Undoubtedly such an outlook upon the fluid nature of the Christian
movement will demand readjustment in the religious thinking of many
people. They miss the old ideas about revelation. This new
progressiveness seems to them to be merely the story of man's discovery,
finding God, here a little and there a little, as he has found the truths
of astronomy. But God's revelation of himself is just as real when it is
conceived in progressive as when it is conceived in static terms. Men
once thought of God's creation of the world in terms of fiat--it was done
on the instant; and when evolution was propounded men cried that the
progressive method shut God out. We see now how false that fear was.
The creative activity of God never was so nobly conceived as it has been
since we have known the story of his slow unfolding of the universe. We
have a grander picture in our minds than even the psalmist had, when we
say after him, "The heavens declare the glory of God." So men who have
been accustomed to think of revelation in static terms, now that the long
leisureliness of man's developing spiritual insight is apparent, fear
that this does away with revelation. But in God's unfolding education of
his people recorded in the Scriptures revelation is at its noblest. No
man ever found God except when God was seeking to be found. Discovery is
the under side of the process; the upper side is revelation.
Indeed, this conception of progressive revelation does not shut out
finality. In scientific thought, which continually moves and grows,
expands and changes, truths are discovered once for all. The work of
Copernicus is in a real sense final. This earth does move; it is not
stationary; and the universe is not geocentric. That discovery is final.
Many developments start from that, but the truth itself is settled once
for all. So, in the spiritual history of man, final revelations come.
They will not have to be made over again and they will not have to be
given up. Progress does not shut out finality; it only makes each new
finality a point of departure for a new adventure, not a terminus ad quem
for a conclusive stop. That God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
himself is for the Christian a finality, but, from the day the first
disciples saw its truth until now, the intellectual formulations in which
it has been set and the mental categories by which it has been
interpreted have changed with the changes of each age's thought.
While at first, then, a progressive Christianity may seem to plunge us
into unsettlement, the more one studies it the less he would wish it
otherwise. Who would accept a snapshot taken at any point on the road of
Christian development as the final and perfect form of Christianity?
Robert Louis Stevenson has drawn for us a picture of a man trying with
cords and pegs to stake out the shadow of an oak tree, expecting that
when he had marked its boundaries the shadow would stay within the limits
of the pegs. Yet all the while the mighty globe was turning around in
space. He could not keep a tree's shadow static on a moving earth.
Nevertheless, multitudes of people in their endeavour to build up an
infallibly settled creed have tried just such a hopeless task. They
forget that while a revelation _from_ God might conceivably be final and
complete, religion deals with a revelation _of_ God. God, the infinite
and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting, the source and crown and
destiny of all the universe--shall a man whose days are as grass rise up
to say that he has made a statement about him which will not need to be
revised? Rather, our prayer should be that the thought of God, the
meaning of God, the glory of God, the plans and purpose of God may expand
in our comprehension until we, who now see in a mirror, darkly, may see
face to face. "Le Dieu défini est le Dieu fini."
This mistaken endeavour, in the interest of stability, to make a vital
movement static is not confined to religion. Those of us who love Wagner
remember the lesson of Die Meistersinger. Down in Nuremberg they had
standardized and conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules
and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music
permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing.
Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion--not a rule, but a
life--and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that
Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who
sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts of the people were stirred in
answer to its spontaneous melody, until all the population of Nuremberg
were singing its accumulating harmonies, poor Beckmesser on his
blackboard jotted down the rules which were being broken. Beckmesser
represents a static conception of life which endeavours to freeze
progress at a given point and call it infallible. But Beckmesser is
wrong. You cannot take things like music and religion and set them down
in final rules and regulations. They are life, and you have to let them
grow and flower and expand and reveal evermore the latent splendour at
their heart.
V
Obviously, the point where this progressive conception of Christianity
comes into conflict with many widely accepted ideas is the abandonment
which it involves of an external and inerrant authority in matters of
religion. The marvel is that that idea of authority, which is one of the
historic curses of religion, should be regarded by so many as one of the
vital necessities of the faith. The fact is that religion by its very
nature is one of the realms to which external authority is least
applicable. In science people commonly suppose that they do not take
truth on any one's authority; they prove it. In business they do not
accept methods on authority; they work them out. In statesmanship they
no longer believe in the divine right of kings nor do they accept
infallible dicta handed down from above. But they think that religion is
delivered to them by authority and that they believe what they do believe
because a divine Church or a divine Book or a divine Man told them.
