technical sense. Because we are not concerned with the history of
thought merely, but also with its practical embodiments in various
social organizations as well. So we mean by "humanism" not only those
modes and systems of thought in which human interests predominate but
also the present economic, political and ecclesiastical institutions
which more or less consistently express them. Hence, the term as
used will include concepts not always agreeing with each other, and
sometimes only semi-related to the main stream of the movement. This
need not trouble us. Strict intellectual consistency is a fascinating
and impossible goal of probably dubious value. Moreover, it is
this whole expression of the time spirit which bathes the sensitive
personality of the preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as much
by its derived and concrete manifestations in contemporary society as
by its essential and abstract principles.
There are then two sets of media through which humanism has affected
preaching. The first are philosophical and find their expression in a
large body of literature which has been moulding thought and feeling
for nearly four centuries. Humanism begins with the general abstract
assumption that all which men can know, or need to know, are "natural"
and human values; that they have no means of getting outside the
inexorable circle of their own experience.
Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in which the word
"experience" is used. The assumption need not necessarily be
challenged except where, as is very often the case, an arbitrarily
limited definition of experience is intended. From this general
assumption flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derived
the conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are the only
real, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence from this comes the
shifting of the seat of religious authority from "revelation" to
experience. In so far as this is a correction of emphasis only, or the
abandonment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one of the
areas and modes of understanding, again we have no quarrel with it.
But if it means an exclusion of the supersensuous sources of knowledge
or the denial of the existence of absolute values as the source of our
relative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at the heart
of religion. Because the religious life is built on those factors of
experience that lie above the strictly rational realm of consciousness
just as the pagan view rests on primitive instincts that lie beneath
it. Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous"
values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach
of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our
understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by
the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of
an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition,
nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere
impressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary
definition of experience, ignores or denies these superrational
values. In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition of
experience which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellect
is dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what is below and
what is above itself."
Now it is this first set of factors which are the more important.
For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our present
religious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical but
ideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the present
in the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. It was
then that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world that
it arose out of indifference toward speculative thinking and unfaith
in those concepts regarding the origin and destiny of mankind which
speculative philosophy tried to express and prove.
From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only frankly
rejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditional
expression of those absolute values with which the religious
experience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected the
existence of those values themselves. Thus Petrarch is generally
considered the first of modern humanists. He not only speaks of
Rome--meaning the whole semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical structure
of dogmatic supernaturalism--as that "profane Babylon" but also
reveals his rejection of the distinctively religious experience itself
by characterizing as "an impudent wench" the Christian church. The
attack is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values which
fixes man's relative position by projecting him upon the screen of an
infinite existence and which asserts that he has an absolute, that is,
an other-than-human guide. Again Erasmus, in his _Praise of Folly_,
denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical
values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those
"foul smelling weeds of theology." It was inevitable that such men as
Erasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not,
as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage but
because of intellectual conviction. They saw little to choose between
Lutheran, Calvinistic and Romish dogmatism. They had rejected not only
mediaeval ecclesiasticism but also that view of the world founded on
supersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had produced the
speculative and scholastic theologies. To them, in a quite literal
sense, the proper study of mankind was man.
It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old
"supernatural" religion taken by the English Deists of the last half
of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. Here
was the first definite struggle of the English church with a group
of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke
and others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theological
speculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion as
opposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the
Old and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were not deep
or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in that
their interests were not mainly theological or religious but rather
those of a general culture. They were inconsistent with their humanism
in their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote but
separated from his universe, a _deus ex machina_ who excluded the idea
of immanence. While less influential in England, they had a powerful
effect upon French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rousseau
were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both were
unwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritual
knowledge and religious values.
In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and his
younger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe. Its historical horizon,
racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction,
moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted
religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of the
Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the
inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical
and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present
civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism
of the moment. Thus the nature and place of _man_, under the influence
of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more
important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased
to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence
of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures,
which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic
absolutism of the Catholic theologies.
But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes most closely to grips
with the classic statements and concepts of religion in the critical
philosophy of Kant. It is the intellectual current which rises in
him which is finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in the
various doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the subjectivism of
the neo-realists, and in the superior place generally ascribed by
present thinking to value judgments as against existential ones. His
central insistence is upon the impossibility of any knowledge of God
as an objective reality. Speculative reason does indeed give us the
idea of God but he denies that we have in the idea itself any ground
for thinking that there is an objective reality corresponding to it.
