Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the
decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do.
It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the
outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and
Barrack Room Ballads--too far away for their guns to be heard in the
streets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaper
head-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It was
the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphant
Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution.
Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulae, sure
of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's
hand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere a
general agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benign
development. The world seemed particularly well in hand.
The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism and
Protestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheres
of influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. The
divisive force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. Since
Alexander Campbell--dead now for a decade and a half--no Protestant sect
of any importance had been established. The older denominations had
achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution
and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy
and though these controversies were severe enough they produced no
schisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leaders were urging
a more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of the
teachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with more
suspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology.
We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of the
whole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorian
epoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge of
the accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked to
meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they
have issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient
orders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It will
be the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessary
material in hand to follow these immense reactions in their various
fields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates but
in the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of
being final--and were not final at all.
Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. We
may date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the last
decades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions not
against a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group of
religious validations which had been built up through an immense labour
of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last century
were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousand
years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked to
wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin,
then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I venture to
call the representative orthodox religious consciousness of the end of
the nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian is of
course assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for Protestantism
has supplied the larger number of followers to the newer religious
movements.
To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by no
means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modern
mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole of
our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all
the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and
that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recent
contributions. The religious mind is an equally complex and deep-rooted
inheritance and can best be approached by a consideration of the bases
of religion.
_Certain Qualities Common to All Religions_
We are but pilgrims down roads which space and time supply; we cannot
account for ourselves in terms of what we know to be less than
ourselves, nor can we face the shadow which falls deeply across the end
of our way without dreaming, at least, of that which lies beyond.
Whence? Whither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices out
of the depths. A very great development of intelligence was demanded
before such questions really took definite shape, but they are implicit
in even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we outgrow them
through any achievement of Science or development of Philosophy. They
become thereby, if anything, more insistent. Our widening horizons of
knowledge are always swept by a vaster circumference of mystery into
which faith must write a meaning and beyond which faith must discern a
destiny.
Religion begins, therefore, in our need so to interpret the power
manifest in the universe[1] as to come into some satisfying relationship
therewith. It goes on to supply an answer to the dominant
questions--Whence? Whither? Why? It fulfills itself in worship and
communion with what is worshipped. Such worship has addressed itself to
vast ranges of objects, fulfilled itself in an almost unbelievable
variety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been some
aspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover, of
those who worship to come into a real relation with what is worshipped.
It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to back up so
general a statement with the facts which prove it, but the facts are
beyond dispute. It would be equally difficult to analyze the elements in
human nature which lead us to seek such communion. The essential
loneliness of the soul, our sense of divided and warring powers and the
general emotional instability of personality without fitting objects of
faith and devotion, all contribute to the incurable religiosity of human
nature.
[Footnote 1: I have taken as a working definition of Religion a phrase
quoted by Ward Fowler in the introduction to his Gifford Lectures on
"The Religious Experience of the Roman People." "Religion is the
effective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifesting
itself in the Universe." This is only a formula but it lends itself to
vital interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many of
which are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion just
now current which define it as a system of values or a process of
evaluation.]
The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largely
tested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God as
by any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value of
religion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet the
need of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense for
right standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simple
enough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were
permitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These
permissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may
trace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an
always emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental
relationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first
felt itself to be the more august force and through its superior
authority gave direction and quality to the conduct of its devotees. It
was long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on
the Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to his
churches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover the
beginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the most
primitive cults.
We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion is
less marked in modern religious cults and movements than either the
quest for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three great
questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. They
accept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christian
conduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethical
standards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them.
