifteenth century pagan antiquity revived for good and evil, pagan views obtained fresh reputation and influence in politics. It was revived in the period of the Renaissance especially by Machiavelli. He reckoned only with natural man. But this is of no avail; the Gospel must be taken into consideration too. A Swedish clergyman suggested that the name of Jesus should be put beneath the document of the League of Nations, if it could become worthy of such a signature, which it did not. No one can fail to realize that the idea of unity in those whom it inspires with complete earnestness has a direct Christian origin, however distorted it may have become, resem¬ bling a sort of slave-owning morality. The brother¬ hood and equality of mankind can only be derived from the Gospel, for this ideal becomes powerless and hopeless if it does not acquire its possibility and sup- 88 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP port from the fatherhood of God, from the certitude, possessed by suffering love, of a divine mercy and a vital will which is on its way among mankind. But then the aridity and false pathos of bureau¬ cratic State religion is of no avail. After all it relies ultimately on human strength. Nor is the self- satisfied egoism in the piety of separate communities of any avail, whether the community is small or forms a great clerical institution. Did we not hear from the trenches on both sides: 4 ‘We don’t care any more for those sermons on the power of our nation or on our sacred cause; we should like to hear a simple message about the Crucified and about God’s mercy ’ ’ ? In all countries there are men and women who understand that the only remedy for so much woe is love — people who in their own souls feel something of the secret of conciliation and who are therefore in their hearts not finely or cynically proud, but peni¬ tent. With the help of God they are making in great and small things the most difficult of all efforts; namely, to be able to forgive. Such Christians in all camps and countries must combine and with prayer and work make the union of nations more than a utopian dream or a bold political idea or a carica¬ ture; they must make it a faith that moves moun¬ tains. Nothing less will do than that the Christian faith shall be decisive even in politics. Now that world events have killed the unreal optimism that saw in front of it a steadily ascending evolution, we ought to see that the mediaeval Church formed a great uni- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 89 versal community, which afterwards collapsed. In the long run mankind cannot do without something similar. The universal distress has given a blow to our pride. We are perhaps ready to recognize the greatness of the despised Middle Ages. The universal State which the Church then claimed to be, formed in principle a higher form for the common life of the nations than the self-glory and balance of power of the sovereign States. For the natural man the temptation is certainly great to imagine a policy which wisely produces a state of equilibrium by letting the selfish interests and desires of individuals, social classes, and nations compete with and counteract one another. There is universal recognition of the madness and evil of this method, which has ended in terror and which threatens Europe with still worse self-ruin. Man¬ kind has been painfully taught to realize that even politics needs moral principles, that its guiding spirit is not only to be the mutual compromise and tension of natural interests but the ideal of righteousness, and still more that of love and peace, mutual help and solidarity. However far we may be from the application of such principles in the present position of the world, there is no doubt of their necessity. Politics too needs to be converted and redeemed. The civitas Dei , the would-be theocracy of the Middle Ages, was succeeded by sovereign States. As we shall see, the development was necessary. But now the world has learned with dread that the sov¬ ereignty of States is not the last word in politics, but 90 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP that they must give up something of their sov¬ ereignty for the sake of the whole and feel their membership of a higher commonwealth beneath which they are subordinated, if our entire civilization is not to perish in mutual destruction. In both these re¬ spects the Theocracy of the Middle Ages was higher in its idea than the modern system of States in Europe. But it had to perish. There were two causes. The Church did not respect the right of nationality. The nations had to live their own life. They could not be suppressed forever, mixed up, and used capriciously by Rome. During the fifteenth century the nations were aroused. They became conscious of a national life. But Rome was unable to attend to the just claims of individual nations. Now when nationalism has degraded itself and has almost become a term of abuse, so that what is national will probably be trodden underfoot with the same brutality that dif¬ ferent nationalisms used toward each other, we ought to remember that a people, a nation, is a home, a blessed home. For the human spirit and for the genuine products of higher culture, for their intimate and delicate peculiarities, national life has meant much that is good and that cannot be weighed or measured or stated. But into this home have entered devils, the policy of force, mammon and all the rest. They have changed the friendly home, open to all kind guests, into a training-school in self-sufficiency and inacces¬ sible conceit, nay, into a treacherous postern gate. But this must not conceal from us the rights and necessity of the national idea. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 91 Within the Church too nationalities have become temptations to relapse into pagan idolatry of the State. But from the great Christian family national characteristics are not excommunicated ; they con¬ tribute to the wealth of corporate life. In the sphere of religion there is no slight danger of a levelling that lacks respect for what is fine and spontaneous in the world of the heart. Religious zeal and activity, when transferred, for instance, from Anglo-Saxon to French or Teutonic soil, easily become to some extent foreign, something that remains on the surface and is never able to assimilate with the secret powers of the soul. There are many well-meaning and active men and women whose missionary zeal is rather superficial when it is a question of other countries and other parts of Christendom than those to which they belong. I remember the Scottish seamen’s mis¬ sionary in a French harbour who really wished to convert Frenchmen and Flemings. In the absence of a clientele, however, he also directed his efforts to Scandinavian sailors, but he complained to me of a difficulty. It was not so easy to collect money in England and Scotland for this object, ‘‘for they think that the Scandinavian countries already have the Gospel.” Something analogous can be said about the manner in which German Christianity has sometimes regarded other Christian nations and tried to pro¬ mote Evangelic belief. We are at a period when North America especially means and must mean still more than before for Evangelic Christianity and when many spiritual boundaries will have to be lev¬ elled. All the more important is the mutual respect 92 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP on all sides for such peculiarities as are conneetea with national characteristics. We have no use for well-meant, sweeping generalizations. But in the end it is not nations but souls that are to be saved. The other and more serious cause of the dissolution of the mediaeval divine State was that the soul was hampered. The guardianship of the Church would not release it for free and mature intercourse with God as was the intention of the Gospel. The religious needs of the individual did not get their due. The new catholicity we now aim at, as a spiritual basis for a supernational commonwealth and its legal institutions, must not commit, in a cruder or more refined form, the same crimes against personalities, human and national. Good intentions easily become troublesome when in the name of unity they naively force their own customs on others without respect for the special religious habits of the separate spiritual homes. The Church is ashamed of the excesses of national¬ ism within the walls of the Church itself. I have a dreadful anthology of spiritual war eloquence from pulpits, in different languages and from different groups and organizations in the Church. It is best to drown such spiritual sustenance in the sea of ob¬ livion. Trumpet blasts, which were then proudly blazoned forth and aroused approval, especially if turned against the witnesses of Christian unity and Christian conscience, have died away. They bring no honour to those who caused them. But one ques¬ tion cannot be repressed: Have the national com¬ munions been worse than the corporate communions, THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 93 the Established Churches worse than the Free Churches ? Such hecatombs have been sacrificed to the gods of nationalism that they ought soon to be satiated for ever, but unfortunately there seems little prospect of this. Fresh regions are delivered over to be divided by nationalism, soon giving rise to bloodshed. In some essential respects the peace is a cruel mockery against the principle of the right of nations and lan¬ guages to self-determination. Those who hold tem¬ porary sway move parts of the countries and peoples like pieces on a chessboard, according to the old, familiar methods from the day of cabinet politics. Behind the game one seems to see the devil’s con¬ tented grin. But, thank God, in other respects the peace shows that he is not sole master of the situa¬ tion. There is an attempt to hide the Moloch of nationalism and imperialism beneath all sorts of pro¬ tective disguises and to demand a place for him in the temple of Christianity and of all the virtues. In the opposed camps there are servants of the Church who in sincere and glowing patriotism have wor¬ shipped this deity to such an extent that they have wished to defend crimes that nations or individuals will have the tragic fate of bearing with them through history. The characteristic of the God of Chris¬ tianity is, as the Archbishop of York expressed it, that He cannot be made an ally but can only be the Lord. Only unconditional obedience to divine au¬ thority can abolish selfishness, individual or collective — divided according to nations or social groups — and establish peace and righteousness on earth. 94 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP When the war broke out a meeting was assembled at Constance, with Allen Baker in the chair, which did not separate without founding The World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship Through the Churches. Its activity was linked up with the ef¬ forts made before the war to bring Church people in Germany and England closer together. The lead¬ ing journal of those efforts was Siegmund-Schultze’s organ Die Eiche which with objectivity and manly calm defied the tempest of martial passions. The Goodwill has been issued by the British branch. The Dutch International Christendom and American, Swiss and Danish periodicals have arisen. These and occasional publications of the World Alliance in Swedish and other languages have vied with a series of ecclesiastical and religious papers which are inde¬ pendent of the World Alliance. I may mention among those which are worthy of great honour a fearless, acute and clear-voiced English herald for the high ideals of the Gospel — The Challenge — and Gustaf Adolf Deissmann’s justly admired Evange- lische Wochenbriefe, — in exhorting to reflection, and by zeal and dispassioned critical work of informa¬ tion, attempting to counteract the effects of war hyp¬ notism. One of the leaders of American Lutheranism wrote in the spring of 1918 in a letter that “the Church of Christ ought to have the moral courage to say a word in order to check the unchristian flood of hate and calumny which has affected the countries at war still worse than the war itself.’ ’ On the whole it must be said that the supernational, universal character of the Church has been subordi- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 95 nated far too much to the national task; or rather, the national interest has been conceived in a way that dishonours both religion and the nation. Many for¬ get religion for the nation. Do we not all acknowl¬ edge the one catholic Church ? During the war Chris¬ tians and servants of the Church in the separate countries took part in national self-adoration in a way that we should like to delete from the pages of history. And this happened quite as much, at least as much, in the Church of Rome as in national com¬ munions and free communities. However, in them all there were also those who did not bend the knee to Baal, but were a moral salt among their nations, carrying out the idea of brotherhood even at the risk of becoming isolated and reaping shame. During the world war we learned better than ever before to ap¬ preciate two communities, inspired above all others by the ideas of primitive Christianity. They exist in each of the contesting parties and are called by simple Christian names, “Friends” and “Brothers.” I mean the Quakers and the Moravians. In justice it ought to be stated that neither of these communities possesses the same solidarity with the nation as accompanies the national Church’s vocation to edu¬ cate its people. I have read more of the religious war literature than is good for the soul. Still there are also extraor¬ dinary products. We remember the German professor who related that during the whole war he read with true edification “Vers I’Evangile sous la nuee de guerre” and other meditations of Wilfred Monod. Read Abbe Felix Klein or Siegmund-Schultze or 96 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Ihmels or Giampiccoli or Donald Hankey or David Cairns or Bishop Talbot, not to speak of American examples. But I defy any one to prove that the na¬ tional communions were more distinguished for self- righteousness and chauvinism than the free Churches. At times it almost looked as if the opposite were true. In this neither group in the countries at war has any reason to be more proud than the other. National Church Ideals and Free Church Ideals The ideal of a national Church is very often con¬ founded with establishment, but it must be carefully distinguished from it. The Church has been disestab¬ lished and partly disendowed in a more or less radical way, e.g., in Germany, Latvia and Esthonia, but never¬ theless it preserves in those countries the character of a national Church. Indeed many testimonies are given even from socialistic governments to the national char¬ acter and to the national importance of the Church. It was said at the Second Constitutive Common As¬ sembly of the Evangelic bodies in Germany at Stuttgart, 1921, where the Confederation of all the LandesMrchen with additional representation of the free religious societies and of theological research was founded,1 that the ideal of a national Church is car¬ ried out in spite of the enormous and to human eyes unsurmountable hardships under the actual circum¬ stances with a wider scope and a more intense love than before the revolution, when in some places the i That Confederation of Evangelic Christendom in Germany has been definitely established in Wittenberg, in the Stadt- kirche, on Ascension Day, 1922. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 97 State Church was imprisoned in certain classes of society, a bureaucratic institution rather than a na¬ tional religious communion. Establishment can have very different forms. (a) It can be identified with the realm as in former Russia, where the Czar was also the head of the Church, a Russian translation of old Byzantine iden¬ tification of throne and altar, already prefigured in the Zoroastrian communion of the Sassanidae in An¬ cient Persia. (b) But also in the West, where Byzantinism has been broken, we can distinguish two characteristic types of establishment. In the one, parsons, super¬ intendents and bishops are wholly or chiefly ap¬ pointed from above by a king, a government or by a prime minister, and the affairs of the Church in gen¬ eral form part of the business of the government. This type existed before the war in most of the Ger¬ man Landeskirchen and still to-day in Denmark, Norway and England, though in England the recog¬ nition of the king by Archbishop Laud’s preface to the Thirty-nine Articles as “Supreme governor of the Church of England,” is not supposed to include the royal episcopacy and though in these countries the Church is acquiring more and more the means of expressing its own will. (c) In Scotland, Sweden and Finland the estab¬ lishment does not exclude self-government. The par¬ ishes choose their own divines according to a most democratic way of election. The parish council and the parish assembly are responsible also for the parish sanctuary. Bishops are elected by the clergy, the 98 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP chapters and, in two cases, also by the universities. Episcopacy is constitutional. I can in every question be outvoted by my chapter, and I hope that no ‘ 4 reform ” will reform away that authority of the chapter. The Kyrkomote in Finland and Sweden and the General Assembly in Scotland are the highest representation of the self-governing Church. In Sweden and Finland the Kyrkomote has the right of veto against the government and parliament in re¬ ligious and ecclesiastical matters. Reasons can be given for one or another of these types of establishment, which in normal cases means a public recognition of religion that is to the benefit of the State. But establishment is not necessary for a public recognition of the place of Christianity in the civil commonwealth. There is no large country where public life (except the schools) is more per¬ meated and connected with religion and the Church than in the United States, although there is no estab¬ lishment. But of course establishment means one reason more for the position of religion in society. Obligatory instruction in religion in the schools is as a rule com¬ manded by establishment. No one will fail to recog¬ nize that some knowledge about the Prophets, Jesus Christ, the Apostles, the Bible, and the great men and women of Christian belief and charity has the same right to form part of the most elementary edu¬ cation in a civilized country as knowledge of kings and presidents and battles and rivers in Asia and strange animals in South Africa. During the war a brilliant French politician quoted “a great Eng- THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 99 lish author” in a most eloquent speech. The quota¬ tion runs thus : ‘ 4 Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever would lose his life shall find it!” The rule observed in most parts of Germany after the revolution proves that instruction in religion in the State schools can be maintained without establish¬ ment. Neither establishment nor a national Church is. of course, necessary in order to teach society that no member of it must be allowed to be ignorant of the greatest words that have been spoken on this earth, or of the beautiful lives of the heroes of the soul. In this connection it is sufficient to point out that the question of establishment (of course com¬ bined with necessary freedom for the Church), and still more of the national Church, is not to be solved too lightly, without taking into account some impor¬ tant facts. The modern State feels responsible for the material and moral welfare of the citizens. Such a provision may go too far. But it also easily falls short of its task and, in particular, it sometimes makes a curious selection. When the body is concerned every quack is not allowed to dabble. Shall the citizen be freely exposed to any enterprising fisher of souls? Com¬ pulsory vaccination has checked disease incredibly. Should not society provide the finest part of child and man, the soul, with some strength and prescrip¬ tion against spiritual epidemics? Against supersti¬ tion and fanaticism enlightenment and everything else are in the end vain. Only religion helps. Modern society cannot escape its responsibility in 100 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP religion. It must give every child and citizen the nucleus of religious knowledge. Difficulties arise. It seems easier to shut the eyes and pretend that re¬ ligion does not concern society so far as it does not interfere with the law. But difficulties exist in order to be overcome, not to be concealed. Of course, con¬ fessional and individual subjectivism cannot rule that official instruction. It must be exact. Christianity is a tremendous fact in history and in men’s hearts. Every member of our civilization ought to know some of its most elementary classical expressions, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the parables. A dan¬ gerous teaching, some one remarks. True, a rather revolutionary teaching. It operates the only revolu¬ tion worthy of its name: the change of mind and life. We remember what the mighty Roi sol eil said of his chaplains: “I am always satisfied with B., but L. always makes me dissatisfied with myself.” If, with Emerson, the best service to a man is to move the ferment of discontent in him, there is every rea¬ son for modern society to furnish every citizen of different creeds with knowledge of the most concen¬ trated expression of homesickness for the ideal and of trust. It may be easier for a national religious communion to awaken or keep alive such a responsibility in civil society. But if the State knows its own interest and sees the necessity of a common spiritual authority, it certainly will not fail to teach mankind the most essential parts of the Book of mankind, regardless of possible ecclesiastical fear of immediate access to the Bible. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 101 Has the National Church a Religious Significance ? The contrast is not between the Established Church and the Free Church. The relation to the State is a subordinate matter. But the opposed ideals are (1) a communion which one joins as a corporation (such a union may therefore be called a corporate Church), and (2) a communion in which one is born, baptized as an infant, brought up — a communion that feels its responsibility for the whole people and takes into account the mysterious action of the Spirit in human souls. Is the national Church at the utmost an emer¬ gency measure which can be tolerated as such, or does it include a positive advantage? If we look upon Christianity as a redemption of the community and of humanity as well as the indi¬ vidual, we must value every possibility for Chris¬ tianity to influence society. Eminent Free Church¬ men in Scotland give as one of the reasons for their desire for reunion, the feeling of responsibility that the national Church has for society and the nation as a whole. While the Free Church mag be able to come to anchor among certain groups of society and there establish for itself a comparatively peaceful and honourable existence, the national Church has never peace of conscience so long as large groups in the nation, especially labour and the highest intellectual culture, are indifferent to the Gospel. Is there not in this anxiety and in this continually stimulating task something of Christ’s own Spirit? He too looked upon His task as being chiefly concerned with the lost sheep of the house of Israel. In the same 102 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP way the national Church has a certain definite sphere of work. She cannot settle down in peace and self¬ content within certain more or less comfortable pro¬ tective walls of private communions, but she is always impelled to bring the good message, by word and deed, to each human soul in the nation. The ideal of the national Church thus contains the social claim as well as the educational claim. Social and economic problems cannot be ignored or thrust aside by the national Church. They force themselves upon her to the same extent as she takes her mission seriously. With regard to education, it is not an acci¬ dental circumstance that the Evangelical Lutheran National Churches have maintained more generally and strictly than any others the demand for academic education for their servants. Whether the Church has the form of a private society trying to get as many inscribed members as possible, or it considers itself as a national com¬ munion, the fundamental principle is, of course, the same — God’s self-revelation to mankind. But on this foundation the building can be erected in two dif¬ ferent styles, according to the preponderance of one or the other of the two great ideas inherent in all real Christianity, never quite reconcilable, but "both necessary. The one or the other can be chiefly ex¬ pressed in the outward organization of the com¬ munion. In considering the advantages of the na¬ tional Church and of the corporate Church history must be consulted. Diverse suppositions may be entertained for different countries and communions. Individual conditions must be interpreted without THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 103 unwise generalization. The two great ideas are the subjective one — the decision and choice of the indi¬ vidual soul for itself; and the objective one — the superhuman and inconceivable working of God’s grace. One is the personal resolve of the individual. A choice is dictated between God and the world. Each person must form his decision. He cannot be called a fully responsible Christian before he has experi¬ enced a conscious choice to belong to Christ. This personal decision is the root of the conception of the Church as a society with inscribed members. We see how the first assembly met at Jerusalem. We reflect upon all small circles since gathered for prayer and instruction, frequently under external pressure or persecution. A glimpse of something similar is at times caught from Luther’s discourse on the congre¬ gation of the faithful. The same eclectic, individual¬ istic wish to assemble none but the faithful in 4 ‘Scriptural” congregations animates persons inclined to set themselves more or less both formerly and now in opposition to the Church. This desire arises from dissatisfaction at the multitude’s being indiscrimi¬ nately embraced by the Church. Congregations of that kind have their function, live their life, and, as a rule, take refuge sooner or later in the fold, which, from a deeper point of view, they never forsake. However serious and inevitable personal choice may be, it is precarious to lay the foundation of a re¬ ligious community upon human piety. The other fundamental principle is the work of God, His grace past finding out. He maketh His sun 104 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust. For a righteous or a good man some would even die — but ‘ ‘ Christ died for us while we were yet sinners” (Rom. 5:8). There is something inconceivable, even offensive, in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, and in such a daring preacher of consolation as Luther, who fear¬ lessly opened wide the door to the grace of God. But the beginning and the end in our Church is forgive¬ ness of sins. She desires naught else than to win her way with this message to souls, for she is sure that nothing else can give them joy and moral strength than to be embraced by God’s unmerited mercy. If any form of the Church symbolizes this side of Chris¬ tianity, it is the national communion. She defines no limits for her faith in Almighty God, and for her duty of caring for souls, she is only bounded by the realm. It is obvious that she does not mark off one nation and one national community from greater Christendom, but on the contrary conceives them as her home and the sphere of duty appointed to her within the universal, i.e., catholic Church of God. This conception follows the rule of limitation adopted by the Saviour. We belong to a province of Christ’s Church. But we will not count this province one whit less than the whole of our people — all who do not expressly renounce Church life in common, and never entirely escape from her sight. This broad view of the Church as concerning the nation as a whole brings its advantage and detriment alike. The main point is that in the very notion of the Church THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 105 in the State we catch a human echo of the funda¬ mental article of our faith — God’s all-embracing grace. The Augsburg definition of the Church is of course derived neither from voluntary combination in the sense of a private society or a free religious body, nor from the idea of a national communion; but it describes the Church as built upon the Word about Christ. Est autern ecclesia congregatio sanctorum in qua evangelium rede docetur, et rede administrantur sacr amenta. The Church’s foundations are laid by the Word as revealed in Scripture, sacrament and proclamation. In essence the Word is Logos, Christ. He is God’s Word to mankind, and the substance of the announcement. Rudolf Sohm maintained that “the Word” in Luther’s sense is not “the written Word completed in the early ages, but the living Word of God, nourished by the message of salva¬ tion.” It should be added that this same Word, on which the Church is founded, consists of an objec¬ tive, divine power. Such an acceptation includes in the Word all that God has done and said in the present and the past, for whosoever can see and hear. Such a foundation makes more than one type of Chris¬ tian communion possible. EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON CHURCH UNITY (a) The division brought about by the war is deep and terrible. We have spoken about the disgrace brought upon the Christian name by the inability of 106 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP the Church during the war to preserve its spiritual fellowship better and to testify better that the Cross of Christ is a unifying power that is above all dif¬ ferences. Much has been attempted and reformed, in uncertainty or in certainty, to the honour of the Christian name, in order to maintain and strengthen the bonds that unite all true disciples of Christ, no matter on which side of the sundering abyss of war they stood. We shall later in this exposition deal with this subject. The dishonour of the Church is mingled with the heroism of love and faith in indi¬ vidual Christians and groups of Christians. At the same time the war has accelerated the striving for unity in each separate nation. And, too, the common pressure from without has strengthened the solidarity in the sphere of religion and compelled those who otherwise belong to different camps to acknowledge one another and co-operate in the labour of mercy and in the care of souls. One day during the first autumn of the war a vast crowd of the Evangelic Lutherans of Saxony was congregated in Dresden to pay homage to the Catholic King of the House of Wettin, who, modest and popular, friendly and brusque, had to leave his fore¬ fathers’ castle a few years later with a drastic word. They sought for a common mode of expression. Sud¬ denly Ein feste Burg sounded forth. It was not the only time that German Catholics joined in Luther’s defiant hymn of faith. In England on the initiative of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York consul¬ tations were held in a joint committee of Churchmen and Nonconformists. The reports opened prospects THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 107 for mutual understanding and reunion of which the boldest optimist would not have dared to dream be¬ fore the war. Both these movements were to a certain extent transient. Unfortunately we already detect retro¬ gression in the mutual approach of the confessions within the frontiers of the nations. When the ex¬ ternal pressure ceases one can take breath and reflect. Old hesitations reappear. One perhaps is a trifle sur¬ prised at having recently been so ready to accede. The bold advance is not followed up. But we must not demand that the rapid pace shall be continued. The present hesitation must not be interpreted as a deadlock but as a reculer 'pour mieux sauter. (b) The effects of the war were too violent to last long. Even where hatred and intensified fear are preserved convulsively by artificial means souls can¬ not be wrathful forever. As speech becomes free and information as to the real state of affairs makes its way, warlike feelings retreat, even though it is a long time before the self-destructive antagonisms are smoothed away. In spite of peace and conferences violence still has its hour and darkness still prevails. This will not persist forever. It is not certain that we shall see the day that can bring forth humanity’s benefit from the world catastrophe. But just as certainly as long- suffering love has once more shown its blessed power, so certain is our faith that the new and purer right¬ eousness, which has been painfully branded into the consciousness of individuals and nations, will at length become a reality in the inner structure of our 108 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP communities and in the corporate life of the States. But the new kingdom cannot be conjured by fine ideas and words. It needs a new humanity. “The old Adam in us must be repressed and killed by daily repentance and sanctification, and daily a new man must arise and come forth,” for the real enemy and disturber of peace is the instinct of the wild beast that exists in every one and seeks expression in more refined or more brutal forms. Our chief effort for peace, while the restoration of real peace seems be¬ yond human powers, is, therefore, in the words of a letter from Romain Rolland written during the blood¬ shed, to save peace in the hearts of ourselves and of mankind, as many as remain faithful in love. He added: “To our last breath we shall maintain our faith in the spirit of life and love, which is God living in mankind, to-day scourged, crucified and buried, and our hope in His resurrection.” At the public meeting held in Kingsway Hall in London on March 14, 1918, in support of the Ecu¬ menical Conference, Dr. Henry T. Hodgkin told of the separation after the meeting at Constance in August, 1914, and of the assembly at Berne a year later. “I stood in the railway station at Cologne twenty-four hours before the ultimatum between our country and Germany expired, and said good-bye to Dr. Siegmund-Schultze, who since that time has car¬ ried out such noble work for English prisoners of war in Germany. As the cheers sounded in our ears from one troop-train after another, he said to me: ‘Whatever may happen, nothing shall come between us.’ It was the expression of a Christian faith that THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 109 was to unite us, whatever might happen between the countries. Twelve months afterwards it was granted to me to meet him again face to face, and the first thing he did was to take out the Moravians’ little book with a Biblical quotation for each day of the year. ‘ I want to show you the Bible verse for to-day. ’ He opened the book and found the text: ‘Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it’ (Rev. 3:8).” Are we to mention as a remarkable thing that Shakespeare was of course played during the whole war in Germany and Bach in England? Alas, there were in that epoch other phenomena against which such self-evident things stand out as just and brave. In the midst of the war, 1917, J. Vernon Bartlet and A. J. Carlyle issued “Christianity in History, a Study of Religious Development,” with mottos from Eucken and Troeltsch. The political and national contrasts will not be able to keep religion asunder in the long run. In Latvia, where the contrast has been apparent between the Latvian population and the small minority of Baltic Germans, even under the hard Russian rule, the sec¬ ond Latvian General Assembly in 1922 completed the new democratic organization of the disestablished national Church by introducing Episcopacy. After the election of the venerable Dean Irbe to become bishop of Latvia in Riga, the new bishop arose amid breathless silence after the hymn of praise, presented himself as the servant of the Latvian communion, and requested three things : That in the Church of Latvia there be no more mention of believing and unbeliev- 110 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP ing pastors, that the difference made between Latvian and German pastors also disappear, all being inspired by the same desire to serve the congregation with the gifts given by the Spirit, and that the Assembly prove such an Evangelic mood by giving also to the Ger¬ man Pastor Primarius the position of a bishop of the German-speaking Evangelic communities in Latvia, which was accorded unanimously. Meaning of Divisions It was necessary to consider that complex process of differentiation in order not to be bewildered by the great number of groups and names. Often division was necessary, sometimes helpful. Great things were achieved through division. We must not always cry over it. “There is much cant to-day about the divisions of Christendom, but it is still true, as Milton said, that ‘under the fantastic terrors of sect and religion, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up.’ We must unlearn some of our talk about ‘unhappy divisions.’ Divisions are only unhappy when tempers are sharp and awkward ; otherwise, they may be very profitable, and very happy. The alternative may be spiritual death, as history has witnessed before now. Public opinion does not necessarily mean freedom; it may be the the death of liberty, and only the spirit of Jesus can revive it. ” 1 If we get a clear historical view of the many sec¬ tions of Christendom, and if we penetrate into their 1 T. R. Glover. THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM 111 essence, the seeming confusion is changed into a variety that does not lack unity. Division reveals itself as distribution. “The more we study it (the distribution of the Church), observing how the . . . wants and capacities of men in all ages and climes are provided for, and how the parts are made to act as stimulants to each other, the less disposed shall we be to think that the work of distribution is done badly.” 1 i Horace Busknell. IV WAYS TO UNITY IV WAYS TO UNITY THREE methods present themselves: (1) the method of absorption, (2) the method of faith, and (3) the method of love. Let us first con¬ sider the method of absorption in its difference from the method of faith. These two methods may also be called the institutional and the personal, or the Roman and the Evangelic, or the method of Rome and the method of Wittenberg. A few years ago, when I was about to show on a map of the world what an American survey calls the Lutheran country, that is to say, the Scandinavian, Finnish, and Baltic North, and Evangelic Germany with neighbouring Lutheranism in Poland, Czecho¬ slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Jugo-Slavia, France, and Holland (the second and smaller centre of Lutheranism being situated in the United States and numbering twelve to thirteen millions of souls), I discovered what I have never before observed, that if you divide the rectangular projection of our small planet in two sections, Rome, Geneva, and Witten¬ berg are situated on the central line. On the right wing lies the really old and venerable world — China, with Japan and other partners in Chinese civilization — of which our Erik Gustaf Geijer wrote more than a hundred years ago : ‘ ‘ The Oriental 115 116 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP surface of rigid age may really conceal a preserved youth, and if one is permitted to guess, we should almost suppose that for these old nations who already meet our gaze in the earliest days of antiquity Provi¬ dence has great plans and wishes to be able to count upon their undestroyed strength in the last acts of the great pageant of history, just as they were the chief actors in the first.’ ’ The left wing is occupied by the new world, full of power and possibilities. Pastor Keller rightly entitles his book on American Christendom, “Dynamis.” In 1902 in a famous essay on “Americanization” Harald Hjarne called the United States a rejuvenated Eu¬ rope, where almost every European people could find its reflection in the nation that was composed of all sorts of noble and adventurous elements ; he mocked at the Grecian Europe’s mixture of loftiness and offers of friendship toward Roman America, where the pious Eneas-Pilgrim Fathers had saved the inheritance of ravaged Ilion, and he foresaw the day when “an American Flamininus would dictate peace on Eu¬ rope’s own soil and proclaim the gift of freedom and independence to rejoicing small nations. ’ ’ But neither gold nor work is sufficient for this. “He who is pre¬ pared to sacrifice his life is stronger than the heroes of the exchange and even those of labour.” This seer predicted the suicidal war of the European civilized world and the growing future of America. Near to the central line we stop a moment at two solemn names on each side, Constantinople and Can¬ terbury. During many centuries the problem of Church unity meant Rome or Constantinople and still WAYS TO UNITY 117 has the same aspect to-day to the larger part of Christendom.1 We must regret that noble and sin¬ cere efforts, such as that made by Prince Max of Saxony some time before the war, have always up to this date been condemned and in vain. When we arrive at the West I shall not formulate the problem of Church unity as a French paper did some twenty years ago, Rome or Canterbury. But there are grounds for the traditional Anglican predi¬ lection for the Orthodox communion. It has not only negative reasons in common opposition to Roman claim and domination, exalted by a romantic major e longinquo reverentia, although not seldom ideas of a closer alliance between the Anglican and the Ortho¬ dox communions are based more on abstract discussion of the ancient creeds and liturgies than on real pene¬ tration of the religious spirit and of the state of things in the East and in the West. Celebrating many years ago the great week first in Rome, then, according to the Eastern calendar, in Athens and Constantinople, it was a wonder and a revelation to my heart and to my imagination, al¬ though the fact is well-known and self-evident, that I went from the realm of dogma to the realm of the Greek New Testament, when by chance entering a Church in Athens on Holy Wednesday, St. John’s, eighteenth chapter, was chanted by a congregation still reading and understanding the tongue of the Apostles without translation. But another difference 1 See “La question de VJJnion des Eglises entre Grecs et Latins in Revue d’histoire ecklesiastique of Louvain,” 1921- 1922. 