The idea he admits as necessitated by "the very nature of reason" but
it serves a purely harmonizing office. It is here to give coherence
and unity to the objects of the understanding, "to finish and crown
the whole of human knowledge."[3] Experience of transcendence thus
becomes impossible. As Professor McGiffert in _The Modern Ideas of
God_ says: "Subjectively considered, religion is the recognition of
our duties as commands of God. When we do our duty we are virtuous;
when we recognize it as commanded by God we are religious. The notion
that there is anything we can do to please God except to live rightly
is superstition. Moreover, to think that we can distinguish works
of grace from works of nature, which is the essence of historic
Christianity, or that we can detect the activity of heavenly
influences is also superstition. All such supernaturalism lies beyond
our ken. There are three common forms of superstition, all promoted
by positive religion: the belief in miracles, the belief in mysteries,
and the belief in the means of grace."[4] So prayer is a confession of
weakness, not a source of strength.
[Footnote 3: See _The Critique of Pure Reason_ (Müller, tr.), pp. 575
ff.]
[Footnote 4: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. I, no. 1, p. 16.]
Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with the extreme
subjectivism of his theory of ideas as when he says in the _Practical
Reason_: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on
them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."[5] Again he
remarks, "The belief in a great and wise Author of the world has been
supported entirely by the wonderful beauty, order and providence,
everywhere displayed in nature."[6] Here the objective reality both of
what is presented to our senses and what is conceived of in the mind,
is, as though unconsciously, taken for granted. Thus while he contends
for a practical theism, the very basis of his interest still rests in
the conviction of a Being external to us and existing independent of
our thought.
[Footnote 5: _The Critique of Practical Reason_ (tr. T.K. Abbott), p.
260.]
[Footnote 6: _The Critique of Pure Reason_, p. 702.]
But his intention of making right conduct the essence of religion
is typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions. In
making his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical,
it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion.
Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great
religious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists and
saturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, who
may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral
absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of history
as a moral order. He was following Amos when he took God out of the
physical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him in
the terms of purpose. But the doctrine of _The Critique of Practical
Reason_ is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally
believed to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known
to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is an
idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective
necessity. He is a postulate of the moral will. To quote Professor
McGiffert again: "We do not get God from the universe, we give Him
to the universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. We
assume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjective
need of realizing our highest good.... Religion becomes a creative
act of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of the
understanding."[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we can
know nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objective
and changeless. The absolutism of the Categorical Imperative is
a subjective one, bounded by ourselves, formed of our substance.
Religion is not discovered, but self-created, a sort of sublime
expediency. It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to the
meaning and destiny of the universe as a whole.
[Footnote 7: _H.T.R._, vol. I, no. 1, p. 18.]
Here, then, the nature of morality, the inspiration for character,
the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sort
of cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of the
superman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective
experience and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, throws man
back upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpest
contrast to the scholastic doctrine of the futility and depravity of
human nature. It produces the assertion of the sacred character of the
individual human being. The conviction of the immeasurable worth of
man is, of course, a characteristic teaching of Jesus; what it is
important for the preacher to remember in humanism is the source, not
the fact, of its estimate. With Jesus man's is a derived greatness
found in him as the child of the Eternal; in humanism, it is, so to
speak, self-originated, born of present worth, not of sublime origin
or shining destiny.
So man in the humanistic movement moves into the center of his own
world, becomes himself the measuring rod about whom all other values
are grouped. In the place of inspiration, or prophetic understanding,
which carries the implications of a transcendent source of truth and
goodness, we have a sharply limited, subjective wisdom and insight.
The "thus saith the Lord" of the Hebrew prophet means nothing here.
The humanist is, of course, confronted with the eternal question of
origins, of the thing-in-itself, the question whose insistence makes
the continuing worth of the absolutist speculations. He begs the
question by answering it with an assertion, not an explanation. He
meets it by an exaltation of human genius. Genius explains all sublime
achievements and genius is, so to speak, its own _fons et origo_. Thus
Diderot says: "Genius is the higher activity of the soul." "Genius,"
remarks Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowledge unnecessary." And
Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be
taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than
a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to
transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest
intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of
light and power.