As has been intimated, however, the appeal of religion goes far deeper
than all this. If it did no more than seek to define for us the "power
not ourselves" everywhere made manifest, if it did no more than answer
the haunting questions: Whence? and Whither? and Why?, if it did no more
than offer the emotional life a satisfying object of worship and
communion with the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical standards
and guiding and strengthening the will in its endeavour after goodness,
it would have done us an immense service. But one may well wonder
whether if religion did no more than this it would have maintained
itself as it has and renew through the changing generations its
compelling appeal. More strong than any purely intellectual curiosity
as to a first cause or controlling power, more haunting than any wonder
as to the source and destiny of life, more persistent than any
loneliness of the questing soul is our dissatisfaction with ourselves,
our consciousness of tragic moral fault, our need of forgiveness and
deliverance. This longing for deliverance has taken many forms.
Henry Osborn Taylor in a fine passage has shown us how manifold are the
roads men have travelled in their quest for salvation.[2] "For one man
shall find his peace in action, another in the rejection of action, even
in the seeming destruction of desire; another shall have peace and
freedom through intellectual inquiry, while another must obey his God or
love his God and may stand in very conscious need of divine salvation.
The adjustment sought by Confucius was very different from that which
drew the mind of Plato or led Augustine to the City of God. Often quite
different motives may inspire the reasonings which incidentally bring
men to like conclusions.... The life adjustment of the early Greek
philosophers had to do with scientific curiosity.... They were not like
Gotama seeking relief from the tedious impermanence of personal
experience any more than they were seeking to insure their own eternal
welfare in and through the love of God, the motive around which surged
the Christian yearning for salvation. Evidently every religion is a
means of adjustment or deliverance."
[Footnote 2: "Deliverance," pp. 4 and 5.]
Professor James in his chapter on The Sick Souls deals most suggestively
with these driving longings and all the later analyses of the psychology
of conversion begin with the stress of the divided self. The deeper
teaching of the New Testament roots itself in this soil. The literature
of confession is rich in classic illustrations of all this, told as only
St. Augustine more than a thousand years ago or Tolstoy yesterday can
tell it. No need to quote them here; they are easily accessible for
those who would find for their own longings immortal voices and be
taught with what searching self-analysis those who have come out of
darkness into light have dealt with their own sick souls.
Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to its
devotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurance
that their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured through
the sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only
the sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We
have great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves but
from the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer some
explanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, above
all, justify the ways of God with men.
Generally speaking, religion is very greatly dependent upon its power so
to interpret the hard things of life to those who bear them that they
may still believe in the Divine love and justice. The generality of
doubt is not philosophical but practical. We break with God more often
than for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faith
with us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found their
opportunity in the evident deficiency of the traditional explanation of
pain and sorrow. Religion has really a strong hold on the average life
only as it meets the more shadowed side of experience with the
affirmation of an all-conquering love and justice in which we may rest.
Broadly considered, then, the elements common to all religions are such
as these: a satisfying interpretation of the power manifest in the
universe, the need of the mind for an answer to the questions Whence?
and Whither? and Why?, the need of the emotional life for such peace as
may come from the consciousness of being in right relationship and
satisfying communion with God, the need of the will and ethical sense
for guidance, and a need including all this and something beside for
spiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of the
end of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departure
for the religious reactions of the last generation naturally included
all this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectually
curious were more concerned with science and political economies than
the nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are not
generally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it as
a Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible.
Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be held
abstractly. They were articulate in creeds and organized in churches
and invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated through
old, old processes of religious development.
_Christianity Historically Organized Around the Conception of a
Transcendent God and a Fallen Humanity_
For in its historic development religion has naturally taken distinctly
divergent forms, conditioned by race, environment, the action and
reaction of massed experience and by the temper and insight of a few
supremely great religious leaders. But centrally, the whole development
of any religion has been controlled by its conception of God and, in the
main, three different conceptions of God give colour and character to
the outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thought
of God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to the
measure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of the
universe. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mystical
quality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. The
religions of the Divine Immanence conceive God as pervading and
sustaining all that is and revealing Himself thereby, though not
necessarily confined therein. The religions of the Divine Transcendence
have believed in a God who is apart from all that is, who neither begins
nor ends in His universe, and from whom we are profoundly separated not
only by our littlenesses but by our sin.