118 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP also struck me. On Good Friday God reproaches his people through the Prophet: “My people, what have I done unto thee ? And wherein have I wearied thee ? Tell me ! Is it because I brought thee out of the land of Egypt that thou hast prepared the Cross for your Saviour ? ’ ’ The only answer of contrite hearts in the West is the adoring supplication: Sanctus Deus, sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis. In the East the improperia imply no self-condemna¬ tion. No, the reproach hits the Jews; the Lord turns from them to the Gentiles: “Read that, 0 Lord, to the Jews: 0, My people, what have I done unto thee? And wherein have I wearied thee? For my loving you, you have fastened Me on the Cross. I cannot bear it any more. I shall call on the heathen nations, and they will praise Me with the Father and the Spirit. And I shall give them eternal life.” Before the improperia the antiphony invokes God’s revenge on the Jews, that He may give them according to their deeds. Have not Constantinople and Canterbury a common aversion to tyranny, extravagant claims, and a sec¬ tarian, exclusive spirit? In any case there exist also positive affinities, due partly to the fact that not only the Greek of Sophocles and Plato but also the Greek Fathers found their adopted home in England as nowhere else in the West. I do not know if I am approximately right when I try to sum up such af¬ finities under four heads : (1) A mild conservatism that takes its norm in the earlier centuries against the violently differentiating novelties of later Church history in the West. WAYS TO UNITY 119 (2) An episcopacy more akin to the ancient order of the Church than in the Roman communion. (3) Close connection with a state, a culture, a lan¬ guage; between the Orthodox communion and the sway of Greek culture; between the Anglican com¬ munion and the spread of the British Empire. (4) By the side of Rome the patriarchate in the Phanar of Constantinople and the see of Canterbury constitute the two most eminent services in the Church, if we combine history with real significance and possibilities for the future. Speaking in an earlier chapter of the conservative reform programme of Erasmus and his congenial spirits in the Church, we saw that the genius of Anglicanism is certainly more comprehensive, but less creative, than the two other views of Christianity — that of Rome (enriched by the passionate Church ideal of the Spanish monk) and that of Wittenberg. In each of these the problem of Church unity has become acute in a different way. The history and the divisions of the Church have strongly emphasized the central position of Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg, for, as a non-German and non-Lutheran writer has said, the history of mankind once wended its way along the long, broad highway leading from the Augustine monastery to the castle in Wittenberg. Mankind will never forget this journey. By rights, the whole of Occidental Christendom should have pressed forward on this road, as it once followed St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and St. Francis, but faint or foolish hearts stopped behind. The ways parted. Then new ways have been struck out. Truth 120 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP and spirit mean more than external unity. Divisions have not seldom meant fresh spiritual power, a neces¬ sity, and a progress. Is it God’s plan that the roads shall meet? Is Wittenberg, now regarded by the greater part of Christendom as a sign of discord, to become a sign of reconciliation? We touch here upon a vital question concerning the present and the future of our Evangelic com¬ munions and the whole of the Christian Church. The question of the unity already existent and the neces¬ sary reconciliation of Christendom are inevitable, yet repellent to many, as it is always unpleasant to upset what is firmly established by habit, in this case our actual short-sighted division. And, in truth, human enthusiasm can do little or rather nothing in this re¬ spect, if at the depth of our hearts we do not dis¬ cover a dime spiritual unity, and, further, if we do not see that the already existent activity of true Chris¬ tian love and conviction must needs lead to closer fellowship. Rome is the name of the strongest and most impor¬ tant institution known to the religious history of the world. Wittenberg and Geneva, on the other hand, represent the Word and personalities penetrated by the Word: the German prophet of Christendom and his follower, the great Frenchman, who developed Luther’s free and unbounded faith in God into an imposing theological system, and into a world-con¬ quering moral rule and Church organization. Will the reconciliation of the Church take place in the sign of Rome or in the sign of Wittenberg? I am not referring to a competition between two great WAYS TO UNITY 121 spiritual powers like Roman and Evangelic Chris¬ tendom. This competition should be noble, but is un¬ fortunately very often more worldly-wise, deceitful, and inconsiderate than worthy of Christian faith. Successes and failures occur on both sides. Neither conversions to Evangelic religion nor Rome’s po¬ litical successes reveal to us the true state of things. What happens in the soul of man? Spiritual things should be judged spiritually. I mean the method of Rome and the Wittenberg method. THE METHOD OF ABSORPTION The first, the method of Rome, may be called the institutional, or rather the method of absorption. There are in Christendom many little sects which in their confessional as well as institutional exclusiveness and perfection expect all Christians to think, act, and organize themselves exactly as they do. Such com¬ munions claim for themselves a monopoly of salvation and divine recognition. According to this view, the unity of the Church can only be accomplished by all the other communions’ abolishing their holy doctrines and ceremonies in order to join the only Saving sect. If the great Evangelic sections ever put forward such a claim they have long ago dismissed it to the lumber-room — now a museum — being inspired by the message of love and faith, the message preached of old by the Saviour and St. Paul and revived in the Church from time to time. But this absorbing unity is insisted upon by Rome, perhaps more in the name of the institution than in the name of the doctrine. 122 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP The classical metaphor was created by the great Rus¬ sian theologian, Nicolas Glubokowsky, when he used as a simile the Russian room that is divided into sev¬ eral compartments by low partitions. Rome wants to move the partitions so as to leave no room for the other spiritual homes of Christendom, but make them all remove to Rome. First, Such a method is in op¬ position to the Gospel; secondly, it has no chance of success, as proved by the history of the Church. THE METHOD OF FAITH We can leave the partitions standing so that each one may be at home in the familiar forms of his own service and Church life. But in every room of the Christian family the Spirit of God must accomplish His work of continual chastening and repentance through the Word, that we may all advance in faith, hope, and love, and thus be able confidently to com¬ mune with each other over the partitions. This latter method I call the Wittenberg method. “To form sects serves no good purpose, and does not help, ’ ’ said Luther in his Invocavit sermons. Luther’s act of burning the decretals and — with trembling hand — the papal bull of excommunication may be in¬ terpreted thus: “It was said by them of old time: Thou shalt live according to statutes; but I say unto you, Thou shalt live by faith in freedom and love.” When he came back to Wittenberg in March, 1522, from Wartburg to preach through his Invocavit week, fulfilling his purely spiritual calling with wonderfully courageous devotion and lucidity, then this meant: WAYS TO UNITY 123 “You who say: ‘We must break the statutes and abolish them/ you believe that you preach reforma¬ tion. But I say unto you: ‘You remain slaves of the old order of things.’ ‘No commandment must be made out of freedom.’ ‘For faith without love is not enough, nay, it is no faith, but a semblance of faith.’ ” Fundamental unity is inseparable from our duty as Christians and it belongs to our Saviour’s promise. “When the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth.” Sacred and great is our task to learn from one another, to be taught by the Spirit through each other, in order finally to become of one mind, not only in love, but also in the doctrinal ex¬ pressions for the revealed truth, and to sit all together at our Saviour ’s feet, listening to His voice with burn¬ ing hearts. Unity and Faith There is therefore something of the promise of the Spirit in the noble movement for reconciliation in faith and Church organization, begun by the American Protestant Episcopal Church, and also in the hearty appeal addressed to Christendom by the Anglican Lambeth Conference, which appeal, if we consider the divergent opinions within the Anglican Church, strikes one as a spiritual wonder. In leading and favouring that earnest movement for unity of Faith and Order, the Erasmian section of the Church, i.e., the Anglican communion, fulfils its own old tradi¬ tions. Our unity is necessary, but it must be carried out in a spirit of truth and thoroughness. We must there- 124 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP fore be glad that this conference for Faith and Order has, as writes a teacher of the Church, Dr. Ludwig Ihmels, the Bishop Elect of Saxony, “the courage to go to the bottom of things, and earnestly rings with the thought of uniting all the different Churches into one fellowship — really and intimately one in faith.” The fact — again revealed to us by Luther — that the condition for our salvation is quite free from any form of law, will remain our sacred inheritance, never to be relinquished, which — for the sake of the peace of our souls — we cannot and must not in any way belittle or obscure. As Luther writes in the Articles of Schmalkalden that these articles “concern the of¬ fice and work of Jesus Christ or our redemption,” which “can be gained by no kind of work, law or merit,” “from this article we cannot depart, nor de¬ tract anything, though heaven and earth fall. ’ ’ Here hold good Luther’s words that love endureth all things ; faith, on the other hand, is like the eye, not being able to endure a grain of dust. The Cross of Christ is a uniting power above all differences. This is a fact that we have been impressing upon ourselves and each other all through the war. But the Cross is also a stumbling-block, a distinguishing mark, a point of separation between those who keep their station at the Cross, and those who keep far away from it. It is consistent with our task in Christendom to preach this true doctrine and practice it in deeds. This doc¬ trine must needs be revealed to and recognized by the whole of Christendom. Is it necessary for me first to prove to you that only this true doctrine, the Wittenberg method, can WAYS TO UNITY 125 bring about the unity of faith of the Church? If an actual institution, a certain establishment with its statutes, were to be made a condition for reconcilia¬ tion, then such a reconciliation could only be accom¬ plished by other Christians ’ not only losing their own holy spiritual homes, but also being unfaithful to the Christian faith. Our reconciliation can only be real¬ ized as spiritual unity in the multitude of different forms of conceptions. If, in the fundamental conditions for our unity, any one is tempted to include a certain, not quite purely Evangelic, view of the ministry of the Word and its administration in the Church, I may be allowed to illustrate the position of our section of the Church by means of the words of St. Paul, often referred to by me in discussions on this subject. He wrote to those who could not understand his evangelic freedom, that he counted his descent from the tribe of Ben¬ jamin and his earnest, zealous Pharisaism to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord (Phil. 3 : 5-8). If anybody had under¬ stood him to mean that it was all the same to him wdiether he were a Sadducee or a Pharisee, uncircum¬ cised or circumcised, a Gentile or a Jew, of the tribe of Benjajnin or of any other tribe, do you think that he would have indifferently agreed? No, he was thankful for and proud of his descent and the serious¬ ness of his life. But what things were gain to him, these he counted loss for Christ. The continuity of the Church, the never broken suc¬ cession of the ecclesiastical office, is to us in my native country a precious and binding proof of the faithful- 126 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP ness of God; yet we must count it a loss for the ex¬ cellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord. As we stated at the Anglo-Swedish Church Con¬ ference in Upsala, 1909, “We look upon our Church’s special forms and traditions, not only with a pious regard which is due to an honourable heritage from our forebears, but as an endowment, entrusted to us by the God of history.” The value of episcopacy was accentuated by Laurentius Petri in his Church Ordi¬ nance of 1571: “Wherefore as this law was most useful, and without doubt proceeded from God, the Holy Spirit, the Giver of all goodness, it was also universally accepted and approved over the whole of Christendom, and has ever since been and ever must be, so long as the world endureth ; albeit abuses, which have been exceeding great herein, as in all other of those beneficial and needful things, must be doffed.” And there is in our section of the Church no room for the slightest doubt about the unbroken continuity of what has been called apostolic succession. Still no thought is here implied of a divine and un¬ conditional law. The same Church law rejects any fundamental distinction between the essence of a bishop’s office and that of a priest. Our Church can¬ not upon principle admit separate gradations in that office which is needful for her function of extending the revelation of God to the soul of mankind. Organ¬ ization displays its suitability only according as this aim is promoted. No regulation is ideal, but our his¬ tory proves, as we have seen, the immense advantage gained by the Church from episcopacy. Therefore we value it highly. WAYS TO UNITY 127 Bishop is not only a name, long established from the Bible and Christian antiquity, but it ought always to denote a spiritual task in the Church, a service, not an office, a cure of souls, no lordship over the faith or of the faithful, but a help to their joy, not an in¬ spection but a serving fraternity in the common priest¬ hood of all believers, according to the hierarchy out¬ lined by St. Paul in I Cor. 3:21-23. “Paul and Apollos and Cephas and all the other servants of the Church are yours and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” Episcopacy means further a consecration for life¬ time to an effective responsibility that never ceases and that is bound, therefore, without being asked and without asking to fulfil the cravings of the Christian conscience in the utmost degree in doing things that ought to be done and leaving undone what ought not to be done. Episcopacy symbolizes the independence of the spiritual communion; therefore the bishop must be elected, not appointed without election. And the episcopal service should be strengthened and regulated by responsible collaborators in a constitutional order. The bishop as such does not belong only to the one nation or the other, to the one religious body or the other. The Moravians sought for episcopal ordination in the Waldensian Church because they considered the episcopate as a bond between themselves and the uni¬ versal Church. Speaking of the development of episcopacy, Dr. Headlam writes: “A bishop was the officer, not merely of the local Church, but of the Catholic Church. 128 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Therefore the Church, as a whole, must take part in his consecration, and to secure this the rule grew up that not fewer than three bishops of other Churches must be present and take part in the ceremony. This rule was successful. The unity of the Church was preserved by a strong system of order. The local Church was made conspicuously a part of the whole Catholic Church, and each generation was solemnly, by the visible sign of succession, connected with past generations. As a sign of the unity and continuity of the Church the fact of apostolic succession has been of supreme value.’ ’ Still to-day the episcopal office designates a man as a responsible servant in the Church as a whole. Mani- fold and touching are the testimonies that have reached me as well as other servants of the communion during the war — testimonies telling often in the most unexpected and touching way that the bishop does not mean only a diocesan pastor of the Greek or the Roman or the Lutheran or the Anglican or the Metho¬ dist faith, but simply a responsible brother in Christ’s community. That charge represents essentially the unity of the Church. It is noteworthy that episcopacy (in the constitu¬ tional form) is being introduced in the national com¬ munions, which, since the revolution, have adopted a radically democratic order of self-government, as in Esthonia, Latvia, Saxony, Mecklenburg, etc. “It is necessarily required that there should be an organiza¬ tion (an organized service in the Church).” The value of every organization of the “ minister ium ec- clesiasticum and of the Church in general, is only WAYS TO UNITY 129 to be judged by its fitness and ability to become a pure vessel for the supernatural contents, and a per¬ fect channel for the way of divine revelation unto mankind.” The quod is necessary, but not the quomodo. All such institutions have their worth, according as they are adopted powerfully and ur¬ gently to bring the message of salvation to the souls of men. The statutes, offices, and forms of the Church are not an object in view, but are only the means to instil the forgiveness of God into human hearts, that nobody may live desolate and miserable in ignorance of the fact that he has a Father in heaven, and that — for his sake — Jesus laboured and taught and suffered and lives and reigns eternally. We thank Thee, 0 God, that Thou hast redeemed us, and lettest us serve in Thy congregation. But Thy service is a holy service. 0 Lord, sanctify our hearts, words, and lives. Make us undefiled vessels for Thy eternal love and truth. How the service in the congregation is to be organ¬ ized depends on various circumstances. Do we not perceive that such a unity can be accomplished solely through the principle defended by Luther on two fronts — the principle of evangelic salvation and freedom as against every form of statutory reli¬ gion? When Martin Luther, led by God to the painful discovery of statutory hindrances to the soul’s trust¬ ful and free communion with God, current in the Church of his time, had clearly manifested the Evan¬ gelic principle against Rome, tidings came to his refuge at Wartburg of enthusiastic adherents and 130 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP would-be consistent reformers in Wittenberg, who smashed images in the Churches and introduced into public worship changes offensive to tender con¬ sciences. That seemed to be real and effective reform. But Luther thought otherwise. He alone saw the way. The Romans said that such and such ceremonies and things are necessary for salvation. The oppo¬ nents said that to forbid and destroy such ceremonies and things is necessary for salvation. Luther said that to establish necessity, when charity and wisdom should be used, is against the sufficiency and the free¬ dom of the Gospel. Iconolatry and iconoclasm were to him equally misled. To others they appeared as con¬ trasts ; to him, as different violations of the royal law of love and grace. Our Archbishop Laurentius wrote in 1566, “The enemy cometh again with large haste, and now assaileth us upon the other flank . . . and decry us for open papists ... in that we permit in our congregations certain ceremonies which have been wont and still are among papisticals. ” Without a clear, unprejudiced understanding of this principal point of our creed, all efforts to bring about unity of the Church will be unevangelical and without any chance of success. In an appealing, well-balanced lecture at the Gen¬ eral Lutheran Conference at Greiz on August 4, 1921, — a lecture that ought to become known to all those who are zealous for the unity of the Church — Dr. Ihmels, the trusted spokesman for Lutheranism, ex¬ pressed a hope which undoubtedly is just; namely, that the old Gospel, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” will find an echo in WAYS TO UNITY 131 the hearts of all those who really and fundamentally live by this faith in Christ. When last year, in South India, the Bishop of Skara had given a lecture ex¬ pounding the characteristic features of Evangelic Lutheranism, an English Nonconformist came up and said to Professor L. P. Larsen, “I did not know that I was a Lutheran/’ What we justly call the true Evangelic doctrine is clear not only to our Pres¬ byterian, Methodist, and Reformed brethren, but also to many others. Without human intention, but by God’s providence, it occurred that all those who at Geneva decided on a conference for the united Life and Work of Christendom were clear and unanimous on that fundamental principle. By doctrine I do not mean here a system. Certainly truth is a unity and is defined in each separate point. But revelation comes to us not in the form of a sys¬ tem, but by Prophets and Apostles and by Jesus Christ, the fulfiller of the Prophets and the master of the Apostles. However highly we may esteem and admire the attempts to develop truth into a logical whole of doctrines, we must see that human imper¬ fection, one-sidedness, and limitation encroach upon the universality of any such theological structure, no matter how grandiose and impressive it may be. Con¬ sequently we cannot agree with the papacy’s modern elevation of Thomas Aquinas to the standard ec¬ clesiastical teacher of all time, although we admire, even more than Notre Dame of Paris or the Cologne Cathedral, his creation, which, especially in the Evan¬ gelic section of the Church, has been too long un¬ derestimated or unappreciated. Just as little as we 132 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP acknowledge Gothic or Roman or Norman or any other style of architecture as the only saving one can we bind the Church to one theological system. By doctrine I mean the very principle that salvation is not through man’s feeble works but through God’s potent grace in Jesus Christ. Therefore salvation must be kept pure from every statutory condition that threatens to degrade the blessed certainty of the poor soul to the uncertainty of human things and deeds. A cloud of witnesses can be adduced from Jesus and Paul to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York’s committee, with representatives of the English Free Churches, testifying, March, 1918, that “the visible unity of the Body of Christ is quite compatible with a rich diversity in life and worship.” Augus¬ tine in his Confessions says, “It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian Church that uniform traditions or rites or ceremonies instituted by men should be held everywhere.” Or in the text of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion: “It is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly alike, for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word.” “Every particu¬ lar or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.” Dr. H. K. Carroll explains the same idea in his “Primer of Church Unity.” A uniform system is not needed for unity either in doc- WAYS TO UNITY 133 trinal statements or in Church government and dis¬ cipline. It is moreover incomplete and misleading to imag¬ ine that we can solve the problem of unity with the venerable formulas of the Church. Any one who, like myself, has enjoyed the great privilege of devoting the best years and powers of life to the study of re¬ ligion, cannot help appreciating the creeds at their full value. But they do not say everything. The prob¬ lem is a different one in our days. We must not at¬ tach too much weight to formulas, however important they may be. The work of the Spirit goes on con¬ tinually in the Church and that work of the Spirit acknowledges no confessional boundaries. ‘ ‘ Thoughts are toll-free,” wrote Olaus Petri. The confessional frontiers are overstepped by differences that exist practically everywhere and by problems and ideas that occupy all the communions in our Western civiliza¬ tion. Divisions Overstep Denominational Frontiers The same divisions are to be found in every part of the Church. Differences in outlook and insight do not coincide with denominations. “In every great religious body there are representatives of every type of Christian belief.” This is true in a special sense of ideas that make mutual recognition and spiritual unity either possible or impossible. Let us take up the fundamental difference with regard to Church unity. Where is the frontier in Christendom? Where is the frontier between the greater and smaller pros- 134 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP pects for the work of unification? Especially within Anglicanism, but even in other quarters much stress has been laid on the difference between episcopal and non-episcopal communities, the former comprising the greater and older portion of Christendom, the latter including much of the best power of faith and chari¬ table activity in the Church. The joint committee of the Church and Nonconformists, which during