[Footnote 8: _Anthropologie_, para. 87 c.]
Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in exalting man,
of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiastical
domination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, those
remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those
consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the
religious interpretation of life. Humanistic writing is full of the
exulting sense of this emancipation. These superconsiderations do not
belong in the world of experience as the humanist ordinarily conceives
of it. Hence, man lives in an immensely contracted, but a very real
and tangible world and within the small experimental circumference of
it, he holds a far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller one
from another) than that of a finite creature caught in the snare of
this world and yet a child of the Eternal, having infinite destinies.
The humanist sees man as freed from the tyranny of this supernatural
revelation and laws. He rejoices over man because now he stands,
"self-poised on manhood's solid earth
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
Fed from within with all the strength he needs."
It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe a perennial
enthusiasm. It is the greatest bliss, he says, that the humanist won
back for us. Henceforth, we must strive with all our power to keep it.
We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the chief sources of the
contemporary thought movement, that we may realize the pit whence we
were digged, the quarry from which many corner stones in the present
edifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to underestimate
the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many
institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him
and his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and
ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious
conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism
of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the
influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently
religious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the church
which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of the
moment.
Now, this _abstract_ humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had a considerable influence upon early American preaching.
The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away from
the Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The French
Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the
typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty
of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion
in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with
many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious
consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were
infidels and with a delicious naïveté assumed the names of Voltaire,
Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotist
Rousseau. It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of President
administration in Yale College, only three undergraduates remained
after service to take the sacrament. The reasons were partly
political, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the new
philosophical, anti-religious attitude.
Of course, this affected the churches. There was a reaction from
Protestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated in
Unitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism. The most significant thing
in the Unitarian movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarian
speculation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion of
Jesus' doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature. But it
recovered that doctrine much more by the way of humanistic philosophy
than by way of the teaching of the New Testament. I suppose the
thing which has made the weakness of the Unitarian movement, its
acknowledged lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to the
place where it stands, but to the road by which it got there.
Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preaching of the
supernatural and speculative doctrines and insights of Christianity,
was not in America as great as might be expected. Kant died in 1804,
and Goethe in 1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preaching
of the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally affected by the
prevailing intellectual currents of the day. This is due, I think,
to two causes. One was the nature of the German Reformation. It
found preaching at a low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular,
mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval
pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of the
clergy precluded spiritual insight. The Reformation, with its ethical
and political interests, revived preaching and by the nature of these
same interests fixed the limits and determined the direction within
which it should develop. It is important to remember that Luther did
not break with the old theological system. He continued his belief
in an authority and revelation anterior, exterior and superior to
man, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Church
to the Book. Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant
scholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholic
which it succeeded. We usually regard the Reformation as a part of the
Renaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement. Politically
and religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was
a chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and its central
doctrines of justification by faith, and the right of each separate
believer to an unmediated access to the Highest, exalted the integrity
and dignity of the individual. Inconsistently, however, it continued
the old theological tradition. In the Lutheran system, says Paul de
Lagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic structure standing
untouched with the exception of a few loci. And Harnack, in the
_Dogmengeschichte_ calls it "a miserable duplication of the Catholic
Church."
Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its chief roots in
Calvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, was the religious leader of
the Reformation outside Germany. But his system, also, is only
the continuation of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faith
originating with Augustine. He reduced it to order, expounded it with
energy and consistency, but one has only to recall its major doctrines
of the depravity of man, the atonement for sin, the irresistible grace
of the Holy Spirit, to see how untouched it was by the characteristic
postulates of the new humanism. And it was on his theology that New
England preaching was founded. It was Calvin who, through Jonathan
Edwards, the elder and the younger, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins,
Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course of the
New England pulpit.
The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influence
is accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of our
physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite
largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents
of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism
of the New England theology.
It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may be generally
characterized as scientific and practical, that we now turn. These are
the forces which apparently are most affecting Christian preaching
at this moment. But it is important to remember that a large part
of their influence is to be traced to the philosophic and ethical
tendencies of the earlier humanistic movement which had set the scene
for them, to which they are so sympathetic that we may assert that
it is in them that their practical interests are grounded and by them
that their scientific methods are reinforced. I divide this second
group of media, for clearness, under three heads.