All this is a bare statement of what is almost infinitely richer as it
has been felt and proclaimed by the devout and we shall see as we go on
how the newer religious movements take also their colour and character
from a new emphasis upon the nature of God, or else a return to
understandings of Him and feelings about Him which have been lost out in
the development of Christianity.
Historically Christian theology, particularly in the West, has centered
around the conception of a Transcendent God. As far as doctrine goes
Christianity took over a great inheritance from the Jew, for arrestingly
enough the Jew, though he belongs to the East, had never anything in
common with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets and
lawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects of
Pantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament is
always immeasurably above those who worshipped Him in righteousness and
power; He is their God and they are His chosen people, but there is
never any identification of their will with His except in the rare
moments of their perfect obedience.
True enough, through the insight of the prophets and particularly the
experience of psalmists, this conception of the Apart-God became
increasingly rich in the persuasion of His unfailing care for His
children. None the less, the Hebrew God is a Transcendent God and
Christianity inherits from that. Christianity took over what Judaism
refused--Jesus Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealth
of His teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made most
of what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of their
race. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and the
greatest of the group--St. Paul--was a Jewish Rabbi before he became a
Christian teacher. He had been nurtured and matured in the schools of
his people and though he was reborn, in renunciations and obediences
distinctly Christian, there were in his very soul inherited rigidities
of form in conformity to which he recast his faith.
More distinctly than he himself could ever have known, he particularized
the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doubtless his own experience was the deeper
directing force in all this. Theologies always, to begin with, are the
molten outpouring of some transforming experience and they are always,
to begin with, fluid and glowing.
Such glowing experiences as these are hard to communicate; they, too,
soon harden down and we inherit, as cold and rigid form, what was to
begin with the flaming outcome of experience. St. Paul's own struggle
and the bitterness of a divided self which issued in his conversion
naturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out his
system strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he had
probably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ's
lips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inheritance and
widened that system of sacrifices and atonements until he found therein
not only a place for the Cross but the necessity for it. He made much,
therefore, of the sense of alienation from God, of sin and human
helplessness, of the need and possibility of redemption.
_The Incarnation as the Bridge Between God and Man; the Cross as the
Instrument of Man's Redemption. The Cross the Supreme Symbol of Western
Theology_
Here, then, are the two speculative backgrounds of historic
Christianity,--God's apartness from man in an inconceivable immensity of
lonely goodness, man's alienation from God in a helpless fallen estate.
For the bridging of the gulf between God and His world Christianity
offers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost estate
Christianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the reentry of God
into a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way of
thinking, He has never been entirely separate, but from which He has,
none the less, been so remote that if ever it were to be rescued from
its ruined condition there was needed a new revelation of God in
humanity; and the Atonement is just the saving operation of God thus
incarnated.
Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greek
theologies were built around that. They exhausted the resources of a
language particularly fitted for subtle definition in their endeavour to
explain the mystery of it, and, after more than a century of bitter
debate about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves with
affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature,
neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed
making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so
sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But
though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon
it, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as
one come into human life and sharing it and using it, without which
there would have been in all the faith and thinking of the West for more
than a thousand years an unbridged and unbridgeable gulf between God and
man.
Indeed, when we turn back again to the great Greek symbols with that
conception of the immanence of God which the truer insights of our own
time have done so much to supply, we find these old forms and phrases
unexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the Western
Church had been more strongly influenced by the philosophical insight of
the early Eastern Church, Western Christendom might have been saved from
a good deal of that theological hardness from which great numbers are
just now reacting.
But Western Christendom took the Cross for the central symbol of its
faith. What would have happened to Western Christendom without Augustine
we do not know, and it is idle to try to guess, but Europe in its
religious thinking followed for a thousand years the direction he gave
it. His theology is only the travail of his soul, glowing and molten.
