Among the influences which have forced well-instructed minds first to
accept and then to glory in the progressive nature of Christianity, the
first place must be given to the history of religion itself. The study
of religion's ancient records in ritual, monument and book, and of
primitive faiths still existing among us in all stages of development,
has made clear the general course which man's religious life has traveled
from very childish beginnings until now. From early animism in its
manifold expressions, through polytheism, kathenotheism, henotheism, to
monotheism, and so out into loftier possibilities of conceiving the
divine nature and purpose--the main road which man has traveled in his
religious development now is traceable. Nor is there any place where it
is more easily traceable than in our own Hebrew-Christian tradition. One
of the fine results of the historical study of the Scriptures is the
possibility which now exists of arranging the manuscripts of the Bible in
approximately chronological order and then tracing through them the
unfolding growth of the faiths and hopes which come to their flower in
the Gospel of Christ. Consider, for example, the exhilarating story of
the developing conception of Jehovah's character from the time he was
worshiped as a mountain-god in the desert until he became known as the
"God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."
We are explicitly told that the history of Jehovah's relationship with
Israel began at Sinai and that before that time the Hebrew fathers had
never even heard his name.[6] There on a mountain-top in the Sinaitic
wilderness dwelt this new-found god, so anthropomorphically conceived
that he could hide Moses in a rock's cleft from which the prophet could
not see Jehovah's face but could see his back.[7] He was a god of battle
and the name of an old book about him still remains to us, "The book of
the Wars of Jehovah." [8]
"Jehovah is a man of war:
Jehovah is his name"--[9]
so his people at first rejoiced in him and gloried in his power when he
thundered and lightened on Sinai. Few stories in man's spiritual history
are so interesting as the record of the way in which this mountain-god,
for the first time, so far as we know, in Semitic history, left his
settled shrine, traveled with his people in the holy Ark, became
acclimated in Canaan, and, gradually absorbing the functions of the old
baals of the land, extended his sovereignty over the whole of Palestine.
To be sure, even then he still was thought of, as all ancient gods were
thought of, as geographically limited to the country whose god he was.
Milcolm and Chemosh were real gods too, ruling in Philistia and Moab as
Jehovah did in Canaan. This is the meaning of Jephthah's protest to a
hostile chieftain: "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god
giveth thee to possess?" [10] This is the meaning of David's protest
when he is driven out to the Philistine cities: "They have driven me out
this day that I should not cleave unto the inheritance of Jehovah,
saying, Go, serve other gods." [11] This is the meaning of Naaman's
desire to have two mules' burden of Jehovah's land on which to worship
Jehovah in Damascus.[12] Jehovah could be worshiped only on Jehovah's
land. But ever as the day of fuller understanding dawned, the
sovereignty of Jehovah widened and his power usurped the place and
function of all other gods. Amos saw him using the nations as his pawns;
Isaiah heard him whistling to the nations as a shepherd to his dogs;
Jeremiah heard him cry, "Can any hide himself in secret places so that I
shall not see him? . . . Do not I fill heaven and earth?" [13]; until at
last we sweep out, through the exile and all the heightening of faith and
clarifying of thought that came with it, into the Great Isaiah's 40th
chapter on the universal and absolute sovereignty of God, into the
Priestly narrative of creation, where God makes all things with a word,
into psalms which cry,
"For all the gods of the people are idols;
But Jehovah made the heavens." [14]
Moreover, as Jehovah's sovereignty thus is enlarged until he is the God
of all creation, his character too is deepened and exalted in the
understanding of his people. That noblest succession of moral teachers
in ancient history, the Hebrew prophets, developed a conception of the
nature of God in terms of righteousness, so broad in its outreach, so
high in its quality, that as one mounts through Amos' fifth chapter and
Isaiah's first chapter and Jeremiah's seventh chapter, he finds himself,
like Moses on Nebo's top, looking over into the Promised Land of the New
Testament. There this development flowers out under the influence of
Jesus. God's righteousness is interpreted, not in terms of justice only,
but of compassionate, sacrificial love; his Fatherhood embraces not only
all mankind but each individual, lifting him out of obscurity in the mass
into infinite worthfulness and hope. And more than this development of
idea, the New Testament gives us a new picture of God in the personality
of Jesus, and we see the light of the knowledge of God's glory in his
face.
