want most to believe about Jesus is this, that when we commune with
Him, we are with the infinite; that man's just perception of the
Eternal Spirit, his desire to escape from time into reality, may be
fulfilled in Jesus. That is the Gospel: Come unto Him, all ye that
labor and are heavy laden, for He will give you rest. Whosoever
drinketh of this water shall thirst again. But whosoever drinketh of
the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that
I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into
everlasting life. If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall
be free indeed.
Now, if all this is true, what is the religious preaching of Jesus,
what aspect of His person meets the spiritual need? Clearly, it is His
transcendence. It is not worthy of us to evade it because we cannot
explain it. Surely what has hastened our present paganism has been the
removal from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus the Saviour,
the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter of an absolute need. Of such
preaching of Jesus we have today very little. The pendulum has swung
far to the left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviously
influenced by the currents of the day. It was perhaps inevitable
that He should for a time drop out of His former place in Christian
preaching under this combined humanistic and naturalistic movement.
But it means that again we have relinquished those values which have
made Jesus the heart of humanity.
Of course, He was a perfected human character inspired above all
men by the spirit of God, showing the capacity of humanity to hold
Divinity. This is what Mary celebrates in her paean, "He that is
mighty has magnified me and holy is his name." But is this what men
have passionately adored in Jesus? Has love of Him been self-love? Is
this why He has become the sanctuary of humanity? I think not. We have
for the moment no good language for the other conception of Him. He
is indeed the pledge of what we may be, but how many of us would ever
believe that pledge unless there was something else in Him, more than
we, that guaranteed it? What, as President Tucker asks, is this power
which shall make "maybe" into "is" for us? "Without doubt the trend of
modern thought and faith is toward the more perfect identification
of Christ with humanity. We cannot overestimate the advantage to
Christianity of this tendency. The world must know and feel the
humanity of Jesus. But it makes the greatest difference in result
whether the ground of the common humanity is in Him or in us. To
borrow the expressive language of Paul, was He 'created' in us? Or are
we 'created' in Him? Grant the right of the affirmation that 'there
is no difference in kind between the divine and the human'; allow the
interchange of terms so that one may speak of the humanity of God
and the divinity of man; appropriate the motive which lies in these
attempts to bring God and man together and thus to explain the
personality of Jesus Christ, it is still a matter of infinite concern
whether His home is in the higher or the lower regions of divinity.
After all, very little is gained by the transfer of terms. Humanity
is in no way satisfied with its degree of divinity. We are still as
anxious as ever to rise above ourselves and in this anxiety we want to
know concerning our great helper, whether He has in Himself anything
more than the possible increase of a common humanity. What is His
power to lift and how long may it last? Shall we ever reach His level,
become as divine as He, or does He have part in the absolute and
infinite? This question may seem remote in result but it is everything
in principle. The immanence of Christ has its present meaning and
value because of His transcendence."[40]
[Footnote 40: "The Satisfaction of Humanity in Jesus Christ," _Andover
Review_, January, 1893.]
Preaching today is not moving on the level of this discussion, is
neither asking nor attempting to answer its questions. Great preaching
in some way makes men see the end of the road, not merely the
direction in which it travels. The power to do that we have lost if we
have lost the more-than-us in Jesus. Humanity, unaided, cannot look
to that end which shall explain the beginning. And does Jesus mean
very much to us if He is only "Jesus"? Why do we answer the great
invitation, "Come unto me"? Because He is something other than us?
Because He calls us away from ourselves? back to home? Most of us
no longer know how to preach on that plane of experience or from the
point of view where such questions are serious and real. Our fathers
had a world view and a philosophy which made such preaching easy. But
their power did not lie in that world view; it lay in this vision of
Jesus which produced the view. Is not this the vision which we need?
CHAPTER SEVEN
WORSHIP AS THE CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE
Whatever becomes the inward and the invisible grace of the Christian
community such will be its outward and visible form. Those regulative
ideas and characteristic emotions which determine in any age the
quality of its religious experience will be certain to shape the
nature and conduct of its ecclesiastical assemblies. Their influence
will show, both in the liturgical and homiletical portions of public
worship. If anything further were needed, therefore, to indicate
the secularity of this age, its substitutes for worship and its
characteristic type of preaching would, in themselves, reveal the
situation. So we venture to devote these closing discussions to some
observations on the present state of Protestant public worship and the
prevailing type of Protestant preaching. For we may thus ascertain
how far those ideas and perceptions which an age like ours needs
are beginning to find an expression and what means may be taken to
increase their influence through church services in the community.
