GOD IN THE MODERN WORLD
1. _Imago Dei_
By the dissolution of their ancestral ways men have been deprived of
their sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work,
whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in
sorrow and defeat. They have left to them the ancient codes and the
modern criticism of these codes, guesses, intuitions, inconclusive
experiments, possibilities, probabilities, hypotheses. Below the level
of reason, they may have unconscious prejudice, they may speak with a
loud cocksureness, they may act with fanaticism. But there is gone that
ineffable certainty which once made God and His Plan seem as real as
the lamppost.
I do not mean that modern men have ceased to believe in God. I do
mean that they no longer believe in him simply and literally. I mean
that they have defined and refined their ideas of him until they can
no longer honestly say that he exists, as they would say that their
neighbor exists. Search the writings of liberal churchmen, and when
you come to the crucial passages which are intended to express their
belief in God, you will find, I think, that at just this point their
uncertainty is most evident.
The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick has written an essay, called “How
Shall We Think of God?”, which illustrates [p022] the difficulty.
He begins by saying that “believing in God without considering how
one shall picture him is deplorably unsatisfactory.” Yet the old ways
of picturing him are no longer credible. We cannot think of him as
seated upon a throne, while around him are angels playing on harps
and singing hymns. “God as a king on high—our fathers, living under
monarchy, rejoiced in that image and found it meaningful. His throne,
his crown, his scepter, his seraphic retinue, his laws, rewards, and
punishments—how dominant that picture was and how persistent is the
continuance of it in our hymns and prayers! It was always partly
poetry, but it had a prose background: there really had been at first a
celestial land above the clouds where God reigned and where his throne
was in the heavens.”
Having said that this picture is antiquated, Dr. Fosdick goes on to
state that “the religious man must have imaginations of God, if God
is to be real to him.” He must “picture his dealing with the Divine
in terms of personal relationship.” But how? “The place where man
vitally finds God ... is within his own experience of goodness, truth,
and beauty, and the truest images of God are therefore to be found in
man’s spiritual life.” I should be the last to deny that a man may,
if he chooses, think of God as the source of all that seems to him
worthy in human experience. But certainly this is not the God of the
ancient faith. This is not God the Father, the Lawgiver, the Judge.
This is a highly sophisticated idea of God, employed by a modern man
who would like to say, but cannot say with certainty, that there exists
a personal God to whom men must accommodate themselves. [p023]
2. _An Indefinite God_
It may be that clear and unambiguous statements are not now possible in
our intellectual climate. But at least we should not forget that the
religions which have dominated human history have been founded on what
the faithful felt were undeniable facts. These facts were mysterious
only in the sense that they were uncommon, like an eclipse of the sun,
but not in the sense that they were beyond human experience. No doubt
there are passages in the Scriptures written by highly cultivated men
in which the Divine nature is called mysterious and unknowable. But
these passages are not the rock upon which the popular churches are
founded. No one, I think, has truly observed the religious life of
simple people without understanding how plain, how literal, how natural
they take their supernatural personages to be.
The popular gods are not indefinite and unknowable. They have a
definite history and their favorite haunts, and they have often been
seen. They walk on earth, they might appear to anyone, they are
angered, they are pleased, they weep and they rejoice, they eat and
they may fall in love. The modern man uses the word ‘supernatural’
to describe something that seems to him not quite so credible as
the things he calls natural. This is not the supernaturalism of the
devout. They do not distinguish two planes of reality and two orders of
certainty. For them Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin and was raised
from the dead as literally as Napoleon was Emperor of the French and
returned from Elba.
This is the kind of certainty one no longer finds in the [p024]
utterances of modern men. I might cite, for example, a typically modern
assertion about the existence of God, made by Mr. W. C. Brownell, a
critic who could not be reproached with insensitiveness to the value of
traditional beliefs. He wrote that “the influence of the Holy Spirit,
exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience,
as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism.” I do not suppose
that Mr. Brownell meant to admit the least possible doubt. But he was
a modern man, and surreptitiously doubt invaded his certainty. For
electro-magnetism is not an absolutely solid reality to a layman’s
mind. It has a questionable reality. I suspect that is why Mr.
