This idea that Christianity is itself a progressive movement instead of a
static finality involves some serious alterations in the historic
conceptions of the faith, as soon as it is applied to theology. Very
early in Christian history the presence of conflicting heresies led the
church to define its faith in creeds and then to regard these as final
formulations of Christian doctrine, incapable of amendment or addition.
Tertullian, about 204 A. D., spoke of the creedal standard of his day as
"a rule of faith changeless and incapable of reformation." [3] From that
day until our own, when a Roman Catholic Council has decreed that "the
definitions of the Roman Pontiff are unchangeable," [4] an unalterable
character has been ascribed to the dogmas of the Church of Rome. Indeed,
Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, specifically condemned the modern
idea that "Divine revelation is imperfect, and, therefore, subject to
continual and indefinite progress, which corresponds with the progress of
human reason." [5] Nor did Protestantism, with all the reformation which
it wrought, attack this central Catholic conception of a changeless
content and formulation of faith. Not what the Pope said, but what the
Bible said, was by Protestants unalterably to be received. Change there
might be in the sense that unrealized potentialities involved in the
original deposit might be brought to light--a kind of development which
not only Protestants but Catholics like Cardinal Newman have willingly
allowed--but whatever had once been stated as the content of faith by the
received authorities was by both Catholics and Protestants regarded as
unalterably so. In the one case, if the Pope had once defined a dogma,
it was changeless; in the other, if the Bible had once formulated a
pre-scientific cosmology, or used demoniacal possession as an explanation
of disease, or personified evil in a devil, all such mental categories
were changelessly to be received. In its popular forms this conception
of Christianity assumes extreme rigidity--Christianity is a static system
finally formulated, a deposit to be accepted in toto if at all, not to be
added to, not to be subtracted from, not to be changed, its i's all
dotted and its t's all crossed.
The most crucial problem which we face in our religious thinking is
created by the fact that Christianity thus statically conceived now goes
out into a generation where no other aspect of life is conceived in
static terms at all. The earth itself on which we live, not by fiat
suddenly enacted, but by long and gradual processes, became habitable,
and man upon it through uncounted ages grew out of an unknown past into
his present estate. Everything within man's life has grown, is growing,
and apparently will grow. Music developed from crude forms of rhythmic
noise until now, by way of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, our modern music,
still developing, has grown to forms of harmony at first undreamed.
Painting developed from the rough outlines of the cavemen until now
possibilities of expression in line and colour have been achieved whose
full expansion we cannot guess. Architecture evolved from the crude huts
of primitive man until now our cathedrals and our new business buildings
alike mark an incalculable advance and prophesy an unimaginable future.
One may refuse to call all development real progress, may insist upon
degeneration as well as betterment through change, but, even so, the
basic fact remains that all the elements which go to make man's life come
into being, are what they are, and pass out of what they are into
something different, through processes of continual growth. Our business
methods change until the commercial wisdom of a few years ago may be the
folly of to-day; our moral ideals change until actions once respectable
become reprobate, and the heroes of one generation would be the convicts
of another; our science changes until ideas that men once were burned at
the stake for entertaining are now the commonplace axioms of every school
boy's thought; our economics change until schools of thought shaped to
old industrial conditions are as outmoded as a one-horse shay beside an
automobile; our philosophy changes like our science when Kant, for
example, starts a revolution in man's thinking, worthy, as he claimed, to
be called Copernican; our cultural habits change until marooned
communities in the Kentucky mountains, "our contemporary ancestors,"
having let the stream of human life flow around and past them, seem as
strange to us as a belated what-not in a modern parlour. The perception
of this fact of progressive change is one of the regnant influences in
our modern life and, strangely enough, so far from disliking it, we glory
in it; in our expectancy we count on change; with our control of life we
seek to direct it.
Indeed no more remarkable difference distinguishes the modern world from
all that went before than its attitude toward change itself. The
medieval world idealized changelessness. Its very astronomy was the
apotheosis of the unalterable. The earth, a globe full of mutation and
decay; around it eight transparent spheres carrying the heavenly bodies,
each outer sphere moving more slowly than its inner neighbour, while the
ninth, moving most slowly of all, moved all the rest; last of all, the
empyrean, blessed with changeless, motionless perfection, the abode of
God--such was the Ptolemaic astronomy as Dante knew it. This
idealization of changelessness was the common property of all that by
gone world. The Holy Roman Empire was the endeavour to perpetuate a
changeless idea of political theory and organization; the Holy Catholic
Church was the endeavour to perpetuate a changeless formulation of
religious dogma and hierarchy; the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas was the
endeavour to settle forever changeless paths for the human mind to walk
in. To that ancient world as a whole the perfect was the finished, and
therefore it was immutable.
How different our modern attitude toward change has come to be! We
believe in change, rely on it, hope for it, rejoice in it, are determined
to achieve it and control it. Nowhere is this more evident than in our
thought of the meaning of knowledge. In the medieval age knowledge was
spun as a spider spins his web. Thinking simply made evident what
already was involved in an accepted proposition. A premise was drawn out
into its filaments and then woven into a fabric of new form but of the
same old material. Knowledge did not start from actual things; it did
not intend to change actual things; and the shelves of the libraries
groan with the burden of that endless and largely futile cogitation.
Then the new knowledge began from the observation of things as they
really are and from the use of that observation for the purposes of human
life. Once a lad, seventeen years old, went into the cathedral at Pisa
to worship. Soon he forgot the service and watched a chandelier,
swinging from the lofty roof. He wondered whether, no matter how
changeable the length of its arc, its oscillations always consumed the
same time and, because he had no other means, he timed its motion by the
beating of his pulse. That was one time when a boy went to church and
did well to forget the service. He soon began to wonder whether he could
not make a pendulum which, swinging like the chandeliers, would do useful
business for men. He soon began to discover, in what he had seen that
day, new light on the laws of planetary motion. That was one of the
turning points in human history--the boy was Galileo. The consequences
of this new method are all around us now. The test of knowledge in
modern life is capacity to cause change. If a man really knows
electricity he can cause change; he can illumine cities and drive cars.
If a man really knows engineering, he can cause change; he can tunnel
rivers and bridge gulfs. It is for that purpose we wish knowledge.
Instead of being dreaded, controlled change has become the chief desire
of modern life.
When, therefore, in this generation with its perception of growth as the
universal law and with its dependence upon controlled change as the hope
of man, Christianity endeavours to glorify changelessness and to maintain
itself in unalterable formulations, it has outlawed itself from its own
age. An Indian punkah-puller, urged by his mistress to better his
condition, replied: "Mem Sahib, my father pulled a punkah, my grandfather
pulled a punkah, all my ancestors for four million ages pulled punkahs,
and, before that, the god who founded our caste pulled a punkah over
Vishnu." How utterly lost such a man would be in the dynamic movements
of our modern Western life!--yet not more lost than is a Christianity
which tries to remain static in a progressive world.