His Confessions reveal to us more clearly than any other record we have
Paganism becoming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we see
something vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of new
spiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, the
growth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us the
passages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirth
meant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing recasting of
both the inner and outer life. He shows us what it meant to put aside
the inheritances and relationships of an immemorial order and to stand
as a little child untaught, undisciplined and unperfect in the presence
of the new. The spiritual attitude which Augustine attained was to be
for long the dominant spiritual attitude of Europe, was to govern
medieval conceptions, inspire medieval actions, colour with its flame
the mystic brooding of the medieval mind.
In the end the sovereignty of God became for Augustine supreme and over
against this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state. He
was doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions but
they took new character as they passed through the alembic of his own
experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning
the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity
with God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as a
deification ... they dwell on the idea that we become partakers of the
Divine nature."[3] The emphasis here is not so much upon sin to be
atoned for or punishment to be avoided, as reconciliation to be
achieved.
[Footnote 3: Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine," p. 162.]
After Augustine the interpretations of the Cross take a new direction.
Now men are thereby not so much to be made partakers of the divine
nature as to be saved from hell. The explanations of the way in which
this salvation is really achieved change with the changing centuries but
through shifting theologies there is one constant. All men are lost and
foredoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only in
that Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith and
obedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varying
theological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as if
here were something whose meanings no single explanation could exalt,
something to be felt rather than understood. The Cross so seen is the
symbol at once of love and need, of moral defeat and moral discipline,
of suffering helplessness and overcoming goodness. We cannot overstate
the influence of this faith upon the better part of Western
civilization.
It has kept us greatly humble, purged us of our pride and thrown us back
in a helplessness which is, after all, the true secret of our strength,
upon the saving mercy of God. The story of it, simply told, has moved
the hard or bitter or the careless as nothing else can do. Its
assurances of deliverance have given new hope to the hopeless and a
power not their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very message
of God the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us how
there is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and the
strong put their strength at the service of the weak; it has taught us
that the greatest sin is the sin against love and the really enduring
victories for any better cause are won only as through the appeal of a
much enduring unselfishness new tempers are created and new forces are
released. Nor is there any sign yet that its empire has begun to come to
an end.
_The Catholic Church Offered Deliverance in Obedience to the Authority
of an Inerrant Church_
Nevertheless the preaching of the Cross has not commonly taken such
forms as these; it has been rather the appeal of the Church to the
individual to escape his sinful and hopeless estate either through an
obedient self-identification with the Church's discipline and an
unquestioning acceptance of the Church's authority, or else through an
intellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moral
surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the
one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the
individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early
formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual
and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline
Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and
method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly
interprets St. Paul. Faith--a big enough word, standing for both
intellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love and
goodness and justice of God revealed in the Cross of Christ--is the key
to salvation and the condition of Christian character. It is also that
through which religion becomes real to the individual. But since all
this lays upon the individual a burden hard enough to be borne (as we
shall see when we come back to Protestantism itself) the Church, as her
organization became more definite and her authority more strongly
established, took the responsibility of the whole matter upon herself.
She herself would become responsible for the outcome if only they were
teachable and obedient.
The Catholic Church offered to its communicants an assured security, the
proof of which was not in the fluctuating states of their own souls but
in the august authority of the Church to which they belonged. As long,
therefore, as they remained in obedient communion with their Church
their souls were secure. The Church offered them its confessional for
their unburdening and its absolutions for their assurance, its
sacraments for their strengthening and its penances for their discipline
and restoration. It took from them in spiritual regions and maybe in
other regions too, the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives
and asked of the faithful only that they believe and obey. The Church,
as it were, "stepped down" religion to humanity. It did all this with a
marvellous understanding of human nature and in answer to necessities
which were, to begin with, essential to the discipline of childlike
peoples who would otherwise have been brought face to face with truths
too great for them, or dismissed to a freedom for which they were not
ready.