the war put forth in England important propositions with cordial mutual recognition, started out from the same division between the episcopal portion of Christendom and religious communions without any episcopal con¬ stitution. Is the frontier really here? As between episcopal and non-episcopal Methodists? Did the Church in Esthonia or in Latvia or in Saxony cross the frontiers when their superintendents became bishops? Does it mean so much if one uses a Latin or a Greek word? Does it mean so much if one uses the Biblical term episkopos (bishop) or some other one ? No. The real frontier is within the episcopal part of the Church be¬ tween those who consider a certain external order, here the historic episcopal office, necessary for the true con¬ gregation of Christ and for the unity of the Church, and those who do not. The former favour statutory religion, the latter have an Evangelic view. The former group has its strong and consistent prototype in Rome, which identifies the Roman Catholic Church with its hierarchy and sacrament with God’s king¬ dom on earth, and which must therefore consistently demand that every true Christian shall abandon his own spiritual home and range himself beneath the WAYS TO UNITY 135 dominion of the Pope and his bishops. But there is something of the same spirit wherever episcopacy or the unbroken succession of bishops through the ages is made an essential condition for the unity of the Church. A difference must be made here between what is precious to us but unessential and what is essential, in other words, between that which belongs to God’s other good gifts and the one thing needful. Quite the same frontier passes through that part of Christendom that has no bishops. I have no reason here to enter in detail upon the different kinds of Church organization. There are different types in the communions that have no episcopacy. The two most important types are the Presbyterian, based on elders, and the Congregational, based on the separate con¬ gregations combined in the form of an association. All these differences are secondary. If it is held that the New Testament prescribes a certain definite or¬ ganization of the Church, then one is on the same side of the boundary whether one wishes to have bishops or elders or the form of union or papal autocracy. Within the non-episcopal part of Christendom too the frontier passes between those who demand a certain external form and those who say that no special form of the Church is prescribed in the Word of God. One can adduce reasons of tradition and experience for both these forms. The one says : My form of com¬ munion best serves Christ’s Gospel. The other says: No, my form of communion is the best vessel for the truth. But they can both maintain that the true con¬ gregation of Christ is found in one as well as in the 136 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP other. The revered Baptist leader, Dr. J. H. Shake¬ speare, writes, “I regard it as a waste of time to seek to bring about reunion on any other than the basis of constitutional episcopacy/’ although episcopacy does not exist in his section of the Church. The unity of the Church can be brought about without her organ¬ ization’s being the same everywhere. One can find advantages and disadvantages in every form of Church organization. None is ideal. God has led us in different paths. Each has special experiences to preserve and make use of. Unity ought not to be uniformity. It would then be poorer. It is to be noted in this connection that a Scottish Presbyterian insists on the unbroken connection be¬ tween his elders and the Apostles by means of the laying on of hands just as strongly as an Anglican or Roman Christian insists on the apostolic succession of the bishops. Nevertheless they can respect the freedom of the Gospel and say, “Our form of com¬ munion is tested and found good, but it is not neces¬ sary for the true congregation of Christ, not neces¬ sary for the unity of the Church.” They are then on the same side of the frontiers as we are. For the frontier does not pass between episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational organization, not be¬ tween national Church and corporate Church, not be¬ tween Established Church and Free Church, or what¬ ever different forms and connections the communion may have in different quarters, but the frontier passes straight through all these different groups. It divides those who consider a certain external system necessary from those who pay homage to the freedom WAYS TO UNITY 137 of the Gospel. The frontier passes between statutory- religion and spiritual religion. Also other and still more important divisions overstep confessional fron¬ tiers. The real differences in the realm of religion are not separated by creeds. On the contrary they are to be found inside the same confessional pen. WTe need not go so far as to remote ages or communions of the his¬ tory of religion in order to find the disparity between lower and higher religion, or even between primitive religion and civilized faith. Both are near at hand everywhere in the larger Christian communions. But also rich diversity of temperaments lives in almost every one of the more important religious bodies. Swedenborg was right in seeing together in the other world men from epochs and countries, dis¬ tant in time and space, whose souls were intimately akin, while even pious people closely connected in creed and worship remained strangers by tempera¬ ment. I may feel so quietly and instinctively related in spirit with, say, an Orthodox priest or, say, a thinker who is not supposed to be a Christian, that we understand each other without saying anything and feel comfortable together meditating in silence, while I can be inwardly, in the heart of my being, rather a stranger to excellent men and women of my own creed and endeavour. Thus keeping faithful to truth we cannot consider formulas and modes of worship as the division par excellence in the Church. We must dig deeper into reality. 138 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP The Same Problems Occupy the Church in All Its Sections Some concrete instances may be more eloquent than a general discussion. Historical investigation of Holy Writ transcends confessional frontiers. For my part I am not ready to subscribe without reserve to the eschatological interpretation of the kingdom of God in the Gospel. But the history of that interpretation in our time is instructive. It proves that denomina¬ tions do not mean Chinese walls. Biblical research, which has given fresh insight into the history of revelation, numbers in modern times the Roman Catholic Richard Simons among its fa¬ thers, but its really great work was accomplished by Evangelic investigators. It is true that the Roman Papal Catholic Biblical Commission has decided that Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch, that the prophet Isaiah has written chapters 40-66 of the book called by his name, and that the statement of the first Epis¬ tle of John about the three who bear record in heaven is genuine. But clear views cannot be repressed by peremptory decrees. The main point is that the oracular view of Holy Writ has given place to an in¬ sight into the essence of Christianity as a revealed religion or a prophetic revelation in history. One discovery proceeded in this way. Johannes Weiss examined in the nineties the question of how our Saviour expected the catastrophe, the advent of God’s dominion by force, immediately or soon, and how this expectation explains much in the Gospels that was previously dark or contradictory. He came WAYS TO UNITY 139 into conflict with the accepted view, especially with the rationalizing explanation of the kingdom of God as only an ideal entity. In other respects too there has been a desire to alter the proclamation of Jesus according to the measure of ordinary human under¬ standing. His eschatological expectation is offensive, but perhaps leads us to a deeper view of the nature of this world and of the Christian ideal. The eschatological view also occurred to the German the¬ ologian Bousset, the French Protestant philosopher Renouvier, and others. In the more thorough form it had obtained in Johannes Weiss it influenced a bril¬ liant young scholar at Strassburg, Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher, theologian, virtuoso on the organ, musical theorist, who was a medical missionary in Congo at the outbreak of the war. He worked out the theory with artistic and paradoxical power. Every one had to listen. Now the eschatological ex¬ planation has departed from the sphere of German theology. Loisy in France, in his exposition of the conscious¬ ness of Jesus, gave a well-balanced proportion to the expectation of the impending transformation of the world. In England her fheologus laureatus, Sanday of Oxford, was convinced and with his ecclesiastical authority endorsed the eschatological Gospel and fol¬ lowed the subject up in pulpits. But the most re¬ markable of all was what happened through George Tyrrell, the religious genius and martyr of Modern¬ ism, the Roman Catholic apologist and romanticist. As a good Catholic he took this offensive interpreta¬ tion of Jesus ’ proclamation of the divine kingdom; 140 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP namely, that the historical vision of the Saviour was narrowly restricted by the final catastrophe, and with it polemized against what he called the rationalism of Protestantism. In his posthumous book on 4 ‘Chris¬ tianity at the Cross-Roads” he made this expectation, irrational but concentrating in every way within the personal sphere of life, appear as an utterance of Catholic faith in the supernatural against the levelling rationalism of Protestant theology. The situation was really moving. In its content Tyrrell’s exposition is powerful, religious, and, in my opinion, essentially correct. Only the indication of its origin has a false label attached. Tyrrell had learned the matter from modern Protestant research, which he scorns. And as regards its affinity with the Roman spirit, the author was excommunicated like Loisy. The instance shows how research even in such central parts of the Christian conception passes beyond the frontiers. This is not the place to explain why the eschato¬ logical view struck me thirty years ago as elucidating in a somewhat clearer way to us than before the con¬ centration of our Lord on every actual moment of His life and on every human being whom He met, and His heroic calmness. A feeble man would have hurried and become nervous. Christ became collected and quiet, just as the engine-driver on the express train, the general in the decisive moment of the battle, or Father Perry, who observed in a South Pacific station the transit of the planet Venus with a still more perfect lucidity and care because he knew that a mortal fever, which took him shortly before the transit, would kill him in a little space of time. WAYS TO UNITY 141 We easily forget. Otherwise the apocalyptic years through wThich we are still passing might make it easier for us to understand the Gospel, as well as to give us an unexpected and terrible freshness in the understanding of the small apocalypse (Mk. 13) and to St. John’s Apocalypse. Some years before the wTar I had a delightful talk with Mgr. Duchesne about eschatological and catastrophical theories in the his¬ tory of religion. Suddenly an earthquake disturbed his exquisite smile. The fine ironist rushed in fear to the wall. When in about a minute the erratic caprice of our generally reliable ground was over, and we took up the conversation again, the subject seemed to the great scholar as well as to myself less mythical. The earthquake of history in the last years ought to make the short horizon of the eschatology in the Gos¬ pel more real to us. Such considerations have nothing to do with denominational divisions. The Suffering God God’s voice is heard everywhere by listening hearts in spite of confessional walls. Our generation is called for in order to get deeper insight into the secret of God’s work. Some fundamental facts be¬ longing to revelation itself had been obscured, but began in our generation to rise to new importance, when the great war violently made the problem acute. Rationalistic piety would purify the comforting belief in God’s providence and just ruling of the world from such terrible old dogmas as those about evil, vicarious suffering, and atonement, dogmas aban¬ doned by enlightened humanity. The modern dogmas 142 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP have failed. Many thought that our civilization went by itself comfortably to heaven. Now they see that it goes to hell, that it must take another path, in order to get saved. Is evil real ? The Christian strug¬ gle against evil must be more recognized than it was before the wrar in modern thought. At the same time the message of the Church about atonement, vicarious suffering, redeeming love, and the enigma of sacrifice has become evident as never before to many minds that despised such Christian ideas as foolish antiquities and that now see that those experiences touch the very deepest realities of life. Must we not go a step further? A suffering God seems to be a contradictio in cidjecto. But our poor intellect is unable to grasp truth and reality other¬ wise than in ultimate postulates which must be eagerly scrutinized by reason, but which perhaps in the funda¬ mental issue cannot be but approximately systema¬ tized. Mankind has long felt that suffering is concerned with God’s own being. Long before Moses, some thou¬ sand years before the prehistoric chieftains of the chosen people, when the patriarchs pastured their herds in Canaan, the temples and the vernal landscape of Babel resounded with cries of distress and dirges for the death of Tammuz. When, five thousand years afterwards, we read Zimmern’s interpretation of the fragments remaining of the women’s lamentations on the death of Dumuzi, “the real son,” or Adon, “the Lord,” it still grips our hearts. Then they rejoiced over the return of the god to life. The whole thing was intended to promote the growth of vegetation. WAYS TO UNITY 143 But a human feeling of the divine mystery of suffer¬ ing was mingled in it, and we hear the echo in many places, from the melancholy notes of the flute at the Mexican human sacrifices to all the rites in the Medi¬ terranean countries which were concerned with the death and resurrection of the young, redeeming god, and to the Balder sage of the North. What sort of a wild horde passed along the streets of Rome at the time of year that later became Easter? The priests lacerated themselves till the blood ran, and eastern instruments accompanied clamorous lamentations. It was Attis who had died to live again. Now comes the miracle. Some of these rites were adopted in the Christian Church. There was weeping and wailing, and at length the world got for Good Friday a music that reveals the divine secret of suf¬ fering better than words. But it was not a young god who died and came to life again with the spring. It was a man of flesh and blood. It was one who had been crucified at Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth, an his¬ torical figure, Who now gathered to Himself the lamentations throughout all the thousands of years, among all peoples, and in all languages, for the death of the God. The passion was transferred from the cult into history itself. This is a wonderful connection. We link the New Testament to the Old Testament. The Epistle to the Hebrews ingeniously and profoundly devotes to Christ the whole sacrificial system of Israel. A day will come when the science of religion will be able to ex¬ plain the far broader connection between the above- mentioned lamentation ceremonies and our Saviour’s 144 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP death and resurrection, as a prophecy and a fulfilment, as a type created by the longing and presentiments of souls until it became flesh and blood. The genuine Old Testament is only one. But beside it there will be as many secondary Old Testaments to the one New Testament, as there are religions on the earth. Then we shall see that, strangely enough, Christ fulfils even the apostate lamentation ceremonies that, according to Hezekiah, eighth chapter, the women carried out with weeping and wailing for Tammuz at the temple of Jerusalem, and that the Roman soldiers indicated an inner connection when they mockingly arrayed Pilate’s Prisoner as a sort of spring king with a mantle and crown. However often my thoughts and researches have gone and go in this direction my amazement is still just as fresh and great. I can never cease to medi¬ tate that our species from the most remote times have transferred suffering into the essence of divinity, until even an instrument of death became the su¬ preme symbol of religion — the Cross. The path of suffering is the path of God. In these days, if not before, suffering forces its way into our conception of life. In face of the nameless woe caused by the World War it would be cruelty to take refuge in the idea of a purpose and say that this had to happen so that from it there should come a blessing born of pain. But by a divine miracle distress actually does bring forth a goodness, a mercy, a reconciliation, an ethical value, a purification, a turning to essentials that was unsuspected before. No view of life can now hold good if it excludes suffering. WAYS TO UNITY 145 During persecution the Russian Church revealed qualities that many did not credit her with. When once the vicissitudes of Russian religion during the terror are known it is certain that this great and little known part of the Church will draw the heart of the West nearer to it. The story of martyrdom in Finland and the Baltic states is already known in its main features, and we already discern something of the harvest that has begun to spring forth from the sowing of suffering faith. Quite close to us things have happened that surpass in cruelty the persecutions in heathen Rome. But at the same time inhumanity has revealed the superhuman, calm heroism of divine confidence and faith and has added new and unforgettable leaves to the white-red book that contains the history of suffer¬ ing in the Christian Church. The texts in Isaiah, fifty-third chapter, about the sufferings of the Lord’s servant have upheld Poland in her ruin, until, incredible as it may seem, the day of resurrection should come. No people has expressed the Redeemer’s passion in art and in music as have the Germans. The German passion music is, of its kind, the greatest addition that has been made to the documents of revelation in the Old and New Testament. If I were asked for a fifth Gospel, I should not hesitate to name the inter¬ pretations of the secret of the redemption that reached its climax in Johann Sebastian Bach. I had previ¬ ously studied the Passion of St. Matthew and the Mass in B minor. When for the first time I heard a dignified performance of them in St. Thomas’ 146 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Church at Leipzig, I obtained a deeper insight than before into the mystery of the Passion and the In¬ carnation. One need not be a Deutero-Isaiah to venture to predict that in a people with such depths of soul, such capacity for work, and such passion music, the fruits of suffering, if accepted with attentive obedi¬ ence to God’s meaning, will ripen to regeneration for the fatherland and benefit for the world. God suffers. May one venture to state: God Him¬ self suffers? Is it not a heathen idea? Paganism knows how to relate with ceremonies and words: a god, the god of life, the saviour-god who suffers and dies, arising again to a new life. For paganism the idea of a god’s suffering is easier because it knows many gods. Some of them may reign in blessed peace while another god suffers. For Christianity, as for all monotheism, it is difficult. There seems to be a contradiction. History and revelation show us how Christ, God’s supreme Son, the real Revealer, suffers and dies. Dogmatics, that are more well-meaning and eager than Biblical and sound, have emphasized the divinity of Christ in a metaphysical way which incurs the risk of crucifying God the Father and of transforming Golgotha and Jesus’ cry of anguish, Eli , Eli , to a sort of sham manoeuvre in divinity. The Christian Church has always rejected the con¬ clusion from the dogma of the divinity of Christ, that God Himself, the one, sole Almighty, suffers. But still this idea comes forth again in new forms, al¬ though it was already rejected by the Church in the WAYS TO UNITY 147 so-called gnostic systems. How can we really believe and experience the living God in history and human life without imagining Him as suffering, when life and history are so full of suffering, or, more correctly, when what is new, significant, and blessed in history seem to be incapable of realization except through pain and death ? Pascal saw the exalted Saviour still suffering in pangs of the Cross in heaven. Before the great war in our own times the doctrine of God ’s suf¬ fering had thrust itself forward in the minds of Wil¬ fred Monod and other Christian thinkers. The ques¬ tion has been asked, first silently and tremblingly, then openly, Does God suffer with us and for us? And the answer has come, Yes. Amid strife and pain God realizes Himself and His dominion over the in¬ sensible order of nature and the resistance of evil and sloth. It is a troublesome and painful path. But if we obey the voice in our soul we have no choice. We must surrender to God in unconditional submis¬ sion. We must ally ourselves with Him, take part in His struggle and pain, and, through the hindrances of nature, distress, and sin within us and without, be helped on by Him to His kingdom. Such an idea is incompatible with the First Article of our Confession of Faith. But it has deep roots in religious aspiration and in the Gospel. That is why the sacrifice of the Mass is so powerful and attractive, in spite of its incompatibility with our Lord’s teach¬ ing. It is difficult to give up the pagan idea of a sacrificial priest. With the priest is connected the sacrifice. When it became impossible to sacrifice ani¬ mals, the idea was developed, contrary to the Epistle 148 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP to the Hebrews and the whole New Testament, of bloodlessly repeating Jesus’ sacrificial death. It is not a Christian idea. But why has the sacrifice of the Mass such power? Why does it attract so many, even outside Roman Catholicism? The answer is obvi¬ ous: There is a religious idea behind it. God has a share in our suffering. The truth about God’s mysterious path has been expressed in ways that are not satisfactory. Is God Himself involved in strife, suffering, and pain? This idea shows now, as in the old gnostic systems and in all the forms in which it appears, how incapable our thought is of conceiving and expressing God’s being beyond the testimony of the revelation, that is above all, of Christ. But a groping and dizzying concep¬ tion of God Himself as suffering and struggling in the development of the world seems to me to come nearer to the strange, nay, tragic, conditions of this existence and the essence of Christianity than a view that arranges both God and the course of the world in a perfect harmony, where everything fits in splen¬ didly from beginning to end. It may be a pity that we were not there to arrange the course of the world, but, as it is now, God’s path must be through suf¬ fering, as must that of His congregation. For thou¬ sands of years the spirit of man has thought of and expressed salvation and expiation through suffering in passion rites, until passion was no longer merely a cult. The Man of Sorrows came, He Who was also God’s sanctified, the Lord of joy and conquering trust. In any case our Christian faith transfers suf¬ fering quite into God’s being, provided that we seri- WAYS TO UNITY 149 ously believe that Christ is the real divine revelation. The mystery of God’s suffering occupies every section of serious Christian thought to-day. The Longing for the Unconditional The study of religion and theology will always re¬ gard the epoch in which we are still living as one of the great ages of religious research. No gain has been more obvious than the historic view itself. Stumbling stones have been removed that the Church and reason in earlier periods tried to get rid of in vain through symbolic interpretation. It is difficult to overrate what the historic view on all such phenomena that we include in the name religion means for a just ap¬ praisement and a deeper understanding of God’s intercourse with man. But the historic view is not the last word. The question in the young school of bold religious thinkers and students is not how to understand everything in its relative and historic role, but to grasp the absolute itself. Heinrich Scholz rightly writes that it is not easy to find two things more remote from one another than religion and the doctrine of relativity. One feels with Bishop Butler the absurdity in a view: “As if religion were intended For nothing else but to be mended.” A brilliant young German scholar calls this new trend in theology Das Heimveh nacli dem TJnbedingten 1 — 1 See “ Die Gewissheit der Christen-Botschaft,” by Otto Schmitz, Paul Althaus, Karl Girgensohn, Berlin Furche-Ver- lag, 1922. 