Moreover, this development, so plainly recorded in Scripture, was not
unconsciously achieved by the drift of circumstance; it represents the
ardent desire of forward-looking men, inspired by the Spirit. The
Master, himself, was consciously pleading for a progressive movement in
the religious life and thinking of his day. A static religion was the
last thing he ever dreamed of or wanted. No one was more reverent than
he toward his people's past; his thought and his speech were saturated
with the beauty of his race's heritage; yet consider his words as again
and again they fell from his lips: "It was said to them of old time . . .
but I say unto you." His life was rooted in the past but it was not
imprisoned there; it grew up out of the past, not destroying but
fulfilling it. He had in him the spirit of the prophets, who once had
spoken to his people in words of fire; but old forms that he thought had
been outgrown he brushed aside. He would not have his Gospel a patch on
an old garment, he said, nor would he put it like new wine into old
wineskins. He appealed from the oral traditions of the elders to the
written law; within the written law he distinguished between ceremonial
and ethical elements, making the former of small or no account, the
latter all-important; and then within the written ethical law he waived
provisions that seemed to him outmoded by time. Even when he bade
farewell to his disciples, he did not talk to them as if what he himself
had said were a finished system: "I have yet many things to say unto you,
but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is
come, he shall guide you into all the truth."
In Paul's hands the work which Jesus began went on. He dared an
adventurous move that makes much of our modern progressiveness look like
child's play: he lifted the Christian churches out of the narrow,
religious exclusiveness of the Hebrew synagogue. He dared to wage battle
for the new idea that Christianity was not a Jewish sect but a universal
religion. He withstood to his face Peter, still trammeled in the
narrowness of his Jewish thinking, and he founded churches across the
Roman Empire where was neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, male
nor female, bond nor free, but all were one man in Christ Jesus.
Even more thrilling were those later days when in Ephesus the writer of
the Fourth Gospel faced a Hellenistic audience, to whom the forms of
thought in which Jesus hitherto had been interpreted were utterly unreal.
The first creed about Jesus proclaimed that he was the Messiah, but
Messiah was a Jewish term and to the folk of Ephesus it had no vital
meaning. John could not go on calling the Master that and that alone,
when he had hungry souls before him who needed the Master but to whom
Jewish terms had no significance. One thing those folk of Ephesus did
understand, the idea of the Logos. They had heard of that from the many
faiths whose pure or syncretized forms made the religious background of
their time. They knew about the Logos from Zoroastrianism, where beside
Ahura Mazdah stood Vohu Manah, the Mind of God; from Stoicism, at the
basis of whose philosophy lay the idea of the Logos; from Alexandrian
Hellenism, by means of which a Jew like Philo had endeavoured to marry
Greek philosophy and Hebrew orthodoxy. And the writer of the Fourth
Gospel used that new form of thought in which to present to his people
the personality of our Lord. "In the beginning was the Logos, and the
Logos was with God, and the Logos was God"--so begins the Fourth Gospel's
prologue, in words that every intelligent person in Ephesus could
understand and was familiar with, and that initial sermon in the book,
for it is a sermon, not philosophy, moves on in forms of thought which
the people knew about and habitually used, until the hidden purpose comes
to light: "The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his
glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and
truth." John was presenting his Lord to the people of his time in terms
that the people could understand.
Even within the New Testament, therefore, there is no static creed. For,
like a flowing river, the Church's thought of her Lord shaped itself to
the intellectual banks of the generation through which it moved, even
while, by its construction and erosion, it transfigured them. Nor did
this movement cease with New Testament days. From the Johannine idea of
the Logos to the Nicene Creed, where our Lord is set in the framework of
Greek metaphysics, the development is just as clear as from the category
of Jewish Messiah to the categories of the Fourth Gospel. And if, in our
generation, a conservative scholar like the late Dr. Sanday pleaded for
the necessity of a new Christology, it was not because he was primarily
zealous for a novel philosophy, but because like John of old in Ephesus
he was zealous to present Christ to his own generation in terms that his
own generation could comprehend.[15]