It was and is a marvellous system; there has never been anything like it
and if it should wholly fail from amongst us there will never be
anything like it again. And yet we see that all this vast spiritual
edifice, like the arches of its own great cathedrals, locks up upon a
single keystone. The keystone of the arch of Catholic certainty is the
acceptance of the authority of the Church conditioned by belief in the
divine character of that authority. If anything should shake the
Catholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of her
sacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulated
as this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change. To
continue our figure, one great wing of the medieval structure fell away
in the Protestant Reformation and what was left, though extensive and
solid enough, is still like its great cathedrals--yielding to time and
change. The impressive force and unity of contemporaneous Catholicism
may lead us perhaps to underestimate the number of those in the Catholic
line who, having for one reason or another lost faith in their Church,
are now open to the appeal of the newer movements. For example, the
largest non-Catholic religious group of Poles in Detroit are
Russellites. There are on good authority between three and four thousand
of them.
_The Protestant Church Made Faith the Key to Salvation with Conversion
the Test for the Individual of the Reality of His Religious Experience_
If religion has been made real to the Catholic through the mediation of
his Church, Protestantism, seeking to recreate the apostolic Church, has
made the reality of religion a matter between the individual and his
God. And yet Protestantism has never dared commit itself to so simple a
phrasing of religion as this, nor to go on without authorities of its
own. Protestantism generally has substituted for the inclusive authority
of the Catholic Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentally
the authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carried
over the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we have
generally recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine as
Augustine was in direct line with St. Paul, and Luther's fundamental
doctrine--justification by faith--was not so much a rewriting of ancient
creeds as a new way of validating their meaning for the individual.
Faith, in our common use of the term, has hardened down into an
intellectual acceptance of Protestant theologies, but certainly for St.
Paul and probably for Luther it was far more vital than this and far
more simple. It was rather a resting upon a delivering power, the
assurance of whose desire and willingness to deliver was found in the
New Testament. It was an end to struggle, a spiritual victory won
through surrender.
The Latin Catholic system had come to impose upon such tempers as
Luther's an unendurable amount of strain; it was too complex, too
demanding, and it failed to carry with it necessary elements of mental
and spiritual consent. (St. Paul had the same experience with his own
Judaism.) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. He
was typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" and
he found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts in
simply taking for granted that a fight which he was not able to win for
himself had been won for him in the transaction on the Cross. He had
nothing, therefore, to do but to accept the peace thus made possible and
thereafter to be spiritually at rest.
Now since the whole of the meaning of the Cross for Christianity from
St. Paul until our own time is involved in this bare statement and since
our theologies have never been able to explain this whole great matter
in any doctrinal form which has secured universal consent, we must
simply fall back upon the statement of the fact and recognize that here
is something to be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine.
The validating experience has come generally to be known as conversion,
and conversion has played a great part in evangelical Protestantism ever
since the Reformation. It has become, indeed, the one way in which
religion has been made real to most members of evangelical churches. So
sweeping a statement must be somewhat qualified, for conversion is far
older than Luther;[4] it is not confined to Protestantism and the
Protestant churches themselves have not agreed in their emphasis upon
it. Yet we are probably on safe ground in saying that religion has
become real to the average member of the average Protestant Church more
distinctly through conversion than anything else.
[Footnote 4: But rather in the discipline of the Mystic as an enrichment
of the spiritual life than as a door to the Communion of the Church.]
Conversion has of late come up for a pretty thoroughgoing examination by
the psychologists, and their conclusions are so generally familiar as
to need no restatement here. William James, in a rather informal
paragraph quoted from one of his letters, states the psychologist's
point of view more simply and vividly than either he or his disciples
have defined their position in their more formal works. "In the case of
conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be
supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am sure
that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power
gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict
of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously
divided, but in which, after the conversion crisis, the higher loves and
powers come definitely to gain the upper hand and expel the forces which
up to that time had kept them down to the position of mere grumblers and
protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will
cover an enormous number of cases psychologically and leaves all the
religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory."[5]
[Footnote 5: Letters of William James, Vol. II, p. 57.]