150 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP “The nostalgia for the unconditioned. ” This new direction appears most strongly in young theological Germany, where it has a centre in Leipzig, and where Friedrich Heiler’s concluding words in his great study of prayer are characteristic. The Craving for Unity A turning to the unconditioned and absolute im¬ plies a sharpened sense for an exclusive unity of all true believers. The necessity of unity is produced and felt more deeply by the lover of absolute truth. The longing for Church unity and the apprehension of its necessity have been alive in our generation and strengthened beyond the most sanguine expectations through the divisions of war. Notwithstanding cruel enmities, hatred, and crimes in war and in peace, I think that human solidarity has never been so evidently and deeply recognized as now. Hard facts have turned many hearts to the essence of the Gospel. They constrain the Church to contrition and repentance and to loving service. But they also give her wonderful tasks. Therefore we considered it as a holy but most difficult duty to make for a common confession of the Church of the supernational importance of Christ’s Cross as a unifying power already during the slaughter — the killing of the fittest — on the continental altar of Moloch worship ; will God change it into a Golgotha ? What is it that unites us? The answer is: The imitation of Christ. It certainly ought to be a suf¬ ficient communion that we all, collectively and indi¬ vidually, wish honestly to follow in the footsteps of WAYS TO UNITY 151 the Master, to be inspired by His love and guided by His strength. If we wish to be serious about following our Saviour, can we then still go in separate flocks? No, in common works of charity we will approach one another, because we approach the Saviour. So we shall probably see by degrees something 'more of the one Holy Church which we confess, in which we be¬ lieve, to which belong all hearts that believe in Christ in all Christian communions, and which will once stand eternalized before the Throne. But there is something else that unites us as Chris¬ tians — a faith, a certainty about things that are not visible, a conviction about that which no human un¬ derstanding can devise or conceive. When we are to express the common and inalienable .features that every one assigns to his Christianity and cannot separate from it, we easily enter upon doctrines, rites, and orders that keep us asunder. Tragic is the fate of the sacrament of fellowship which has become to many queer Christians a shibboleth of separation. But here we should of course find what is common, a faith that unites all the true disciples of Christ, without any difference between confessions and theo¬ logical schools. We all believe and live in the Father¬ hood of God. God, the heavenly Father, in His un¬ fathomable mercy and unfailing providence, is our sure refuge, our security. It ought to be enough. He who has God has everything. “Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” Yet as Christians we cannot stop even here, when 152 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP communion of Life and Work is concerned, still less when the bright faith in God’s goodness has been mercilessly disturbed and troubled by the world crisis, even in those hearts that did not find long be¬ fore the ordinary way of life incompatible with such optimism. I hear that at first the war separated the pious country-people in certain parts of Italy from the Church and threatened to destroy faith: If the Good and Almighty God we have learned to believe in really existed, this could never have happened. But then the need of the heart asserted its claim, for man must abide with God. He has no choice so long as he wishes to remain a human being. Only in the presence of God is life possible to endure. When we have to express briefly what unites us against the schism and disintegration of wTar, not merely as believers and religious beings, but as Chris¬ tians in the real sense, two expressions have chiefly been used. They remind one of the difference of which Chantepie de la Saussaye used to speak when he said: “The Anglicans have a theology of Incarna¬ tion. We have a theology of Redemption. The Anglicans have learned from the Greek Fathers to group religion round Incarnation.” The difference in the points of view and methods of expression that this far-sighted historian of religion observed is char¬ acteristic for Christendom as a whole and can be used to some extent to denote the two great basic tend¬ encies within positive Christianity. The Word has been made flesh. Into our species entered a divine ferment, akin to the image of God that is latent and deformed in mankind. Specula- WAYS TO UNITY 153 tions upon this run the risk of becoming absorbed in human and gnostic wisdom instead of keeping to the experience of faith and divine' intercourse. But the mystery of Incarnation contains in nuce the whole process of redemption, just as surely as in the wTeak embryo each separate human life is already essen¬ tially determined beforehand in its main features and in its consequences. From the Incarnation can be derived the whole of God’s continued creation and work in the world and the whole of our individual and social task. We have, however, without thinking of any devia¬ tion, preferred, nay, let me say we have without any choice, without any consciousness of being concerned with a nuance or even of a difference in Christian views, unconditionally by our own Christian experi¬ ence and by the narrative of the Gospel and the spirit and words of Holy Writ, been brought to Christ’s Cross and there found what unites us, a unity so potent and essential that it surpasses all earthly dif¬ ference. What does the Cross tell us? The Cross means suffering — incredible, shameful, unmerited suf¬ fering, the offence of suffering, but also the mystery of suffering, for that suffering, that destruction, that shame is in the service of love and reveals God’s love more deeply than all talk of the heavenly Father’s goodness and providence. Just what is offensive, just what threatens to trouble and disturb consolation, that is placed in the service of love. A love that lives and suffers and dies, not for its own sake, but for the sake of others, lets us suspect something of the mys¬ tery that is called God, God’s desire and powder to 154 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP redeem in spite of all and through all, God’s vast and mighty activity. The meaning of life is taken from God’s own being. Jesus Christ has taught us this meaning of life with His life and teaching and suffering. We must realize it in the united work of Christ’s congregation. This work obtains its strength and its unity from vital communion with the crucified Christ and through Him with God, Whom we rightly know and can trust through the Cross alone. Somewhat in this way perhaps might be indicated the spiritual communion that is at the same time a common, superrational, conquering Christian faith above the things of this world, and the motive and guidance for a united Life and Work to which Christ’s congregation is now summoned more insist¬ ently than ever by God’s own authoritative voice. He is our Peace, Who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity. During these last years have not the affiliations of Christ been filled up richly enough by martyred souls and bodies, in order to abolish enmity and break down divisions that prevent us from becoming truly one in His body which is the Church ? (Col. 1:24). We see how intimately the aching and comforting mystery of the Cross, emphasized to our Christendom as never before, is connected with the unity, which already exists in Spirit between all sincere Christians as well as that which is hourly wanting in the Church on earth. Those three great problems — the enigma of suffer¬ ing love and expiation, the craving for the absolute WAYS TO UNITY 155 and unconditioned in religion, and the faith in unity — are lessons taught by God without difference of con¬ fessions and Church organizations. They prove that creeds and venerable formulas are not sufficient for the settling of our problem, but that Christian thought is bound to dive afresh into the depths of actual expe¬ riences in order to find a unity that formulas and external divisions may conceal. A method which makes too much of formulas and institutions is not able to solve the problem of Chris¬ tian fellowship. Faith must be conceived in a deeper, more real, and more Evangelic sense in order to create unity. THE METHOD OF LOVE I have tried to indicate the method of faith for unity of belief. In the third place I will now — after the method of absorption and the method of faith — - show you a still more excellent way: the path of love. This path is called Christian co-operation. This method is fundamentally practical, not theoretical. All sincere disciples can join in it. Even those who cherish the hope of absorbing all fellow Christians in their own flock can enter with us upon the path of love without any prejudice to their principles. We cannot afford to remain separated and in the state of unnecessary impotence, caused by our separation,1 up 1 What Mr. Lloyd George said to Dr. J. H. Jowett: “If the Churches of England were united on anything, no government could withstand their will” — is still more true of a united action of all the sections of the Church in every country. 156 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP to the time when we shall be truly united in faith and Church organization through the true doctrine of Evangelic freedom. Listen! Cries for help! The whole party is in danger of being drowned. People come running up. What is to be done? How get to their rescue on the thin ice? A chain must be formed, life-buoys and ropes must be brought. All must work quietly and systematically; otherwise the help will be in vain. Then something unexpected happens. — “ Excuse me, my dear sir, my name is Smith. What’s your name, and what opinions do you hold ? Where do you come from? For whom did you vote at the last election?” The introduction and the discussion on the views of the one and the other take so long that the help comes too late. Is not thus a double offence committed? (1) Who has time for such things when one’s neigh¬ bour is in danger of death? (2) Besides, leave me and my faith alone. What business is it of yours? Do not interfere with things that concern my heart alone. Or have we not enough in common, is there not sufficient evidence of our mutual fellowship in the fact that we are both willing to help, nay, that we are both prepared to sacrifice our lives to help? Our generation is verily like one drowning. Many seek nobly and courageously to save themselves and others from ruin. Many give the best assistance in their power. The different Christian faiths and com¬ munities do not always behave quite so senselessly as described above. The distress of the world has brought into closer contact those who otherwise wander separately, although they all want to follow WAYS TO UNITY 157 in the Saviour’s footsteps. But for Christian co-op¬ eration it has often been made a rule — either under¬ stood or clearly expressed — to ascertain uniformity of creed, before the members of Christ’s Church can agree to work whole-heartedly together in His name. Leave to each communion entire freedom to regulate its own faith and its own affairs. Is not our sincere yearning to follow the Lord enough? Is it necessary to go into the question of our different creeds, views, and customs, when the great thing in common really exists in our hearts; namely, obedience to the voice of our Lord? Our own work in His service as well as the distress of our generation renders systematic co-operation imperative. Otherwise we are in danger of wasting noble strength and experiencing the bit¬ terness of unnecessary failure — unnecessary because the lack of confidence and clear, mutual understand¬ ing, free from vain confusion and unseemly interfer¬ ence, produces unnecessary weakness. Organization is not the Important Thing As I shall have to speak about organization in this context, I will make a few introductory observations in order to explain as clearly as possible that organi¬ zation is by no means the most important thing. It is commonplace, but not unnecessary, to say that there are more important things in Christianity than the most excellent establishments and institutions. If too much importance is attached to organization, we run the risk of being enticed into the prison of statu¬ tory religion, abandoned long ago by Jesus, Paul, Luther, and others, but still attractive. 158 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP The Word of God Means More Than Organization The Word means more than organization — the Word that was made flesh. Did onr Saviour found a religion or perhaps even a Church? I cannot count Him as one of the founders of religion, but many consider Him one. They refer to the twelve disciples, whom He chose, and whom He appointed His fellow- workers. Christ’s words to Peter are perhaps inter¬ preted as the completion of this supposed organiza¬ tion. But even if we look upon the band of disciples as the first form of the Church, we find, however, that neither this body as a whole, nor any single one of the twelve made members of it by the Saviour, ever meant nearly so much to the future of Christianity as did a man outside the circle of the twelve — a man who did not belong to Christ’s supposed organization, but who had received his mission and his impressions of the Redeemer in a purely spiritual way. Paul laboured more abundantly than they all (I Cor. 15:10). If we desire to speak of a founder of the Christian religion, our thoughts might go to him. But even with regard to his importance to the world, we must bear in mind that this was fundamentally due to his personal and spiritual influence, and only in the second, or perhaps only in the tenth place, to the organization he introduced or improved in the communities. As a second example we will take the man who has had a deeper influence on the West than any man after Jesus. In distinct contrast to those who had WAYS TO UNITY 159 separated from tlie Church in order to form purer religious communities, Luther had, as we have seen, at the beginning of his prophetic career, no thought of forming a religious community. The necessity of organization was forced upon him through Rome’s impotence to absorb his message. It is true that Luther has left evidence of ingenuity also as an or¬ ganizer — a fact which has, especially lately, been emphasized; for instance, his ideas on the duties of a bishop, ‘as expounded and put into practice by him, deserve attention wherever in Evangelic Christen¬ dom this office exists or is about to be founded, whether, like Luther, we call it by the name of visitor, or prefer other names, such as president, superin¬ tendent, or whatever other temporal titles we may be able to invent, or whether we venture to use the Biblical and old-established word bishop. But, on the whole, Luther had no inclination to organize a new religious community. His calling was purely spiritual. Peace within, perfect peace, was the object of his work. With outward establishments and in¬ stitutions his work had little to do. The Spirit Means More Than Organization and Diplomacy The Spirit communicated to men through the Word of God is more important than organization. I may be allowed to give an example from the actual world crisis. My heart was filled with praise and thanks¬ giving to the Lord when I read in La Jeune Bepub- lique about the conference held in Paris under the presidency of Marc Sangnier. For a whole week 160 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP there sat together in friendly counsel representatives of different nations, among them also Germans, Aus¬ trians, and Hungarians. They had come together, not to wallow in discussions on the responsibility for the outbreak of the war, but to help to kill hatred and other germs dangerous to our civilization. They wranted, to quote Marc Sangnier’s own words, to build up peace on a more solid foundation than a peace treaty that “had proved a terrible disappointment to the anxiously waiting peoples, because it means in reality no peace at all”; namely, on the good-will among all nations. At the public sitting that brought the conference to a close, Marc Sangnier proclaimed to a consenting audience a principle which ought to be self-evident to all Christians, and which we tried to impress by our joint appeal of November, 1914: that God is more and must be more to us than any¬ thing else, even more than our own native country. He wanted to form a league of nations, not with the object of securing the advantages of a war victory, but to secure peace in the whole world. France must not be the bulwark of social, international, and capi¬ talist reaction, but, faithful to her best traditions, she must strive to realize what is really right, and to serve the brotherhood of mankind. “If we had pro¬ nounced such principles when we were beaten in 1870, we should have had nothing to glory of. If now, in 1918, we are the conquerors, it is our glory to proclaim that we are able to sacrifice everything for the weal of mankind.” Our chauvinists say, “We shall only feel safe when there is no rifle and no gun in Germany,” but I say, “We shall only feel safe WAYS TO UNITY 161 when there is no more hate either in France or in Germany.” At this closing ceremony Christians from the Central countries were also seated on the platform. A German- Austrian priest arose and ad¬ dressed the audience. This was the first time since the war that a German spoke in public in Paris. Such things are worthy of Christendom and the Church. We know of similar voices from the great conferences that met during the war and after the war in London and in other places. Especially note¬ worthy are the meetings held by the British Council for Promoting an International Christian Confer¬ ence, under the presidency of Lord Parmoor, the most trusted layman of the Anglican communion, and the great champion of peace in Christendom universal, who on the occasion of the eleventh Church Assembly in Stockholm delivered his magnificent lecture on the duties of the Church in the present world crisis. At a similar meeting the Dean of St. Paul’s spoke many a word, sharp and to the point. Beside such Angli¬ cans, Quakers like Miss Ellis and Dr. Hodgkin, and Nonconformists, the genuine Christian spirit of fel¬ lowship in spite of war was clearly and courageously upheld by a noble number of clergy and laymen. We think of the powerful protest lodged against the con¬ tinuance of the blockade by Bishop Gore, the spiritual leader of the High Church Party in England, and of other evidence of the Evangelic conscience. The champions of such principles were bitterly attacked in their own countries, and perhaps denounced as unpatriotic, nay, traitors. But in the end, notwith¬ standing their sharp criticism of national politics, 162 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP they have, by raising their voices, proved an honour to their native lands. Now we may add to their number Marc Sangnier. But his enterprise did not originate in, nor was it by any means called forth by, the organization known to the world and to the history of religion as the most admired one; namely, the hierarchy of Rome with the Pope as the supreme head of the Roman Catholics in all countries. No, the dawn of international peace in Paris had its origin in Marc Sangnier ’s Christian enthusiasm and the spirit of his friends and those present at the conference. Sangnier emphasized that he himself was as little of a clericalist as possible, and that he was equally opposed by Roman and by revolutionary clericalists. A noble British Protes¬ tant, the Rev. Oliver Dryer, secretary of the Fel¬ lowship of Reconciliation, said at the conference, “We have conquered all sorts of things, but, best of all, ourselves.” Dryer added that during the con¬ ference Catholic priests had mingled like brothers with adherents of other faiths. Pastor Wilfred Monod of l’Oratoire du Louvre sent the following letter: “Circumstances have pre¬ vented me from taking part in the first international democratic congress, but I am anxious to assure you of my deep and considered sympathy with your initiative. In your opening address you defined per¬ fectly the problem which is imposed on men of good¬ will: 'To seek the moral conditions for the disarma¬ ment of hatred and the reconciliation of the nations.’ The problem is ultimately of a psychological char¬ acter — a statement that is both troubling and encour- WAYS TO UNITY 163 aging: troubling, because the soul of the nations ap¬ pears to be unseizable, it remaining a target that de¬ fies the concrete calculations of ballistics, and of the policy called realistic ; encouraging, because, in spite of all, the soul of the nations is what is most true, most real, most living — an incomparable point dfappui for every lever applied to mankind. ‘ ‘Where indeed are we to assign the limit to the moral capacities of humanity? Where are the bound¬ aries assigned to its spiritual progress, to its indefi¬ nite evolution towards higher forms of existence? It is endowed with an admirable and redoubtable power of free decision which undoubtedly permits retire¬ ment but also advancement ; descent but also ascent. Far from its nature’s being immutable and fixed in a fatal manner, mankind is prepared to rectify even its secular orientation, to acquire sentiments and ideas, even to enrich itself with new attributes. “To deny that humanity is able and ought to tri¬ umph over its bestial inheritance, the atavistic rule of violence, and suppress the legal recourse to war, that is to organized homicide, in order to settle the conflicts of interests between nations, that is to deny humanity itself, to blaspheme the Spirit, to promul¬ gate the dictatorship of materialism. “Let us then venture to hope, to affirm, to act. Moratoriums in the domain of moral redemption are useless, absurd, and culpable. To see good without wishing for good is to betray the universe and deny the Eternal. “You do not belong to these deserters. You inspire, you animate, you carry us away. I feel impelled to 164 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP address to yon, publicly, the expression of my grati¬ tude as a Frenchman and a Christian. Wilfred Monod, Pastor of FOratoire du Louvre, Professor in la Faculte de Theo- logie Protestante. A considerable number of Evangelic Christians from Holland, Germany, Scandinavia, and other countries took part in the conference, but also men be¬ longing to no Christian creed. The French pacifists, who do not represent any ecclesiastical or Chris¬ tian party, played rather an important part at the great final sitting. So we see that the spirit means more than organization. Testimonies of Christian Solidarity in Eoman and in Evangelic Christendom Marc Sangnier’s Christian peace conference, which was, no doubt, brought about under great difficulties, was doubly gratifying to those who had felt bitterly disappointed with Rome. The Pope proclaimed excel¬ lent intentions, and the Vatican made earnest en¬ deavours to bring about peace. Yet Rome failed during and after the war to give evidence of her adherence to the principle of Christian solidarity even in times of war. We Evangelic Christians, anxiously guarding our inherited spiritual freedom, in which there is, perhaps, an element of too sensitive Germanic individualism, we Evangelic Christians, who are without a common spokesman and bitterly felt the loss of such an ecumenical council during and after the war, we were justified in looking towards WAYS TO UNITY 165 our Roman brethren, expecting courageous testi¬ monies of Christian solidarity, notwithstanding the temptations of the World War. Their common duty of obedience to the same absolute ecclesiastical su¬ premacy gave us the hope of such testimonies from them. I was full of expectation, therefore, when I read Baupin’s resume on ‘'Roman Catholics and In¬ ternational Relations” in the March issue, 1921, of The Constructive Quarterly, after I had been trying, during and after the war, to collect all information bearing on this subject. In so doing I have been moved by a strong feeling of spiritual fellowship with all, I say all, who worship Christ's name. But strengthened as it was by Evangelic and other forces, Marc Sangnier’s conference seems to have been, as far as we know, the first really supernational one on the Roman side. I should be glad if, in spite of the war, there were testimonies of Christian solidarity within the Roman Church that had escaped my notice. We all know that the analogous undertakings in the non-Roman part of the Church, the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship Through the Churches, after preparations during several years, really held its constitutive meeting at Constance in the last days of July and the first days of August, 1914. Toward the end of the war Catholics belonging to Entente countries, “prompted by motives of prudence and national loyalty,” encouraged no international meetings. Those of the Central empires, at the sug¬ gestion of Herr Erzberger, and with the co-operation 166 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP of their friends in German Switzerland, founded an International Catholic Union with its headquarters at Zurich and held its sessions there. This union con¬ sisted entirely of Germanophilist Catholics, recruited almost entirely from parliamentary and political cir¬ cles. Since it proclaimed that its aim was to devote itself exclusively to the defence of religious causes, it obtained the approbation of the Holy See in March, 1917. During the war it held two assemblies, one in March, 1917, the other in August, 1918. Those international Catholic gatherings thus simply consisted in meetings between Roman Catholics from Central Europe with their friends in neutral coun¬ tries. There are records of a considerable number of such gatherings also after the war. Another group of Roman Catholics organized meetings pretending to be international, but restricted by the political situation to similar poor limits. About the same time some Catholics favouring the cause of the Entente or belonging to Entente nations began to hold friendly meetings of a private character at Fribourg, in the home of Baron de Montenach, one of their number. The author of the article mentioned, Mr. Baupin, who is himself general secretary of the Comite des Amities Catholiques Fr&ngaises d Vetr anger, gives further proofs of what should testify an international Catholic solidarity. On September 13, 1920, pilgrims from Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg and Portugal, with an archbishop from Equador, took part in a “very im¬ pressive ceremony at Lourdes.” A congress held at The Hague, June 15-19, 1920, formed the International Confederation of the Chris- WAYS TO UNITY 167 tian Syndicates. The year before, 1919, an interna¬ tional syndical conference was held at Paris with delegates of eight countries, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Holland, Poland, and Switzerland. But at Rotterdam, on February 20, 1920, one German delegate conferred with Dutch, Belgian and French Christian syndicates. At the conference just men¬ tioned at The Hague in June, 1920, representing ten national syndical groups, it is not evident whether any member was present from the Central powers. We are told that a Dutch delegate read the declara¬ tion of regret of the German syndicates. Anyhow, it may be mentioned that Evangelic Christians also belong to those syndicates. Some months later “Catholics of good-will from France, Switzerland, and Italy arranged a new meet¬ ing in the presence of members also from Chili, Poland, and Belgium, forming together the Catholic Union for International Studies that has been ap¬ proved by “important personages from Spain, Hol¬ land, Canada, and Czecho-Slovakia, who were not present at the inauguration. Indeed still to-day that Catholic Union consists of those Catholics only, “who belong to nationalities which have already been ad¬ mitted to the League of Nations.” A congress composed of representatives of agricul¬ tural syndicates gathered two days later also at Paris. Amongst its thirteen different nationalities one seeks in vain for the Catholics of Central Europe. Having studied the publications on this matter in German and French and having read the quoted article carefully twice, I am sorry to say that no 168 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP single, truly supernational Roman Catholic gather¬ ing has convened since the war. If we do not count the single German pacifist present at Rotterdam, February 20, 1920, Marc Sangnier’s meeting seems then to be the first of its kind. So little importance has organization. The most powerful, the most abso¬ lute ecclesiastical constitution existing, has not been able to bring about what Evangelic Christianity, known, and badly known, for the divisions that were always observed by its adversaries, and regretted by its members, had already carried out long before. Not some solitary pacifist, but representative Church¬ men and laymen in responsible positions from Ger¬ many, England, and neutral countries met in con¬ ference at Berne for three days in the autumn of 1915. Circumstances beyond our control unfortunately prevented the conference between eminent, highly trusted servants of the Church from both camps that was planned as early as 1917. As our friends from the West were refused passports, we have with the deepest regret — rather than spoil the desired ecu¬ menical character of the gathering — desisted from the presence of those spiritual fathers and brethren who were already about to embark on their journey from Germany and Hungary. But at last, between the 1st and the 3rd of October, 1919, at Oud Wassenaer in Holland, it came about. This ardently desired con¬ ference was between Evangelic laymen in respon¬ sible positions and bishops and other leading Church servants from America, Germany, England, Italy, Hungary, France, Belgium, Latvia, Finland, and neu- WAYS TO UNITY 169 tral countries. In order to refute incorrect state¬ ments, it should be emphasized here that we did not meet there as accusers and accused or as judges, nor were any special conditions made for the participa¬ tion of any party in the conference. But collective and individual crimes and omissions were admitted on both sides with Christian courage. We were ail deeply conscious of our responsibility and of our need to obtain forgiveness from God and our fellow creatures. In August of the following year, 1920, the Uni¬ versal Conference of the Church of Christ on Life and Work was founded in Geneva by representative Christian personalities from the United States of America, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ger¬ many, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Jugo-Slavia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzer¬ land, in the presence of eminent fraternal visitors from Orthodox Christendom. During the last thirty years I have been present at many international meet¬ ings and I can recall some that were more soul¬ stirring, more solemn and beautiful than this gather¬ ing of earnest Christian workers from the Old World and the New. But I was never present at any inter¬ national conference that meant spiritual action so much as this one. Difficulties were not palliated, but brought to light with moving, sometimes somewhat merciless, sin¬ cerity. What was the result? At no previous con¬ ference did I experience so tremendous a spiritual effort as on this occasion. While praying and watch¬ ing were not our hearts burning within us? Did not 170 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP the power of the divine love break through all the obstacles raised by bitter differences, feelings wounded to the quick, just claims, and well-meant palliation or postponement? We neutrals easily underrate the experiences and present feelings of our brethren in the belligerent countries. During the war, in 1916, I wrote a warning against “Our Spiritual Peril as Neutrals,”1 being Pharisaism — fine or coarse. Igno¬ rance and secret self-righteousness lead us into the temptation of taking too light a view of their cause. Our conference did not pass off in loving harmony, yet in the spirit of victory, and we thank God that He was greater than our hearts. Immediately after this conference the International Commission on the World Conference on Faith and Order held its remarkable theological discussions in Geneva, during which no partiality, no word, no look, betrayed the dissension of the war, and where the subject of Faith and Order claimed the whole atten¬ tion and different theories brought about groupings quite independent of the political situation. Before this the Young Men’s Christian Associations had held their splendid international meeting at Beatenberg, and Evangelic Christians had congregated for a general mission conference, at which the cause of Christ sincerely united those whom the cause of their native countries had separated from each other. All Evangelic hearts rejoiced to read how one year later, i.e., 1921, at the Mission Conference at Lake Mohonk, French and English voices were earnestly 1 The Constructive Quarterly , New York, March, 1917. WAYS TO UNITY 171 raised on behalf of the cause of the German Evan¬ gelic missions. What further need have we of testimonies? I have not mentioned these facts in order to reflect credit on ourselves or anybody else. No, we stand guilty before the Lord. And we see with shame that in our Chris¬ tianity the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit have come second to other influences, which are not of God. But so much is evident, that where the Spirit is lacking, organization is fundamentally of little importance. Perhaps discord and hate re¬ veal their abomination in a yet more hideous shape under the squalid cloak of a common ecclesiastical organization. Where the Spirit is, however, there can confidence and spiritual communion be made mani¬ fest, also in outward matters, even though we have no common institution. Perhaps we also get a presentiment that Evan¬ gelic Christendom with all its divisions has a higher degree of unity than outward appearance and public opinion give us to understand, and we dare to believe ourselves. We see at least that the most important thing is not to create organization and outward forms, but to have all over the world praying, ardent souls, who bind together our torn and struggling humanity with invisible but effective chains of love. Spiritual Unity Neither big forms nor big words can repair the in¬ juries of our epoch. Only a truly Christian spirit and a truly Christian life can do this. 172 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Earnest men are tired of the profuse rolling words and the torrent of well-meant, big proposals. They become “fanatics of the small work” (“ Fwnatiker der Kleinar’beit”) , as Dr. Siegmund-Sehultze con¬ fesses of himself. “Die Vielzuvielen, the too many, come with great systems and speeches and try their quack remedies on the whole organism, hut only a few decide to perform the operation at the dangerous spot.” Without small cells that are living and strong, no organism can come into being and subsist. It is a hard task. “The radical evil was always just as certain to us as the belief that man is well conditioned.” But now, to believe in the good that is impressed in mankind; to believe in the Good One WTho is incarnated in humanity; to incarnate this Good One and this good, daily, actually, in other words, a true Incarnation in the t3rpe of the Son of Man, i.e., of man as he is to be, that is our purpose. Where this is done earnestly the barriers collapse between men, between classes, nay, between nations. This alone is the path to reconciliation, to reconstruc¬ tion. Only by action that is truly in earnest about the example of Christ can the dismemberment of to-day be healed, obviously not by effeminate talk about peace, but in the struggle for peace. No day without a sword. No hour in which we do not assert our inexorableness against the evil that is radically inherent in us. Abhor the evil, hold fast to the good ! So whoever can no longer follow this path with us, whoever has lost faith in communion, steals from our union. We have no use for half-measure people. I wish to put it quite clearly. Not only our fellow WAYS TO UNITY 173 workers but even tlie friends of onr cause are con¬ sidered by us as those who are willing to live our faith. He who does not realize God does not believe in Him. People who no longer believe in a com¬ munion of those who wish for God, do not realize it. Friends who do not strain every nerve to establish true communion are a burden to us. Our own reso¬ lution must suffer if such companions complain of their breathlessness and alarm at each new ascent or each new danger. Moreover one does not ascend with a heavy weight of luggage. We have no use for capi¬ talists of the old stamp in our midst. He who can¬ not rid himself of the superfluous pounds of his lug¬ gage at each ascent that is required of him on his highroad, is of no use for our path. How difficult it is for a rich man to ascend! To put it practically, I say quite distinctly that we will not have any one in our midst who is not pre¬ pared to sacrifice. It is painful to me when people, who follow in the footsteps of the poor One Who went through the houses of the rich without hiding the truth, ask those rich people for alms for the service of Him who cried woe upon such rich people. Also our proteges often have no place to stay overnight, and our fellow workers cannot help — but it is not proper for us, on account of this, to make even a single concession, a concession to the power and wealth of this world. When, with Saint Francis of Assisi, we wish to be poor servants of a poor Master, we are still servants of the greatest Master and must know how to preserve His dignity. Our exhortation to help is not, “May it please your gracious lordship.” But 174 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP it is, “Bow yourselves in order to become worthy of helping. Bow yourselves as we do ! Bow to the King and give yourselves willingly in His service. You cannot serve God and mammon. Either — or! Who is prepared to give his life? . . . Yes, do not be jealous any longer of those who have many treasures, but of those who are allowed to stake their lives. ” Such a rule of life, nay, such lives humble us and exalt our Redeemer. They are also found in France, England, and in other parts of Christendom. Who does not observe how meaningless it is to set up sym¬ bols and ecclesiastical constitutions as boundaries for a Christlike life? Beneath the barriers of confessions such souls find one another in the mystery of suffer¬ ing and the Cross. Above the barriers of confessions they are raised by the surging exaltation of the Spirit. Well-meaning superficiality veils the differences. Fundamental union with Christ discovers unity be- V hind the differences. The more Christian a human being is, the more deeply he feels, independently of his confession, his affinity with others that take Chris¬ tianity seriously.1 If our united Life and Work is to come to any¬ thing our strength is not to be sought in any organi¬ zation but in God Himself and thus in the human beings and the groups that live in Him. A truly 1 God has children also outside of Christendom, who live in Him and for Him. God’s self-revelation is a superabundant richness, unmeritedly bestowed upon us. A Christian who does not realize Christ in heart and life is like a rich man who uses his wealth badly. A non-Christian who lives up to the truth accessible to him is like a poor man who bears his scantity with dignity. WAYS TO UNITY 175 Christian life means more than any organization or tradition, because it shows an absolute spiritual au¬ thority. And what our world is fatally lacking in is authority. Under which authority do we live? Answer: Under the authority of the State, or States. Their authority is poorly provided for. What is their supreme law? Shall we answer: The law of the fist? The crying need of an authority that extends beyond the States and groups them in a greater whole has produced the League of Nations. We need not insist here upon its failure, consisting in its weakness and in its perversion to be a disguised form for maintaining the interests of some nations against others, but the thing itself cannot die. But even if the League of Nations could embrace America, Germany, and Russia and become something of what it was intended to be, we feel it is not ready. At best it is a body crying out for a soul, and only Chris¬ tianity can supply that lack. If a supernational commonwealth remains without a soul it wTill be a corpse. If it acquires a soul that is not truly Chris¬ tian, it can easily become a devil. Because an outward authority — which is, alas, ter¬ ribly lacking in our epoch, as Professor Perrero has luminously shown — requires a spiritual authority that, according to the Apostle (II. Cor. 4:2), ap¬ peals to men’s hearts and has an ally in each soul in the fight against private and collective selfishness. An outward authority is simply organized violence, if it does not repose on a spiritual authority recognized by the best members of classes and nations. 