Brownell chose this metaphor; it would have seemed a little too blunt
to his modern intelligence to say that his faith was founded not on
electro-magnetism, but as men once believed, on a rock.
The attempts to reconstruct religious creeds are beset by the
modern man’s inability to convince himself that the constitution of
the universe includes facts which in our skeptical jargon we call
supernatural. Yet as William James once said, “religion, in her fullest
exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already
elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in
a rosier light.... It is something more, namely, a postulator of new
_facts_ as well.” James himself was strongly disposed toward what he so
candidly described as “overbeliefs”; he had sympathy with the beliefs
of others which was as large and charitable as any man’s can be. There
was no trace of the intellectual snob in William James; he was in the
other camp from those thin argumentative rationalists who find so much
satisfaction [p025] in disproving what other men hold sacred. James
loved cranks and naifs and sought them out for the wisdom they might
have. But withal he was a modern man who lived toward the climax of the
revolutionary period. He had the Will to Believe, he argued eloquently
for the Right to Believe. But he did not wholly believe. The utmost
that he could honestly believe was something which he confessed would
“appear a sorry underbelief” to some of his readers. “Who knows,” he
said, “whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their
own poor overbeliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more
effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?” Who knows? And on that
question mark he paused and could say no more.
3. _God in More Senses Than One_
But even if there was some uncertainty as to the existence of the God
whom William James described, he was at least the kind of God with whom
human beings could commune. If they could jump the initial doubt they
found themselves in an exciting world where they might live for a God
who, like themselves, had work to do. James wrote the passage I have
quoted in 1902. A quarter of a century later Alfred North Whitehead
came to Harvard to deliver the Lowell Lectures. He undertook to define
God for modern men.
Mr. Whitehead, like William James, is a compassionate man and on the
side of the angels. But his is a wholly modernized mind in full command
of all the conceptual instruments of scientific logic. By contrast with
the austerity of Mr. Whitehead’s thinking, James, with his [p026]
chivalrous offer of fealty to God, seems like one of the last of the
great romantics. There is a God in Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy, and a
very necessary God at that. Unhappily, I am not enough of a logician
to say that I am quite sure I understand what it means to say that
“God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality.”
There have been moments when I imagined I had caught the meaning of
this, but there have been more moments when I knew that I had not. I
have never doubted, however, that the concept had meaning, and that I
missed it because it was too deep for me. Why then, it may be asked, do
I presume to discuss it? My answer is that a conception of God, which
is incomprehensible to all who are not highly trained logicians, is a
possible God for logicians alone. It is not presumptuous to say of Mr.
Whitehead’s God what he himself says of Aristotle’s God: that it does
“not lead him very far toward the production of a God available for
religious purposes.”
For while this God may satisfy a metaphysical need in the thinker, he
does not satisfy the passions of the believer. This God does not govern
the world like a king nor watch over his children like a father. He
offers them no purposes to which they can consecrate themselves; he
exhibits no image of holiness they can imitate. He does not chastise
them in sin nor console them in sorrow. He is a principle with which
to explain the facts, if you can understand the explanation. He is
not himself a personality who deals with the facts. For the purposes
of religion he is no God at all; his universe remains stonily unaware
of man. Nothing has happened by accepting [p027] Mr. Whitehead’s
definition which changes the inexorable character of that destiny which
Bertrand Russell depicted when he wrote that
we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering
light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves
we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity
amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which
must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against
the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and
fears.
It is a nice question whether the use of God’s name is not misleading
when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men
have worshiped. Plainly the modernist churchman does not believe in the
God of Genesis who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and
called to Adam and his wife who had hidden themselves behind a tree;
nor in the God of Exodus who appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of
the Elders of Israel, standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it
were a sapphire stone; nor even in the God of the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah who in his compassion for the sheep who have gone astray,
having turned everyone to his own way, laid on the Man of Sorrows the
iniquity of us all.