In Luther, Augustine and St. Paul, and a great fellowship beside, this
stress of the divided self was both immediate and intense. Such as these
through the consciousness of very real fault--and this is true of
Augustine and St. Paul--or through a rare spiritual sensitiveness and an
unusual force of aspiration--and this is true of many others--did not
need any conviction of sin urged upon them from the outside. They had
conviction enough of their own. But all these have been men and women
apart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to great
travail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritual
deliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal,
their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type of
personality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience be
cast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to every
one through the same travail of soul in which it was made real to them,
carries with it two very great dangers: first, that some semblance of
struggle should be created which does not come vitally out of
experience; and second, that the resultant peace should be artificial
rather than true, and therefore, should not only quickly lose its force
but really result in reactions which would leave the soul of the one so
misled, or better perhaps, so mishandled, emptier of any real sense of
the reality of religion than to begin with.
_Protestantism Found Its Authority in an Infallibly Inspired Bible_
Now this is too largely what has happened in evangelical Protestantism.
The "twice-born" have been set up as the standard for us all; they have
demanded of their disciples the same experience as those through which
they themselves have passed. Since this type of religious experience has
always been the more ardent and vivid, since the churches in which least
has been made of it have generally tended to fall away into routine and
some want of real power, we have had, particularly since Jonathan
Edwards in America and the Wesleys in England, a recurrent insistence
upon it as the orthodox type of religious experience. Partly through
inheritance and partly in answer to its own genius Protestantism has
built up a system of theology tending to reproduce the sequence of
conviction of sin, aspiration, repentance, and conversion by doctrinal
pressure from the outside. The foundations of it all are in the New
Testament and somewhat in the Old, but what has been built upon these
foundations has been either too extended or too one-sided. In order to
include in one general sense of condemnation strong enough to create an
adequate desire for salvation, all sorts and conditions of people,
theology has not only charged us up with our own sins which are always a
sad enough account, but it has charged us up with ancestral and imputed
sins.
This line of theology has been far too rigid, far too insistent upon
what one may call the facts of theology, and far too blind to the facts
of life. It has made much of sin in the abstract and sometimes far too
little of concrete sin; it has made more of human depravity than social
justice; it has failed to make allowance for varieties of temper and
condition; it is partly responsible for the widespread reaction of the
cults and movements of our own time.
Since so strongly an articulate system as this needed something to
sustain it, Protestantism has constantly supported itself in the
authority of the Old and New Testaments. It displaced one authority by
another, the authority of the Church by the authority of the Book, and
in order to secure for this authority an ultimate and unquestioned power
it affirmed as the beginning and the end of its use of the Scriptures
their infallibility. The growth of Protestant teaching about the Bible
has necessarily been complicated but we must recognize that Protestant
theology and Protestant tradition have given the Bible what one may call
read-in values.
At any rate after affirming the infallibility of the text Protestantism
has turned back to the text for the proof of its teaching and so built
up its really very great interrelated system in which, as has already
been said, the power of religion over the life of its followers and the
reality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up on
just such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions;
second, conversion secured through the processes of Protestant
indoctrination, backed up by the fervent appeal of the Protestant
ministry and the pressure of Protestant Church life; and third, all this
supported by an appeal to the authority of the Bible with a proof-text
for every statement.
All this is, of course, to deal coldly and analytically with something
which, as it has worked out in religious life, has been neither cold nor
analytical. Underneath it all have been great necessities of the soul
and issuing out of it all have been aspirations and devoutnesses and
spiritual victories and new understandings of God and a wealth of love
and goodness which are a part of the imperishable treasures of humanity
for three centuries. This faith and experience have voiced themselves
in moving hymns, built themselves into rare and continuing fellowships,
gone abroad in missionary passion, spent themselves for a better world
and looked unafraid even into the face of death, sure of life and peace
beyond. But behind the great realities of our inherited religious life
one may discover assumptions and processes less sure.