We begin, then, in this chapter, not with preaching, but with worship.
It seems to me clear that the chief office of the church is liturgical
rather than homiletical. Or, if that is too technical a statement,
it may be said that the church exists to set forth and foster the
religious life and that, because of the nature of that life, it finds
its chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative rather than the
rationalizing or practical areas of human expression. Even as Michael
Angelo, at the risk of his life, purloined dead bodies that he
might dissect them and learn anatomy, so all disciples of the art of
religion need the discipline of intellectual analysis and of knowledge
of the facts of the religious experience if they are to be leaders in
faith. There is a toughness of fiber needed in religious people that
can only come through such mental discipline. But anatomists are not
sculptors. Michael Angelo was the genius, the creative artist, not
because he understood anatomy, but chiefly because of those as yet
indefinable and secret processes of feeling and intuition in man,
which made him feel rather than understand the pity and the terror,
the majesty and the pathos of the human spirit and reveal them in
significant and expressive line. Knowledge supported rather than
rivaled insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need religious
instruction. Nevertheless they are what they are because they are
first perceptive rather than reasoning beings. They both owe, the one
his salvation, the other his despair, to the fact that they have seen
the vision of the holy universe. Both are seers; the saint has given
his allegiance to the heavenly vision. The sinner has resolved to be
disobedient unto it. Both find their first and more natural approach
to religious truth, therefore, through the creative rather than the
critical processes, the emotional rather than the informative powers.
There are, of course, many in our churches who would dissent from
this opinion. It is characteristic of Protestantism, as of humanism in
general, that it lays its chief emphasis upon the intelligence. If we
go to church to practice the presence of God, must we not first know
who and what this God is whose presence with us we are there asked
to realize? So most Protestant services are more informative than
inspirational. Their attendants are assembled to hear about God rather
to taste and see that the Lord is good. They analyze the religious
experience rather than enjoy it; insensibly they come to regard
the spiritual life as a proposition to be proved, not a power to
be appropriated. Hence our services generally consist of some
"preliminary exercises," as we ourselves call them, leading up to the
climax--when it is a climax--of the sermon.
Here is a major cause for the declension of the influence of
Protestant church services. They go too much on the assumption that
men already possess religion and that they come to church to discuss
it rather than to have it provided. They call men to be listeners
rather than participants in their temples. Of course, one may find
God through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician or the
astronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think the thoughts of God
after him!" Yet a service which places its chief emphasis upon the
appeal to the will through instruction has declined from that realm
of the absolutes where religion in its purest form belongs. For since
preaching makes its appeal chiefly through reason, it thereby attempts
to produce only a partial and relative experience in the life of the
listener. It impinges upon the will by a slow process. Sometimes one
gets so deadly weary of preaching because, in a world like ours, the
reasonable process is so unreasonable. That's a half truth, of course,
but one that the modern world needs to learn.
Others would dissent from our position by saying that service, the
life of good will, is a sufficient worship. The highest adoration is
to visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction. _Laborare
est orare_. What we do speaks so loud God does not care for what
we say. True: but the value of what we do for God depends upon the
godliness of the doer and where shall he find that godliness save in
the secret place of the Most High? And the greatest gift we can give
our fellows is to bring them into the divine presence. "There is,"
says Dr. William Adams Brown, "a service that is directed to the
satisfaction of needs already in existence, and there is a service
that is itself the creator of new needs which enlarge the capacity of
the man to whom it would minister. To this larger service religion
is committed, and the measure of a man's fitness to render it is his
capacity for worship." But no one can give more than he has. If we are
to offer such gifts we must ourselves go before and lead. To create
the atmosphere in which the things of righteousness and holiness
seem to be naturally exalted above the physical, the commercial, the
domestic affairs of men; to lift the level of thought and feeling
to that high place where the spiritual consciousness contributes its
insights and finds a magnanimous utterance--is there anything that our
world needs more? There are noble and necessary ministries to the body
and the mind, but most needed, and least often offered, there is a
ministry to the human spirit. This is the gift which the worshiper can
bring. Knowledge of God may not be merely or even chiefly comprehended
in a concept of the intelligence; knowledge of Him is that vitalizing
consciousness of the Presence felt in the heart, which opens our eyes
that we may see that the mountain is full of horses and chariots of
fire round about us and that they who fight with us are more than
they who fight with them. This is the true and central knowledge that
private devotion and public worship alone can give; preaching can
but conserve and transmit this religious experience through the mind,
worship creates it in the heart. Edwards understood that neither
thought nor conduct can take its place. "The sober performance of
moral duty," said he, "is no substitute for passionate devotion to a
Being with its occasional moments of joy and exaltation."