This, as Kirsopp Lake says, is the God of most, if not all, the
writings in the Bible. Yet “however much our inherited sentiments may
shrink from the admission, the scientists are to-day almost unanimous
in saying that the universe as they see it contains no evidence
of the existence [p028] of any anthropomorphic God whatever. The
experimentalist (_i.e._, modernist) wholly agrees that this is so.
Nevertheless he refuses as a rule, and I think rightly—to abandon the
use of the word ‘God.’” In justification of this refusal to abandon the
word ‘God,’ although he has abandoned the accepted meaning of the word,
Dr. Lake appeals to a tradition which reaches back at least to Origen
who, as a Christian neo-platonist, used the word ‘God’ to mean, not the
King and Father of creation, but the sum of all ideal values. It was
this redefinition of the word ‘God,’ he says, which “made Christianity
possible for the educated man of the third century.” It is this same
redefinition which still makes Christianity possible for educated
churchmen like Dr. Lake and Dean Inge.
Dr. Lake admits that although this attractive bypath of tradition
“is intellectually adorned by many princes of thought and lords of
language” it is “ecclesiastically not free from reproach.” He avows
another reason for his use of the word ‘God’ which, if not more
compelling, is certainly more worldly. “Atheist” has meant since Roman
times an enemy of society; it gives a wholly false impression of the
real state of mind of those who adhere to the platonic tradition. They
have been wholly without the defiance which “atheism” connotes; on
the contrary they have been a few individuals in each age who lived
peaceably within the shelter of the church, worshiping a somewhat
different God inwardly and in their own way, and often helping to
refresh the more mundane spirit of the popular church. The term
“agnostic” is almost as unavailable. It was invented to describe a
tolerant unbelief in the anthropomorphic God. In popular usage it has
come [p029] to mean about the same thing as atheist, for the instinct
of the common man is sound in these matters. He feels that those who
claim to be open-minded about God have for all practical purposes
ceased to believe in him. The agnostic’s reply that he would gladly
believe if the evidence would confirm it, does not alter the fact that
he does not now believe. And so Dr. Lake concludes that the modernist
must use the word ‘God’ in his own sense, “endeavoring partly to
preserve Origen’s meaning of the word, and partly shrinking from any
other policy as open to misconstruction.”
I confess that the notion of adopting a policy about God somehow shocks
me as intruding a rather worldly consideration which would seem to be
wholly out of place. But this feeling is, I am sure, an injustice to
Dr. Lake who is plainly and certainly not a worldling. He is moved, no
doubt, by the conviction that in letting ‘God’ mean one thing to the
mass of the devout and another to the educated minority, the loss of
intellectual precision is more than compensated by the preservation
of a community of feeling. This is not mere expediency. It may be the
part of wisdom, which is profounder than mere reasoning, to wish that
intellectual distinctions shall not divide men too sharply.
But if it is wisdom, it is an aristocratic wisdom. And in Dean Inge’s
writings this is frankly avowed. “The strength of Christianity,”
he says, “is in transforming the lives of individuals—of a small
minority, certainly, as Christ clearly predicted, but a large number
in the aggregate. To rescue a little flock, here and there, from
materialism, selfishness, and hatred, is the task of the [p030] Church
of Christ in all ages alike, and there is no likelihood that it will
ever be otherwise.”
But in other ages, one thing was otherwise. And in this one thing
lies the radical peculiarity of the modern difficulty. In other ages
there was no acknowledged distinction between the ultimate beliefs of
the educated and the uneducated. There were differences in learning,
in religious genius, in the closeness of a chosen few to God and his
angels. Inwardly there were even radical differences of meaning. But
critical analysis had not made them overt and evident, and the common
assumption was that there was one God for all, for the peasant who saw
him dimly and could approach him only through his patron saint, and for
the holy man who had seen God and talked with him face to face. It has
remained for churchmen of our era to distinguish two or more different
Gods, and openly to say that they are different. This may be a triumph
of candor and of intelligence. But this very consciousness of what they
are doing, these very honest admissions that the God of Dean Inge, for
example, is only in name the God of millions of other protestants—that
is an admission, when they understand it, which makes faith difficult
for modern men.