_The Strength and Weakness of This Position_
Once more, this inherited faith in the Bible and the systems which have
grown out of it have been conditioned by scientific and philosophic
understandings. The Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of the
Bible assumed its authority not only in the region of religion but in
science and history as well. The inherited theologies really went out of
their way to give the incidental the same value as the essential. There
was no place in them for growth, correction, further revelation. This
statement may be challenged, it certainly needs to be qualified, for
when the time for adjustment and the need of adjustment really did come
the process of adjustment began to be carried through, but only at very
great cost and only really by slowly building new foundations under the
old. In fact the new is not in many ways the old at all, though this is
to anticipate.
It is directly to the point here that the whole scheme of religion as it
has come down to us on the Protestant side till within the last fifty
years was at once compactly interwrought, strongly supported and
unexpectedly vulnerable. The integrity of any one part of its line
depended upon the integrity of every other part; its gospel went back
to the Fall of Man and depended, therefore, upon the Biblical theory of
the Creation and subsequent human history. If anything should challenge
the scientific or historical accuracy of the book of Genesis, the
doctrine of original sin would have either to be discarded or recast. If
the doctrine of original sin were discarded or recast, the accepted
interpretations of the Atonement went with it. With these changed or
weakened the evangelical appeal must either be given new character or
lose force. A system which began with the Fall on one side went on to
heaven and hell on the other and even heaven and hell were more
dependent upon ancient conceptions of the physical structure of the
world and the skies above it than the Church was willing to recognize.
The doctrine of eternal punishment particularly was open to ethical
challenge.
_Evangelical Protestantism the Outcome of the Whole Process_
Of course all this is rather an extreme statement of the situation fifty
years ago. The churches did not all agree in insisting upon a
conversion; some evangelic churches were beginning to place their
emphasis upon Christian nurture; they sought what is secured for the
emotionally twice-born through guided growth and a larger dependence
upon normal spiritual conditions, though they were at least one with
their brethren in believing that those who come into Christian
discipleship must in the end be greatly changed and conscious of the
change; they too must possess as an assurance of the reality of their
religious life a sense of peace and spiritual well-being.
The high Anglican Church approached the Latin Catholic Church in its
insistence upon sacramental regeneration. This wing of the Church
believed and believes still that baptism truly administered and the Holy
Communion also administered in proper form and accepted in due obedience
by priests belonging to some true succession, possess a mystic saving
power. Just why all this should be so they are perhaps not able to
explain to the satisfaction of any one save those who, for one reason or
another, believe it already. But those who cannot understand
sacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there be
here danger of a mechanical formulism, the sacraments themselves may
become part of a spiritual discipline through which the lives of men and
women are so profoundly changed as in the most clear case of conversion,
manifesting often a spiritual beauty not to be found in any other
conception of Christian discipleship. Our differences here are not so
great as we suppose them.
There have always been liberal reactions within the Church herself,
tending either toward relaxation of discipline or the more rational and
simple statements of doctrine. What has been so far said would not be
true of Unitarianism and Universalism in the last century. But these
movements have been somehow wanting in driving power, and so, when all
these qualifications are made, evangelical Protestantism has resulted in
a pretty clearly recognizable type. The representative members of the
representative evangelical churches all had a religious experience; some
of them had been converted after much waiting at the anxious seat, or
long kneeling at the altar rail; others of them had been brought through
Christian teaching to the confession of their faith, but all of them
were thereby reborn. They were the product of a theology which taught
them their lost estate, offered them for their acceptance a mediatorial
and atoning Christ, assured them that through their faith their
salvation would be assured, and counselled them to look to their own
inner lives for the issue of all this in a distinct sense of spiritual
peace and well-being. If they doubted or questioned they were answered
with proof-texts; for their spiritual sustenance they were given the
services of their churches where preaching was generally central, and
exhorted to grow in grace and knowledge through prayer and much reading
of their Bible.