176 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP From this a double conclusion can be drawn. We need a spiritual authority. The supernational lawful order, like law in general, must rest on a spiritual authority. It is not far off. We read about it in Deut. 30:12-14. “It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest. do it.” Now God is nearer than then, for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The only spiritual authority that can save our civilization from dissolution and self-destruction is Christ and His Gospel. Is the Church really able to give the disintegrating world a spiritual orientation and a spiritual authority? One may really doubt and ask, not doubt about Christ’s authority and ask about God’s dominion, but of course ask whether the Church whole-heartedly serves God’s dominion. So much is obvious, that no form nor organization can for the Church in its parts and as a whole replace the one thing needful ; namely, that above all she herself sub¬ mits to Christ’s spiritual authority and thus unitedly by her life and teaching testifies to a common submis¬ sion to the power of the Spirit. Necessity of a New Creed Love needs wisdom. Effort needs clear insight and direction. Otherwise much noble endeavour, much WAYS TO UNITY 177 precious sacrifice is wasted. The practical task of the Church must be guided by elaborate and exact theory also for a second reason. If there is difference of opinion — if, for instance, one preacher says that Christ was a socialist and His true followers must abolish private property, if another says that private property is necessary for the independence and full development of character, and if from the pulpit in the neighbouring' Church a great emphasis tries to prove that religion and the Church must be indif¬ ferent to such matters because the social and economic construction of society has nothing whatever to do with the salvation of the individual soul, then the laziness and egoism of the old Adam is at last com¬ forted by the thought that in such discrepancies of doctrine the wisest way may be not to do anything at all. Therefore we urgently need clear doctrine in these points. The simplest thing is the most difficult. Brother¬ hood of men, how evident ! The great commandment of love even of enemies, of Samaritans, of those be¬ longing to another nation, or to a despised race, how beautiful! But if we look round, it seems doubtful whether such a doctrine has really been issued and recognized in our civilization. Ought not the brother¬ hood of men to be preached and brought about by the Church? Nationalistic prejudices are to be com¬ bated as earnestly as any other heresy. Does not the extension of lawful order to international relations and the organization of a supernational common¬ wealth concern the Church? Is it not implied in the very principles of Christianity? The Christian ideal 178 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP of peace against war must belong to the elementary teaching in Church and school as well as other essen¬ tial parts of our faith. Here another problem emerges; namely, the con¬ ception of law and society. Some Christians think that the shaping of society and State by law as the only guarantee of personal freedom and security is a hard necessity caused by sin, but unnecessary in a truly Christian humanity. Others derive from the Bible the idea that society as a collective personality belongs to God’s Providence and has a positive value in itself. Evidently the Church ought to have a con¬ scious, common, and directive doctrine on such a fundamental subject. In society there is a division that is more momen¬ tous even than the mutual opposition of nations. It runs through every nation and country and threatens our whole civilization. It is due to the economic and social situation. In the Gospel our Saviour says much about mammon. Ought not the Christian Church as such to have a clear and powerful programme in con¬ nection with the reconstruction of society? We have spoken earlier of another problem, which is, as well as these already mentioned, not confined to any com¬ munion, or to any nation, but urgent, in all civilized nations and therefore to be treated by the Church in corpore. How shall we serve our brethren in the best way? Owing to the influence of Christian ideas, especially to the Reformation, modern society feels its respon¬ sibility toward old age, the sick, the poor, the desti¬ tute, childhood, the dangers of adolescence. It is evi- WAYS TO UNITY 179 dently absurd and unchristian if the Church con¬ siders itself as a competitor in charity. It is equally absurd if it thinks that the lay community has taken over all responsibility in works of help and charity. But a clear theory is needed as to the relation of Christian service ( diaconia ) to the activity of the State and of other philanthropic undertakings. A possible distribution might be that society is respon¬ sible for the necessary means and institutions for old age, the sick, the indigent, etc., but that only the Church is able to furnish men and women who con¬ sider such a service as a sacred privilege and are therefore able to make the best of it. In any case a clear theory is needed for the action of the Church and of Christian endeavour in that domain. What we need is a new confession of faith. I do not mean any alteration in the old creeds of the Church, but a clear expression of the teaching of Christ and our Christian duty with regard to the brotherhood of nations, to the fundamental moral laws for the shaping of society, and to the activity of Christian love and charity. Just as in the old Church the enunciation of dogmas was preceded by eager discussion and profound investigation, so in our time too the enunciation of the new dogmas that we need to urge us on and guide us, is being prepared by the investigations and reflections of individual Christians and the joint efforts of larger and smaller groups. And just as certain parts of the creeds of old are paradoxical expressions of ideas that Chris¬ tianity must advocate, but human thought cannot penetrate and systematize, so perhaps Christianity’s 180 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP new confession of faith in a supernational brother¬ hood and Christian principles for social and economic life must stop at clearly conceived propositions and sacred tasks without being able to combine them into a logical unity. But our duty is clear. I do not think we can or ought to be contented with anything less. V A BRIEF SURVEY OF SOME OF THE EFFORTS ALREADY MADE / V A BRIEF SURVEY OF SOME OF THE EFFORTS ALREADY MADE A DISCIPLE who, breathing the air of peace near to the Master’s heart, is anxions to re¬ fresh and vivify the Chnrch with that spirit of commnnion and brotherhood,1 has in the first volume of this series told us encouraging and illumi¬ nating facts about endeavours for unity in previous generations and its necessity and outlook in our days. By reaction the Thirty Years’ War reminded Christendom of its forgotten duty of fellowship. Likewise the World War has from its very opening urged upon Christian hearts the shame and weakness of rupture and the sacred privilege of gathering round the Cross as a uniting power which transcends all earthly division. What I shall describe here is only one of the lines, converging toward Christian fellowship. In Novem¬ ber, 1914, the following appeal for peace and Chris¬ tian fellowship was issued by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and by responsible servants of the Church in Denmark, Fin¬ land, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Switzerland, and Sweden : 1 “If Not a United Church — What?” Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1920. 183 184 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP “The war is causing untold distress. Christ’s body, the Church, suffers and mourns. Mankind in its need, cries out, 0 Lord, how long? The tangle of underlying and active causes which accumulate in the course of time, and the proximate events which led to the breaking of peace, are left to history to unravel. God alone sees and judges the intents and thoughts of the heart. “We, servants of the Church, address to all those who have power or influence in the matter an earnest appeal seriously to keep peace before their eyes, in order that bloodshed soon may cease. We remind especially our Christian brethren of various nations that war cannot sunder the bond of international union that Christ holds in us. Sure it is that every nation and every realm has its vocation in the divine plan of the world, and must, even in the face of heavy sacrifices, fulfil its duty, as far as the events indi¬ cate it and according to the dim conception of man. Our faith perceives what the eye cannot always see. The strife of nations must finally serve the dispen¬ sation of the Almighty and all the faithful in Christ are one. Let us therefore call upon God that He may destroy hate and enmity, and in mercy ordain peace for us. His will be done!” When this appeal was issued it was deemed in cer¬ tain, if not most quarters, as a rather naive good in¬ tention, unless nationalism with angry words did not condemn any such reminder of communion. Still a fellowship was now brought about which during the war maintained brisk communications with those on both sides of the contest. The war has been in some A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 185 respects a merciless truth-teller. The thoughts of many a heart have been revealed. Illusions have col¬ lapsed. The real gold has been painfully melted out, when it existed. When one day the history is written of Christian unity and the power of Christianity to resist evil passions and the suggestive power of en¬ vironment and of the strength or weakness of the ecumenical consciousness in the different branches of the Church, the documents from the private and public discussions on Christian communion during the years of war will provide remarkable testimonies, sad evidence of human weakness or pious self-conceit, but especially proof that the Church in all countries has its spiritual strength not in organization and external power, but in those who have not bowed the knee to Baal even though in the name of the war-cult such “sentimental theologians and bishops” have been publicly reviled and individual Christians have risked their lives for tlieir fearlessness. There is neither the space nor the possibility to describe here the efforts for unity made during the war. With regard to America I may refer to “Chris¬ tian Unity: Its Principles and Possibilities,” pub¬ lished in 1921 by the Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook, to Dr. Macfarland’s “Progress of Church Federation,” 1921, and to a number of pub¬ lications, especially from the Federal Council. From the five neutral countries in Europe was sent at Whit¬ suntide, 1917, especially on account of the commemo¬ ration of the Reformation, a new appeal, “We know in part,” from which the following words may be quoted : 186 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 4 ‘Is the Western civilization doomed, or may we expect to see a new humanity, in some respects higher than the old one, emerge from this destruction? We hear sublime examples of fulfilled duty, of self- discipline and self-denial, and of devoted readiness to give mutual help. Such actions invest humanity with a higher worth. “Still more manifest are, however, the disastrous effects of war devastating not only home and happi¬ ness but also the sanctity of morals and many good and steadying habits of life. “Certain it is that whatever may become the issue of the war, there will be one conquered, our cruelly lacerated Christendom and civilization itself, whose workers of to-day and to-morrow will have perished together with much precious work accomplished in the past. “In future, as hitherto, we are prepared to serve as intermediaries for keeping up or restoring com¬ munications especially in religious and Church mat¬ ters, disturbed by the war, and we hope in this way to be able in some measure to serve our brethren in the belligerent countries. ” Among those who availed themselves of the pro¬ posed mediation was a group of courageous Chris¬ tians of different denominations in England, who, under the noble presidency of Lord Parmoor and with Miss Marian Ellis as their indefatigable secre¬ tary, formed themselves into the British Council for Promoting an International Christian Meeting. This appeal had also a grateful allusion to the efforts of labour. When the plan for an interna- A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 187 tional labour conference failed for the moment, The Challenge said in September, 1917: “We believe that an immense service to humanity could be rendered by an earnest attempt on the part of all sections of the Christian Church to say this thing unitedly to the world. “We desire, then, to see summoned an interna¬ tional interdenominational Christian conference, the primary aim of which shall be the proclamation of Jesus Christ as King, to Whom an absolute allegiance is due and in Whose service alone the nations find the fulfilment of their destiny. On the basis of the faith so proclaimed we would see the conference pro¬ ceed to consider by what means the sections of the Church there assembled may best promote within their respective countries obedience to the law of Christ in international affairs. Further, we would see them test how far they could reach agreement on the principles that should determine the terms of peace and the settlement of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is at least conceivable that they would thus materially shorten the war, partly by revealing the amount of agreement which already exists in men of good-will, partly by creating some further measure of that agreement. But as an act of witness the con¬ ference would be of incalculable importance. It would immensely increase the opportunity of the Church to guide the world when the war is over. After the war men will respect the Church in pro¬ portion as during the war it has been something more than national.” The invitation to a conference in a neutral country 188 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP was hailed as an essay to “find a way of discharging our responsibility to Christendom in other than papal terms” — in accordance with the decision ex¬ pressed earlier in the following wrnrds: “We desire to urge with all possible force the call¬ ing of a conference representing the chief Christian bodies in all belligerent countries. Let the Church take the lead in testifying to the world of the unity of the disciples of Christ in their allegiance to Him. If it be true that this allegiance transcends all earthly loyalties, then the unity resulting from it must trans¬ cend all earthly divisions, as St. Paul emphatically and repeatedly affirmed. The world is longing for the manifestation of something greater than warring nationalities. The Church exists to be that greater thing. Will it not act? The time is ripe and oppor¬ tune.” The British Council just mentioned said about its aim as follows: “The council consists of men and women of very varied religious and political opinions. Their object is to promote a purely religious meeting which will discuss neither the causes of the war nor the political conditions of peace, but which will dem¬ onstrate the true unity which even in the midst of this bitter conflict unites all Christians in allegiance to their common Master.” And it was said from dif¬ ferent quarters that such a conference “might well be a step towards that reunion of Christians which we all long to see, that unity for which Christ prayed. It might even develop into a permanent organ for expressing the mind of the Church upon great moral questions. ’ 7 A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 189 The Berne Conference adjourned in the autumn of 1915 in the hope of assembling again on a more extended scale in one of the Scandinavian countries. How living the idea of an international meeting was can be seen from the fact that it came forth almost simultaneously in somewhat varying forms, quite in¬ dependently, in the Christendom of the North, at the instance of the Bishop of Oxford, in Scotland, in the above-mentioned British Council, from the Evan¬ gelic Christendom of Hungary, in The Challenge in London, in the British branch of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship, in Switzer¬ land, and in America. From three Scandinavian bishops an invitation was issued for an ecumenical conference at LTpsala in December, 1917. The com¬ munions were invited to send representatives, and leading personages received a special invitation in connection with a meeting of the neutral groups in the World Alliance. The invitation was eagerly ap¬ proved, as is testified not least by the greetings to the conference from both the warring factions and from the meeting in London held at the same time. A gentle patriarch of the Church in Germany, Dr. Dryander, thanked 4 ‘the Scandinavian brothers” for their trouble in trying to make it possible to apply the Saviour’s pontifical prayer, “that they may all be one.” A verdict on the programme sent out by the Upsala Conference w'as seen in a public declaration, after¬ wards receiving increasingly numerous adherents, by a number of German clergymen, in which they ex¬ pressed their “whole-hearted love and unalterable 190 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP faith’ ’ to their native country, and then continued: ‘‘But above the fatherland is God’s kingdom, which stretches over all countries and whose Gospel is ‘righteousness and peace and love.f It would be a poor service to the Gospel if we did not keep sway over the passions that have been aroused by this war between nations, but relapsed instead into chauvinism, which would change us, the messengers of peace, to ‘war theologians.’ It is also pointed out that a de¬ ficient sense of righteousness, the worship of mammon, and self-satisfied culture are the causes of the war. “Against all this to defend dauntlessly righteous¬ ness, love, and values that are higher than material ones, briefly, to serve the dominion of God, is the most elementary duty of our office. By doing so we serve our country at the same time, for it can flourish only under God’s dominion. “We therefore hail with gratitude the setting-up of the same Christian moral claims now at Upsala and elsewhere both in neutral and hostile countries. We believe that this ‘new,’ but really ancient spirit of the kingdom of God will make its way past all obstacles, however great, and bring with it to the na¬ tions, as the highest, though slowly maturing, aim of war, a future in righteousness and happiness.” The Archbishop of Poland expressed his great joy that in the land of the Yasas a conference had been summoned by those who believe in our Lord Jesus Christ and acknowledge in Him the Saviour and Master, in order to discuss the import of this, the most terrible of all wars, and the realization of peace upon earth. He thought it right and proper that all Chris- A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 191 tians, without distinction of creed, should proceed together to work for the fulfilling of Jesus Christ’s message: “A new message I give you, that ye love one another.” He hoped for a blessing on the work and results of the meeting. The most representative delegates were appointed by the Evangelic communities of Hungary and Ger¬ many. But the time was too short for more dis¬ tant countries. The passport question caused the well-known difficulties. The conference was therefore limited to the five neutral Evangelic countries whose delegates united in the following declaration “for reflection and guidance in the continued work of the Church” — an attempt to gain firm and uniform lines for the work toward peace that is incumbent upon the Christian Church: “When our Christian confession speaks of one Holy Catholic Church, it reminds us of that deep inner unity that all Christians possess in Christ and in the work of His Spirit in spite of all national and denomi¬ national differences. Without ingratitude or unfaith¬ fulness to those special gifts in Christian experience and conception, which each community has obtained from the God of history, this unity, which in the deepest sense is to be found at the Cross of Christ, ought to be realized in life and teaching better than hitherto. “The great mission of the Christian community is to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This the Evangelic Church can and must fulfil only spiritually by means of her teaching and her life. The Church ought to be the living conscience of na- 192 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP tions and of men. Together with Christians in all belligerent countries, we feel deeply the opposition between the war and the spirit of Christ. We there¬ fore wish to emphasize some principal points con¬ cerning the conduct of Christians in social life. “1. The Church, which has unfortunately not sel¬ dom laid more stress upon that which divides than that which unites, ought to enforce the ideal of Chris¬ tian brotherhood, arouse and strengthen the judgment upon selfishness, and employ all its powers in the work for the removal of the causes of war, whether these be of a social, economic, or political nature. “2. Christians ought to feel their share in the re¬ sponsibility for public opinion; they ought to serve the cause of truth and love in public national and international life as well as in personal relations, and to try to understand the assumptions that lie behind the utterances, thoughts, and deeds of others. “3. The Church ought to educate the nations to a higher and higher degree of self-government. “4. The Church ought to work for international understanding and the settlement of international controversies through mediation and arbitration. “ According to the Christian conception the con¬ sciousness of right and wrong and the system of law and political order that arise from this consciousness, are good gifts from God to man. The Gospel re¬ quires for its work at least an elementary legal order. Every existing form of law and justice is incomplete and requires to be developed in proportion as the moral sense becomes more perfect. “For this reason the Church has in the name of A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 193 Christ to vindicate the sanctity of justice and law, and to demand its further development. In the first place, the Church ought to do this with all its might within each separate country, but it is also its im¬ perative duty to support, as far as it lies in its power, the effort for the international establishment of jus¬ tice embodied in law. It ought therefore to fight against any glorification of violence and force at the expense of justice and law, and to lay stress upon the axiom that even the acts of nations and States are subject to ethical principles just as much as those of the individual, and that the commonwealth of na¬ tions ought to be built upon the principles of truth, justice, and love. “The Church ought humbly to confess that it has failed in this respect, and ought to strive with all its might to rectify its shortcomings. “The different systems of law both within a single nation and between nations are imperfect and inef¬ fective except in so far as they are inspired by a real inward moral conviction. To produce and further such a spirit of Christian brotherly love, self-control, and mutual righteousness, is the foremost duty of the Church in this aspect of life.” The invitation to this conference at Upsala in De¬ cember, 1917, and, as this was not complete, to a meeting during 1918, met with recognition and sym¬ pathy from most communions and groups that are religiously awake, as it did everywhere among the individuals who had not sacrificed their Christian honour on the altar of the gods of war. Of course refusals were also received. Many earnest servants 194 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP of the Church were doubtful about a meeting while war was still being waged, and looked forward to the ecumenical conference that we are now working for and that was afterwards called the Universal Con¬ ference of the Church of Christ on Life and Work. At the same time the British Council of the World Alliance held a public conference in London, where Dean Inge urged that “this mutual suicide club will have to be dissolved.” The Bishop of Peterborough made the opening speech. The resolution passed emphasized the duty “to bring all public sentiment in action under the control of the Mind and Spirit of Christ.” The belief was strengthened that “the time is ripe for the Church to act as a pioneer of supernational thinking and an interpreter of inter¬ national fellow-feeling. ’ ’ That the International Christian