4. _The Protest of the Fundamentalists_
Fundamentalism is a protest against all these definitions and
attenuations which the modern man finds it necessary to make. It is
avowedly a reaction within the Protestant communions against what
the President of the World’s Christian Fundamentalist Association
rather accurately described as “that weasel method of sucking the
meaning [p031] out of words, and then presenting the empty shells in
an attempt to palm them off as giving the Christian faith a new and
another interpretation.” In actual practice this movement has become
entangled with all sorts of bizarre and barbarous agitations, with the
Ku Klux Klan, with fanatical prohibition, with the “anti-evolution
laws,” and with much persecution and intolerance. This in itself
is significant. For it shows that the central truth, which the
fundamentalists have grasped, no longer appeals to the best brains
and the good sense of a modern community, and that the movement is
recruited largely from the isolated, the inexperienced, and the
uneducated.
Into the politics of the heated controversy between modernists and
fundamentalists I do not propose here to enter. That it is not merely
a dispute in the realm of the spirit is made evident by the President
of the Fundamentalist Association when he avers that “nothing” holds
modernists and fundamentalists together except “the billions of dollars
invested. Nine out of ten of these dollars, if not ninety-nine out of
every hundred of them, spent to construct the great denominational
universities, colleges, schools of second grade, theological
seminaries, great denominational mission stations, the multiplied
hospitals that bear denominational names, the immense publication
societies and the expensive societies were given by fundamentalists
and filched by modernists. It took hundreds of years to collect this
money and construct these institutions. It has taken only a quarter of
a century for the liberal bandits to capture them....”
Not all the fundamentalist argument, however, is pitched at this
level. There is also a reasoned case against [p032] the modernists.
Fortunately this case has been stated in a little book called
_Christianity and Liberalism_ by a man who is both a scholar and a
gentleman. The author is Professor J. Gresham Machen of the Princeton
Theological Seminary. It is an admirable book. For its acumen, for its
saliency, and for its wit this cool and stringent defense of orthodox
Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced by either
side in the current controversy. We shall do well to listen to Dr.
Machen.
Modernism, he says, “is altogether in the imperative mood,” while
the traditional religion “begins with a triumphant indicative.” I
do not see how one can deny the force of this generalization. “From
the beginning Christianity was certainly a way of life. _But how was
the life to be produced?_ Not by appealing to the human will, but by
telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.”
Dr. Machen insists, rightly I think, that the historic influence of
Christianity on the mass of men has depended upon their belief that
an historic drama was enacted in Palestine nineteen hundred years
ago during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. The veracity of that
story was fundamental to the Christian Church. For while all the
ideal values may remain if you impugn the historic record set forth
in the Gospels, these ideal values are not certified to the common
man as inherent in the very nature of things. Once they are deprived
of their root in historic fact, their poetry, their symbolism, their
ethical significance depend for their sanction upon the temperament
and experience of the individual believer. There is gone that deep,
compulsive, organic faith in an external fact which is the essence of
religion for all but [p033] that very small minority who can live
within themselves in mystical communion or by the power of their
understanding. For the great mass of men, if the history of religions
is to be trusted, religious experience depends upon a complete belief
in the concrete existence, one might almost say the materialization,
of their God. The fundamentalist goes to the very heart of the matter,
therefore, when he insists that you have destroyed the popular
foundations of religion if you make your gospel a symbolic record of
experience, and reject it as an actual record of events.
The liberals have yet to answer Dr. Machen when he says that “the
Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the
modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based,
not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but on an
account of facts.” It was based on the story of the birth, the life,
the ministry, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That
story set forth the facts which certify the Christian experience.
