_It is a wrong use of the Bible to manufacture cut of it any one uniform,
system, of theology, as the fixed and final form of thought in which
religion is to live._
Let me define these contrasting terms, so commonly confounded. Religion
is man's perception of the Power in whom we live and move and have our
being, and his emotion towards this power. Theology is man's conception of
this Power, and his thought defined and formulated.
Religion is man's feeling after God; theology is man's grasp of God. The
two are necessarily connected. They are different forms of one and the
same force; the heat and the light which stream from God; but the heat and
the light are not always equal. A worthy thought of God ought to sustain
any worthy feeling towards Him. It generally does so. A heightened thought
of God may often be found back of a rising flow of feeling after Him. More
often the emotion precedes the conception; the vague, awed sense of God
travails till a new thought is born among men. This has been the order of
development in history. Men felt the Divine Power and Presence ages before
they had learned so much of theology as to say--God. The feeling of
God--religion--always keeps, in healthy natures, far ahead of
theology--the thought about Him. The deepest religion finds no word for
the mystery before which it bows. Its only thought may be that no thought
is sufficient.
"In that high hour thought was not."
Theology, then, as man's thought about God, is necessarily conditioned by
man's mind. It is under the general limitations of the human intellect,
and the special limitations of thought in each race and age and
individuality. It cannot escape these limitations, expand as they may. A
flooding of the mind from on high may overflow these embankments but they
still stand, shaping the flow of the fullest tides. The individuality of a
great writer asserts itself most strongly in his greatest works. His
deepest inspiration brings out most plainly his mental form, just as the
drawing of a full breath shows the real shape of a man. No possible theory
of inspiration should lead us to look for the submergences of the dykes of
thought cast up by race and age and individuality.
As a matter of fact, we find no uniformity in the theologies of the New
Testament writers. Men have tried hard to make it appear that there was
such a unity of thought. Never was more ingenious joiner-work done than in
the "harmonies" of the New Testament writers. But facts are stubborn
things, and in this case have resisted even the omnipotence of human
ingenuity; as open minds have seen, despite the doctors.
St. Paul's Epistles reveal a theology by no means as precise and fixed as
is popularly imagined, undergoing rapid changes, growing with his growth,
always suffused from the soul with emotions which struggled against the
prison bars of thought and speech. His intensely speculative mind had
furnished a system of thought into which he built such ideas as these: The
pre-existence of Christ, as, in some mystic, undefined way, the Head of
Humanity; the sacrificial nature of His death; the justification of the
sinner through faith; the life of Christ within the soul, as the Human
Ideal; the speedy return of Christ in person to reign on earth (at least
in the early part of his career); the resurrection of the pious dead; the
translation of living believers; the final victory of goodness over evil;
and the ending of the mediatorship of Christ, God then becoming all in
all.
This was the form which the mystery of God's relationship to man took in
the mind of this great genius, and around which the fiery passion of his
hunger after righteousness shaped itself.
In the Epistle of St. James, assuming the traditional authorship, how much
of this theology can you find? The incarnation is nowhere clearly stated.
The name of Christ occurs but twice. His atonement is scarcely mentioned.
The prophets are held up as examples of patience, under suffering without
any reference to Christ. Paul's especial doctrine of justification by
faith is explicitly denied. Of his fellowship with the Gentiles and his
broad human sympathies, there is nothing whatever. All is intensely
Jewish. If Paul's theology is orthodoxy, James is dreadfully unsound.[33]
"The fundamentals" are all lacking.
Both Paul and James differ very decidedly from the mystic soul who wrote
the First Epistle of John; and all three differ again, quite as much, from
the philosopher who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. How little have
either the Apocalypse or Jude in common with Paul! We can no more make a
uniform theology out of the New Testament writers than we can out of
Calvinism, Arminianism Catholicism, and Unitarianism.
These various theologies can be traced to the elements making up the
individualities of the different writers. The idiosyncracies of Paul are
clearly marked. He was a man of strong speculative mind, of mystic piety,
of lofty enthusiasm for great ideals, a-hungered after righteousness. A
Jew and yet a Roman citizen, his education developed the two-fold
sympathies of an Israelite of the dispersion. At the feet of the liberal
rabbi, Gamaliel, he learned the curious and mystical lore of the rabbins,
while drinking in from his Master the spirit of freedom. Thrown from a
child in constant contact with the Gentiles of his native city, Tarsus,
race prejudices had been sapped unconsciously; while in youth or manhood
the wisdom and beauty of the Greek genius had apparently been opened to
him.
Paul's personality, fusing the materials of his education, and out of them
building a body of thought around The Christ, explains his theology. He
reproduces the conceptions of the rabbis, of the popular Jewish belief, of
Gamaliel, of Tarsus, of Athens; transfigured on the heights of thought to
which he climbed, in his intense musings over the problem of Jesus of
Nazareth, while buried away in Arabia.
The small amount of theology in the practical Epistle of James is quite as
plainly Jewish, of the school of the Sages, with a touch of Essenism. The
theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows throughout the influences of
the philosophy of Alexandria. The theology of the introduction to the
Gospel according to St. John is just as unquestionably this same
Alexandrian philosophy, still further developed.
These variant schools of Christian theology, so plainly revealing the
sources of their variations, deny the existence of any one uniform system
of thought in the New Testament writers, and pronounce the different
systems transient and not final forms.
Whatever the Church may offer us, the New Testament offers us no fixed and
final body of thought. In the Bible, Christian theology is still a soft
vase, plastic to the touch of each worker upon it. Had Paul's fine hand
played around it even another decade, how different the shape it might
have taken.
With the incoming of a more rational, ethical, and spiritual age, we may
surely expect a finer fashioning of the forms of thought blocked out in
the New Testament, under the first, fresh inspiration of the age of Jesus;
into whose larger patterns shall be taken up all the truths revealed
through the various sciences of these rich later ages; while all shall
still take on the shape of Him who is the image of the invisible God.
"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."
The true Biblical theology is--Christ himself. His thought of God, and not
even Paul's thoughts about Christ, are to mould our thinking. The Supreme
Son of Man must have had the truest thought of God. Two words formulate
his theology as bodied not in a creed, but in a prayer--"Our Father." The
earliest, simplest, deepest cry of the human after God, now by Him who
lived its spirit perfectly, the trusting, loving, holy Child of the
Father, made no longer a sigh, a dream, a vision, but a life. "The life
was the light of men."
That light is the sufficient clue to the dark labyrinth in which we wander
wearily.
I cannot always make out the face of a Father on the stern, harsh Power
in whom we live and move and have our being. Then I turn to my Divine
Brother, who, of all the children of men, saw deepest into the mystery,
and in his far-mirroring eyes I read the vision which satisfies me.
With poor dying Joe, I whisper to myself:
"'Our Father:' yes, that's werry good."