Conference should be held during the war was strongly advocated in March, 1918, at a public meeting at Kingsway Hall by the British Council for such a meeting. A note¬ worthy suggestion was that the members of that con¬ ference should go there as officially sent representa¬ tives of the various religious bodies. The greetings and the theses sent by the conference in Upsala in December, 1917, were kindly received and even for¬ mally accepted in many quarters, from Constan¬ tinople to America. Special mention is due to the active interest shown independently from the Orthodox section of the Church. May we not consider that the encyclical, sent by the Patriarchate in Constantinople to the different parts of Evangelic Christendom on the A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 195 necessity of closer alliance in order to meet tlie crav¬ ings of our epoch for a League of Churches corre¬ sponding to the League of Nations, may we not con¬ sider this appeal and various actions of the Greek Orthodox Church in that respect as beginning a new epoch in the relationship between West and East in the Church of Christ? In the encyclical the patri¬ archate laid special stress upon co-operation for prac¬ tical aims. During the great preparatory meeting for the Conference on Faith and Order at Geneva in 1920, Greek representatives agreed that the unity in the Church of Christ must at first, as Dr. Curtis styles it in Die EicJie, be a union of love. A brilliant and whole-hearted divine, who was sent by the patriarchate first to Geneva and then to Sweden, the principal of the Academy on Halki, Archbishop Germanas, has made the volume for Sep- tember-October, 1921, of Neos Dolmen a veritable epistle on Church unity and the strivings for it. But we are going too fast. The meeting in Oud Wassenaer in 1919 gave its blessing to an ecumenical conference of the different Christian communions to consider urgent practical tasks before the Church at this time, and the possibilities of co-operation in testi¬ mony and action. Delegates who gathered later in Paris appointed, according to a suggestion by the Archbishop of Canterbury, a committee of one for preparation. This one man became a well-known cham¬ pion for international Christian fellowship and good¬ will, Frederick Lynch. I have already told how the preliminary meeting at Geneva, August 9-12, 1920, was able through God’s help to overcome hindrances 196 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP that had to be met. It was providential that Arthur J. Brown acted as president at the most critical moment and constituted the nucleus of the large representative committee of arrangements as well as the beginning of an executive committee in three sections, one for Europe, one for the British Empire, and one for America, on the Universal Conference of the Church of Christ on Life and Work. At a meeting under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Peterborough in 1921, that executive committee recommended the pro¬ posed Universal Conference to the prayers of fellow Christians in every race and country and, inspired by William P. Merrill, asked them to pray now and continually : For the coming of a fuller unity of spirit and of action in the entire Church of Christ through the world, For readiness on the part of all Christians to make new ventures of faith, and to take more seriously the implications of the Gospel, For the deepening and broadening of love among all Christ’s followers toward all men, For the elimination of all passion and prejudice, and the growth of peace and brotherhood, For clearer vision of the will of God and of the work of Christ in this day, For all that may further the coming of His king¬ dom. Especially do they ask their fellow Christians everywhere to pray for the success of the conference which is to consider how best the teaching and pur¬ pose of our Master can be brought to bear upon the A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 197 manifold problems which beset ns. The united and unceasing intercession of all Christians is asked, that through this gathering of Christians from all over the world the Church may come to a clear realization of its opportunity and its responsibility, and that through it the Holy Spirit of God may find an ever larger impact in the minds and wills of men. Let us pray that through His working mankind may be led into the larger life which is in Him, and the whole creation, now groaning and travailing in pain, may be delivered from the bondage of corruption and brought into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.” A considerable number of Christian communions in the New World and in the Old World have already appointed official delegates to the committee of ar¬ rangements on such a universal Church meeting. Others will follow. Last year, 1922, at a new session of the executive committee at Helsingborg, Sweden, important decisions were taken. Official representa¬ tives from the Church in the Old World and in the New World, from Western Christendom and from the Orthodox communion, have never before met with such authority for such an undertaking. Preparatory work is eagerly being done in the three sections, har¬ moniously and in constant mutual communication, but at the same time independently, in order not to copy one or the other, because our God does not like copies, but originals. It is comparatively easy to create big and beautiful schemes of organization and work, but nothing is more necessary than to indi¬ vidualize every Christian endeavour and build such a comprehensive act of Christian fellowship on realities 198 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP and labours already deeply rooted in the special character of each people, each communion, and each great section of Christendom. Thus preparatory con¬ ferences have been held and others will be held, after thoroughgoing introductory work, in the three sec¬ tions mentioned above. As to the time of the Uni¬ versal Conference, there are two considerations, which seem to contradict each other. On the one hand a new Nicsea for United Life and Work of Christendom must be prepared in a way worthy of such an aim; on the other hand, we who met at Geneva in 1920 cannot help seeing the mournful, emaciated face of that venerable Hungarian brother and hearing his passionate voice crying out, when wise men asked us to wait and see, “Brethren, can we wait? Evil does not wait.” In the corner of the world where this is written, an action for the same purpose was initiated in 1914 by Olaus Petri Stiftelsen, a Foundation in the Uni¬ versity of Upsala, which, for many years, invited eminent scholars and men of religion to lecture on subjects bearing upon the history and problems of religion and published their lectures. This Founda¬ tion decided to summon leading Churchmen and emi¬ nent theologians from different parts of Christendom to lecture on Church unity and on the relation of their own communion to this question. The lectures already published in the series on Church unity, all marked with the motto of Olaus Petri Stiftelsen, “The truth shall make you free,” constitute a unique set of documents, and are a strong witness to Chris¬ tian solidarity in spite of earthly divisions. They A BRIEF SURVEY OF EFFORTS MADE 199 treat the subject from the standpoint of the com¬ munions of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ice¬ land, Holland, Switzerland, Hungary, England (the Church as wTell as Nonconformity), Germany, Scot¬ land, America, the Patriarchate and the Holy Synod in Constantinople, from Russia, Greece, and France. Still others have promised to come and give their views on Church unity. IMMEDIATE AIMS VI IMMEDIATE AIMS I Evangelic catholicity is a pressing need if dismemberment is not to cause hopeless weak- ** *“■ ness. Unity must assert itself without waiting for community in doctrine and Church government. The voice of the Christian conscience cannot be si¬ lenced. But it has not been heard as it ought to have been. This is due to weakness and neglect, and also to the lack of a platform. We must create one in a common organization, so built up that it can worthily represent Christianity without sectarianly excluding any part of it. If Rome finds it difficult to embark upon such equal co-operation, represented by an ecumenical Church council, then the rest of Christianity must make a beginning. The American envoys for the World Conference on Faith and Order, 1919, were told by the Pope in Rome, if they did not know it beforehand, that Rome is unable to join with other sections of Christendom in such an undertaking. As a consequence of that visit the Saint Office revived in July, 1919, a decretal of 1864, forbidding Roman Catholics to partake in meetings or preparations for Church unity,1 but il y a des accomodations avec le 1 La Civilta Catholica, 1919, s. 197. 203 204 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP del . Even inside the Roman communion a single Churchman can be moved by faith to listen to the voice of the One Shepherd about unity in the sense of the brotherly and trustful solidarity of all disciples of Christ. If conferences on Faith and Constitution go against Roman exclusiveness, it is a self-evident fact that Roman Christians already have joined and can in the future join with other Christians for com¬ mon practical tasks. These are beautiful proofs of an ecumenical spirit of fellowship in Roman Catholic prelates in the United States and elsewhere. We must therefore not look too much askance to the right or to the left but follow the Master forward. The Evangelic part and the Orthodox part of the Church would even now be able to find a formula for a mutual understanding which leaves the confession and the constitution of the separate religious com¬ munities undisturbed and which obtains its vital power and its inspiration from the Gospel. The Catholic Church has three main sections: the Orthodox Catholic, the Roman Catholic, and the Evangelic Catholic. If we try to fulfil the duty laid upon us by the Master Himself, Rome also may sometime be willing to join a Catholic Church that does not exclude any time believers. Let the Spirit build up an Evan¬ gelic catholicity in men’s minds in united Xife and Work. The day will come when Roman and other communions which, excluding themselves from organ¬ ized fellowship, cannot exclude ecumenical souls in their midst from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apos¬ tolic Church, will come and find the door open and IMMEDIATE AIMS 205 enter to praise and worship with the whole of Christ’s flock. We must have the Christian Internationale wThich was proclaimed during the war at a meeting in Ox¬ ford and pursued in an enthusiastic way by the Bilthoven movement. We must have a permanent Council of the Church, which Canon Masterman would like to see assembled once in Jerusalem, Prepa¬ rations are needed. But they have been most thor¬ oughly accomplished during many years, especially in Germany and England. The social duties of the Church have been treated in a weighty literature and experienced in adventures of faith and love. The Universal Conference itself should be a fact more important than we can now imagine. It will be composed of men and women in whose hearts Christian love is burning, as well as earnest and prayerful thought and experience about the duties and opportunities of the flock of Christ. When they come together they must not hurry, although our longed-for meeting will gather persons who have no spare time to give to conferences and talks. Our Saviour gave full time to each person and to each case. Every one will see beforehand that if such a gathering comes into existence through the grace of God, Who is able to do superabundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that worketh in us, it must not devote less than two months or six weeks to such an errand in the Master’s service. If peace conferences and economical conferences last weeks and weeks, would it not be unworthy of 206 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP our sacred duty not to give full time for mature counsel, prayer, and meditation in a meeting of the universal Church of Christ? Those servants of the Christian communions should not come together to make decisions already prepared. Preparations must be made in addition to, and in order to sum up, the enormous amount of experiences and of thinking accomplished in this domain. “It is sufficiently evi¬ dent that this enterprise is one of enormous scope, and will need the most careful preparations/ ’ But the result that we wish for cannot be reached with¬ out a full and deep spiritual labour done by those workers in common. I need not try to outline here the programme that has been proposed in several connections and that must not be too overburdened but concentrated on two or three main points. It is obvious. Nothing can be more illuminating than to see how for three years or more every month, nay, every week, brings new, independent expressions of the same necessity felt in different quarters of the Church of Christ. The executive committee tried to define the aim in the following way: “The purpose of the Conference is not primarily to promote the reunion of Christendom, though such co-operation between the Churches as it proposed would undoubtedly help to this end. It is not in¬ tended to deal with questions of Faith and Order. The purpose is rather to concentrate the thought of Christendom on the mind of Christ as revealed in the Gospels towards those great social questions, in¬ dustrial and international, which are so acutely • * IMMEDIATE AIMS 207 urgent in every country. Believing that only in Christ’s way of life can the world find healing and rest, we desire to discover how best this can be con¬ fronted. The need for making some such concerted endeavour to learn afresh the mind of Christ cannot be exaggerated. The nations are yearning for purer politics. Industrial unrest is producing chaos and confusion. The basic motives of citizenship need strong reinforcement. In international affairs men are seeking anxiously for permanent peace and deeper fellowship. We believe that the message and teaching of Jesus Christ afford the only solution. To set ourselves to discover His will and under the guid¬ ance of His Spirit to find wise ways of applying His teaching, would seem to be the paramount task of the Church.” (1) The first need can be called diaconia, including works of love, performed by the Church as such or by free organizations in the Church in different coun¬ tries. Eager workers in such a blessed service are coming to ask everywhere in each country, in each Christian communion, where the same problems are felt: Why can we not work together, give each other our experiences, follow common wise directions and be represented, as well as other undertakings for help and relief, in an international way, according not only to the actual state and need of the world, but also according to the supernational character of Christ ’s message ? Such Christian charity is intended for the help and rescue of the individual, but it can¬ not be exercised in any earnest and elaborate way without leading to the great problems of economic 208 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP and civic order. Nothing less is needed than the Christianizing of society. (2) Are we not brethren, are we not children of the same heavenly Father? How can such a holy fellowship suffer organized violence to use human brains and arms and the perfection of science and technique for a devilish killing of the fittest? Chris¬ tendom must mean more for the future than it has meant in the past against war and for furthering international good-will and peace through righteous¬ ness. (3) Only the united work of the Church can help suffering minorities to get their rights. If included in a whole family of the Church, sections of it which have quarrels and difficulties with each other can more easily be brought into mutual understanding, why cannot the seemingly hopeless complications created by the new disputed frontiers in the East of Europe with regard to the different denominations, why cannot they be brought before the love and wis¬ dom of a unitedly working Church? We realized it when our Polish brethren of the four chief Evan¬ gelic communions in the revived Poland met in Upsala in March, 1921, with us, servants of the Church in America, Switzerland and the Northern countries. Experience from the World Alliance makes us long impatiently for a common permanent representation to which difficulties of all kinds can be referred by suffering sections of the Church. (4) Here we arrive at the most generally desired ecumenical council of which much has been spoken IMMEDIATE AIMS 209 in this book; namely, a common tongue for the Chris¬ tian conscience for that which the Christian con¬ science knows to be true and which it longs to cry out to all the world. The Universal Conference will create such a common speaking trumpet that must not in any way become an instrument of external authority, but a body having only a spiritual au¬ thority. It shall be a general Christian council or an ecumenical committee or council consisting of representative delegates. Such an organ would be listened to on burning religious and moral questions and have influence to the degree in which it would be able to make itself the vehicle of the Christian conscience and the spirit of Christ, amid the storms of the age. As to its composition, careful consideration is wanted. It must not be bulky, but spiritually strong and effective. Some confidential posts in the Church ought to belong to the ecumenical council without election, such as the patriarchate in Constantinople, the see of Canterbury and the presidencies of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and of the Kirch enbund in Germany. Other mem¬ bers must be elected in order to afford the fullest possible representation in a small number for Scot¬ land, British Nonconformity, Holland, Switzerland, France, Evangelic bodies in the East, the Scandi¬ navian and Baltic North, etc., grouped together in some four or five sections. It is conceivable that some communions or groups can be represented on the ecumenical council in their proper turns with in- 210 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP tervals of five years or less. The chairmanship can also move from one group to another in order to make the council as ecumenical as possible. But the most essential thing in creating and per¬ petuating such a common herald for Christendom will be that it is supported by the prayers and the con¬ fidence of the Christian people all over the world. Many have certainly had the same experience as myself that the questions here treated excite a veri¬ table enthusiasm in the rank and file of our com¬ munions. I think that the flock of faithful laymen and laywomen in the Church has a less obscured sense of the shameful nonsense in many of our discrep¬ ancies, than many trained officers of the Church. It is a source of ever renewed strength, in the midst of obstacles and worldly wise indifference to the crav¬ ings for unity, to meet in the Christian people of all groups a powerful response to the call for fellowship and to the adventures of the united Life and Work of Christendom. Sometimes one feels strongly that the Christian people at large would hail united Life and Work as a longed-for boon, if some leaders did not try with some success to keep their beloved divisions intact. In advocating the cause of unity you will experience almost a Pentecost in the rank and file of faithful Christians. A venerable patriarch in the Church of Christ has in an Anglican official report, which we partly include here, expressed our aim with unrivalled acuteness: “We wish to say that we use the word Church without any controversy and in the largest possible sense to mean ‘all who profess and call themselves Christian. ’ We know and de- IMMEDIATE AIMS 211 plore the divisions of Christendom, and we do not in the least underrate the difficulties involved in healing ancient wounds and restoring violated fellowship. We do not underestimate the theological and consti¬ tutional questions involved. But we say deliberately that in the region of moral or social questions we desire all Christians to begin at) once to act together as if they were one body, in one visible fellowship. This could be done by all alike without any injury to theological principles. And to bring all Christians together to act in this one department of life as one visible body would involve no loss and manifold gain. We should get to know and trust one another: we should learn to act together: we should thus prepare the way for fuller unity.” CONCLUSION Shoals of sand, wide and narrow, separate bodies of water and river beds into a confused, dispersed system, continually invading new ground and by its swampy disorder preventing both the ground and the water from doing their full work. Spades are set working, machines are invented, the work proceeds year after year. It is necessary to dig through the shoals, unite the separated and incalculable waters, and give the river a single deep channel and a single mighty flow. Here and there it is possible to break through a barrier and unite the streams, but soon the banks of the channel give away. It is a task of Sisyphus, a web of Penelope. Still the workers do not lose courage. It must once succeed. They rejoice 212 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP at every stream tliat is moulded into shape, every piece of ground that is won or drained. But suppose a miracle should happen. Suppose the breaking of the ice up in the hills should take place so rapidly and so abundantly that the spring flood comes with force, breaking down all obstacles and creating what man’s industry could not, namely, a collected flow of water, a powerful river, which, soon grown calm, shall farther down, reflect the summer sun in its single majestic flow. Can we already hear the roar? Or is it our longing and our prayers to the Spirit that deceive us? The figure has been used for the unity of the Church. We must not grow tired. For we have the Lord’s commandment and His promise. We have something more. We have His Spirit. We can only watch and pray, trust and work. When the Spirit of the Lord pervades our sundered, materialized and crippled Christendom, then the dividing walls which have arisen in the course of time will hold no longer. They shall be torn asunder, not by well-meaning strivings for unity, but by the Lord’s own might. And in its single great flow, the flood of God’s love shall unite us all who are moved by the Spirit of our Lord. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CHURCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK WILLIAM ALLEN HARPER President Elen College, - - - - — - - North Carolina Reconstructing the Church i2mo, net $1.25. 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