We should then begin with worship. A church which does not emphasize
it before everything else is trying to build the structure of a
spiritual society with the corner stone left out. Let us try,
first of all, to define it. An old and popular definition of the
descriptive sort says that "worship is the response of the soul to
the consciousness of being in the presence of God." A more modern
definition, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as "the
unification of consciousness around the central controlling idea of
God, the prevailing emotional tone being that of adoration." Evidently
we mean, then, by worship the appeal to the religious will through
feeling and the imagination. Worship is therefore essentially
creative. Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and there
a direct experience of God through high and concentrated emotion.
It fixes the attention upon Him as an object in Himself supremely
desirable. The result of this unified consciousness is peace and the
result of this peace and harmony is a new sense of power. Worship,
then, is the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one form
or another all religion strives by means of contemplation. So by its
very nature it belongs to the class of the absolutes.
Many psychologies of religion define this contemplation as aesthetic,
and make worship a higher form of delight. This appears to me a quite
typical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience. There
are four words which need explaining when we talk of worship. They
are: wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder springs from the
recognition of the limitations of our knowledge; it is an experience
of the mind. Admiration is the response of a growing intelligence to
beauty, partly an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience. These
distinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sentence "In
wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills
up the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance;
the last is the parent of adoration." Awe is the sense-perception
of the stupendous power and magnitude of the universe; it is, quite
literally, a godly fear. But it is not ignoble nor cringing, it
is just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, of a
comprehensive sanity.
Thus "I would love Thee, O God, if there were no heaven, _and if there
were no hell, I would fear Thee no less_." Reverence is devotion to
goodness, sense of awe-struck loyalty to a Being manifestly under the
influence of principles higher than our own.[41] Now it is with these
last two, awe and reverence, rather than wonder and admiration, that
worship has to do.
[Footnote 41: For a discussion of these four words see Allen,
_Reverence as the Heart of Christianity_, pp. 253 ff.]
Hence the essence of worship is not aesthetic contemplation. Without
doubt worship does gratify the aesthetic instinct and most properly
so. There is no normal expression of man's nature which has not its
accompanying delight. The higher and more inclusive the expression
the more exquisite, of course, the delight. But that pleasure is the
by-product, not the object, of worship. It itself springs partly from
the awe of the infinite and eternal majesty which induces the desire
to prostrate oneself before the Lord our Maker. "I have heard of Thee
by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I
abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." It also springs partly
from passionate devotion of a loyal will to a holy Being. "Behold, as
the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters and as the
eyes of a maid unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon
the Lord." Thus reverence is the high and awe-struck hunger for
spiritual communion. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?"
There is a noble illustration of the nature and the uses of worship
in the Journals of Jonathan Edwards, distinguished alumnus of Yale
College, and the greatest mind this hemisphere has produced. You
remember what he wrote in them, as a youth, about the young woman who
later became his wife: "They say there is a young lady in New Haven
who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and
that there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some way
or other invisible comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding
sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to
meditate on Him. Therefore if you present all the world before her,
with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for
it and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange
sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections, is most
just and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuade
her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the
world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of wonderful
calmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this
great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go
about from place to place singing sweetly and seems to be always full
of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone,
walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible
always conversing with her."
Almost every element of worship is contained in this description.
First, we have a young human being emotionally conscious of the
presence of God, who in some way or other directly but invisibly comes
to her. Secondly, we have her attention so fixed on the adoration of
God that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate upon Him.
Thirdly, as the result of this worshipful approach to religious
reality, we have the profound peace and harmony, the _summum bonum_
of existence, coupled with strong moral purpose which characterize
her life. Here, then, is evidently the unification of consciousness in
happy awe and the control of destiny through meditation upon infinite
matters, that is, through reverent contemplation of God. Is it not
one of those ironies of history wherewith fate is forever mocking
and teasing the human spirit, that the grandson of this lady and of
Jonathan Edwards should have been Aaron Burr?