Modernism, which in varying degree casts doubt upon the truth of that
story, may therefore be defined as an attempt to preserve selected
parts of the experience after the facts which inspired it have been
rejected. The orthodox believer may be mistaken as to the facts in
which he believes. But he is not mistaken in thinking that you cannot,
for the mass of men, have a faith of which the only foundation is
their need and desire to believe. The historic churches, without any
important exceptions, I think, have founded faith on clear statements
about matters of fact, historic events, or physical manifestations.
They have never been content [p034] with a symbolism which the
believer knew was merely symbolic. Only the sophisticated in their
private meditations and in esoteric writing have found satisfaction in
symbolism as such.
Complete as was Dr. Machen’s victory over the Protestant liberals,
he did not long remain in possession of the field. There is a deeper
fundamentalism than his, and it is based on a longer continuous
experience. This is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. From
a priest of that church, Father Riggs, has come the most searching
criticism of Dr. Machen’s case. Writing in the _Commonweal_ Father
Riggs points out that “the fundamentalists are well-nigh powerless.
They are estopped, so to speak, from stemming the ravaging waters
of agnosticism because they cannot, while remaining loyal to the
(Protestant) reformers ... set limits to destructive criticism of the
Bible without making an un-Protestant appeal to tradition.” Father
Riggs, in other words, is asking the Protestant fundamentalists, like
Dr. Machen, how they can be certain that they know these _facts_ upon
which they assert that the Christian religion is founded.
They must reply that they know them from reading the Bible. The
reply is, however, unsatisfying. For obviously there are many ways
of reading the Bible, and therefore the Protestant who demands the
right of private judgment can never know with absolute certainty that
his reading is the correct one. His position in a skeptical age is,
therefore, as Father Riggs points out, a weak one, because a private
judgment is, after all, only a private judgment. The history of
Protestantism shows that the exercise of private judgment as to the
meaning of Scripture [p035] leads not to universal and undeniable
dogma, but to schism within schism and heresy within heresy. From
the point of view, then, of the oldest fundamentalism of the western
world the error of the modernists is that they deny the facts on which
religious faith reposes; the error of the orthodox Protestants is
that although they affirm the facts, they reject all authority which
can verify them; the virtue of the Catholic system is that along with
a dogmatic affirmation of the central facts, it provides a living
authority in the Church which can ascertain and demonstrate and verify
these facts.
5. _In Man’s Image_
The long record of clerical opposition to certain kinds of scientific
inquiry has a touch of dignity when it is realized that at the core of
that opposition there is a very profound understanding of the religious
needs of ordinary men. For once you weaken the belief that the central
facts taught by the churches are facts in the most literal and absolute
sense, the disintegration of the popular religion begins. We may
confidently declare that Mr. Santayana is speaking not as a student of
human nature, but as a cultivated unbeliever, when he writes that “the
idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation
of truth and life is simply an impossible idea.” The idea is
impossible, no doubt, for the children of the great emancipation. But
because it is impossible, religion itself, in the traditional popular
meaning of the term, has become impossible for them.
If it is true that man creates God in his own image, it is no less true
that for religious devotion he must remain [p036] unconscious of that
fact. Once he knows that he has created the image of God, the reality
of it vanishes like last night’s dream. It may be that to anyone who is
impregnated with the modern spirit it is almost self-evident that the
truths of religion are truths of human experience. But this knowledge
does not tolerate an abiding and absorbing faith. For when the truths
of religion have lost their connection with a superhuman order, the
cord of their life is cut. What remains is a somewhat archaic, a
somewhat questionable, although a very touching, quaint medley of
poetry, rhetoric, fable, exhortation, and insight into human travail.
When Mr. Santayana says that “matters of religion should never be
matters of controversy” because “we never argue with a lover about
his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a
passion,” he expresses an ultimate unbelief.
For what would be the plight of a lover, if we told him that his
passion was charming?—though, of course, there might be no such lady
as the one he loved.