_The Individual Experience of the Believer the Keystone of Evangelical
Protestantism. Its Openness to Disturbing Forces_
Now fine and good as all this was it was, as the event proved, not big
enough to answer all the needs of the soul, nor strong enough to meet
the challenge of forces which were a half century ago shaping themselves
toward the almost entire recasting of great regions of human thought. It
was, to begin with, unexpectedly weak in itself. Evangelical
Protestantism, as has been noted, throws upon the members of Protestant
churches a larger burden of individual responsibility than does the
Catholic Church. The typical evangelical Protestant has had little to
sustain him in his religious life save his sense of reconciliation with
God, from whom possibly he never vitally thought himself to have been
estranged, and a consequent spiritual peace.
His church promises him nothing except teaching, inspiration,
comradeship, an occasion for the confession of his faith and some
opportunity for service. His ministers are only such as he; they may
exhort but they dare not absolve. He is greatly dependent, then, for his
sense of the reality of religion upon his own spiritual states. If he is
spiritually sensitive and not too much troubled by doubt, if he
possesses a considerable capacity for religious understanding, if his
Bible is still for him the authoritative word of God, if his church
meets his normal religious needs with a reasonable degree of adequacy,
if he is resolute in purpose and if he has no excessively trying
experiences in the face of which his faith breaks down, and if the cares
of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, or the strain of poverty do
not too much distract him (and this is a long and formidable list of
ifs) then he is faithful in his church relationships and personally
devout. He grows in grace and knowledge and the outcome of it all is a
religious character admirable in manifold ways, steadfast and truthful
in good works.
* * * * *
The fact that in spite of all hindrances the Protestant churches do go
on, registering from decade to decade a varying statistical growth with
a strongly organized life and a great body of communicants who find in
the religious life thus secured to them the true secret of interior
peace and their true source of power, is itself a testimony to the
massive reality of the whole system. And yet the keystone of the great
structure is just the individual experience of the individual believer,
conditioned upon his longing for deliverance and his personal assurance
that he has found, through his faith in his church's gospel, what he
seeks.
If anything should shake the Protestant's confidence in his creed or his
Bible, or if his own inner experiences should somehow fail in their
sense of sustaining reality, then all the structure of his religion
begins to weaken.
If one may use and press a suggestive figure, here is a religious
structure very much like Gothic architecture; its converging arches of
faith and knowledge lock up upon their keystones and the thrust of the
whole great structure has been met and conquered by flying buttresses.
In other words, sustaining forces of accredited beliefs about science,
history and human nature have been a necessary part of the entire system
and the temple of faith thus sustained may be weakened either through
some failure in the keystone of it which is inner experience, or the
flying buttresses of it which are these accepted systems of science,
history, philosophy and psychology.
_Readjustment of Both Catholic and Protestant Systems Inevitable_
Out of such elements as these, then, through such inheritances and
disciplines the representative religious consciousness of American
Protestantism of the end of the nineteenth century had been created. It
rooted itself in elements common to all religion, it inherited
practically the whole content of the Old Testament, it invested Hebraic
systems of sacrifice with typical meanings and Jewish prophecy with a
mystic authority. It was in debt to St. Paul and Augustine for its
theology. Its cosmogony was 4,000 years old and practically uninfluenced
by modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in its
acceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its main
line of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. It
made more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in the
Crucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic in
its emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. For
the Protestant it locked up unexpectedly upon the infallible authority
of the Bible and for the Catholic upon the inerrancy of the Church. It
was out of the current of the modern temper in science and philosophy
generally. Its conceptions of the probable fate of the world were Jewish
and of the future life were medieval, and perhaps the strangest thing in
it all was the general unconsciousness of its dependence upon
assumptions open to challenge at almost every point and the process of
profound readjustment upon the threshold of which it stood.
It is almost impossible to disentangle the action of the two sets of
strain which have within the last half century been brought to bear upon
it. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is to
consider the forces which for the last two generations have been
challenging and reshaping inherited faiths, and then to consider the
outcome of it all in the outstanding religious attitudes of our own
time.