Clearly, then, the end of worship is to present to the mind, through
the imagination, one idea, majestic and inclusive. So it presents it
chiefly through high and sustained feeling. Worship proceeds on the
understanding that one idea, remaining almost unchanged and holding
the attention for a considerable length of time, so directs the
emotional processes that thought and action are harmonized with it.
If one reads the great prayers of the centuries they indicate, for the
most part, an unconscious understanding of this psychology of worship.
Take, for instance, this noble prayer of Pusey's.
"Let me not seek out of Thee what I can find only in Thee, O Lord,
peace and rest and joy and bliss, which abide only in thine abiding
joy. Lift up my soul above the weary round of harassing thoughts, to
Thy eternal presence. Lift up my soul to the pure, bright, serene,
radiant atmosphere of Thy presence, that there I may breathe freely,
there repose in Thy love, there be at rest from myself and from all
things that weary me, and thence return arrayed with Thy peace, to do
and bear what shall please Thee."
This prayer expresses the essence of worship which is the seeking,
through the fixation of attention, not the delight but rather the
peace and purity which can only be found in the consciousness of God.
This peace is the necessary outcome of the indwelling presence. It
ensues when man experiences the radiant atmosphere of the divine
communion.
The same clear expression of worship is found in another familiar and
noble prayer, that of Johann Arndt. Here, too, are phrases descriptive
of a unified consciousness induced by reverent loyalty.
"Ah, Lord, to whom all hearts are open, Thou canst govern the vessel
of my soul far better than can I. Arise, O Lord, and command the
stormy wind and the troubled sea of my heart to be still, and at peace
in Thee, that I may look up to Thee undisturbed and abide in union
with Thee, my Lord. Let me not be carried hither and thither by
wandering thoughts, but forgetting all else let me see and hear Thee.
Renew my spirit, kindle in me Thy light that it may shine within me,
and my heart burn in love and adoration for Thee. Let Thy Holy Spirit
dwell in me continually, and make me Thy temple and sanctuary, and
fill me with divine love and life and light, with devout and heavenly
thoughts, with comfort and strength, with joy and peace."
Thus here one sees in the high contemplation of a transcendent God
the subduing and elevating of the human will, the restoration and
composure of the moral life. Finally, in a prayer of St. Anselm's
there is a sort of analysis of the process of worship.
"O God, Thou _art_ life, wisdom, truth, bounty and blessedness, the
eternal, the only true Good. My God and my Lord, Thou art my hope and
my heart's joy. I confess with thanksgiving that Thou hast made me in
Thine image, that I may direct all my thoughts to Thee and love Thee.
Lord, make me to know Thee aright that I may more and more love and
enjoy and possess Thee."
One cannot conclude these examples of worshipful expression without
quoting a prayer of Augustine, which is, I suppose, the most perfect
brief petition in all the Christian literature of devotion and which
gives the great psychologist's perception of the various steps in
the unification of the soul with the eternal Spirit through sublime
emotion.
"Grant, O God, that we may desire Thee, and desiring Thee, seek Thee,
and seeking Thee, find Thee, and finding Thee, be satisfied with Thee
forever."
I think one may see, then, why worship as distinct from preaching,
or the hearing of preaching, is the first necessity of the religious
life. It unites us as nothing else can do with God the whole and God
the transcendent. The conception of God is the sum total of human
needs and desires harmonized, unified, concretely expressed. It is the
faith of the worshiper that this concept is derived from a real and
objective Being in some way corresponding to it. No one can measure
the influence of such an idea when it dominates the consciousness of
any given period. It can create and set going new desires and habits,
it can minish and repress old ones, because this idea carries, with
its transcendent conception, the dynamic quality which belongs to
the idea of perfect power. But this transcendent conception, being
essentially of something beyond, without and above ourselves can only
be "realized" through the feeling and the imagination, whose province
it is to deal with the supersensuous values, with the fringes of
understanding, with the farthest bounds of knowledge. These make the
springboard, so to speak, from which man dares to launch himself into
that sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor measure,
but which nevertheless we may perceive and feel, which in some sense
we know to be there.
So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely beginning at the
beginning and starting at the bottom. And, in the light of this
observation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churches
today and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is not
too much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant
communities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in the
nature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They have a naïveté,
an incongruity, that can only be explained on the assumption of their
impoverished background.