In this common mode of thinking, popular ideas have the truth turned
upside down. The fact is that science, not religion, is the realm where
most of all we use external authority. They tell us that there are
millions of solar systems scattered through the fields of space. Is that
true? How do we know? We never counted them. We know only what the
authorities say. They tell us that the next great problem in science is
breaking up the atom to discover the incalculable resources of power
there waiting to be harnessed by our skill. Is that true? Most of us do
not understand what an atom is, and what it means to break one up passes
the farthest reach of our imaginations; all we know is what the
authorities say. They tell us that electricity is a mode of motion in
ether. Is that true? Most of us have no first hand knowledge about
electricity. The motorman calls it "juice" and that means as much to us
as to call it a mode of motion in ether; we must rely on the authorities.
They tell us that sometime we are going to talk through wireless
telephones across thousands of miles, so that no man need ever be out of
vocal communication with his family and friends. Is that true? It seems
to us an incredible miracle, but we suppose that it is so, as the
authorities say. In a word, the idea that we do not use authority in
science is absurd. Science is precisely the place where nine hundred and
ninety-nine men out of a thousand use authority the most. The chemistry,
biology, geology, astronomy which the authorities teach is the only
science which most of us possess.
There is another realm, however, where we never think of taking such an
attitude. They tell us that friendship is beautiful. Is that true?
Would we ever think of saying that we do not know, ourselves, but that we
rely on the authorities? Far better to say that our experience with
friendship has been unhappy and that we personally question its utility!
That, at least, would have an accent of personal, original experience in
it. For here we are facing a realm where we never can enter at all until
we enter, each man for himself.
Two realms exist, therefore, in each of which first-hand experience is
desirable, but in only one of which it is absolutely indispensable. We
can live on what the authorities in physics say, but there are no proxies
for the soul. Love, friendship, delight in music and in nature, parental
affection--these things are like eating and breathing; no one can do them
for us; we must enter the experience for ourselves. Religion, too,
belongs in this last realm. The one vital thing in religion is
first-hand, personal experience. Religion is the most intimate, inward,
incommunicable fellowship of the human soul. In the words of Plotinus,
religion is "the flight of the alone to the Alone." You never know God
at all until you know him for yourself. The only God you ever will know
is the God you do know for yourself.
This does not mean, of course, that there are no authorities in religion.
There are authorities in everything, but the function of an authority in
religion, as in every other vital realm, is not to take the place of our
eyes, seeing in our stead and inerrantly declaring to us what it sees;
the function of an authority is to bring to us the insight of the world's
accumulated wisdom and the revelations of God's seers, and so to open our
eyes that we may see, each man for himself. So an authority in
literature does not say to his students: The Merchant of Venice is a
great drama; you may accept my judgment on that--I know. Upon the
contrary, he opens their eyes; he makes them see; he makes their hearts
sensitive so that the genius which made Shylock and Portia live
captivates and subdues them, until like the Samaritans they say, "Now we
believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves,
and know." That is the only use of authority in a vital, realm. It can
lead us up to the threshold of a great experience where we must enter,
each man for himself, and that service to the spiritual life is the
Bible's inestimable gift.
At the beginning, Christianity was just such a first-hand experience as
we have described. The Christian fellowship consisted of a group of men
keeping company with Jesus and learning how to live. They had no creeds
to recite when they met together; what they believed was still an
unstereotyped passion in their hearts. They had no sacraments to
distinguish their faith--baptism had been a Jewish rite and even the
Lord's Supper was an informal use of bread and wine, the common elements
of their daily meal. They had no organizations to join; they never
dreamed that the Christian Gospel would build a church outside the
synagogue. Christianity in the beginning was an intensely personal
experience.
Then the Master went away and the tremendous forces of human life and
history laid hold on the movement which so vitally he had begun. His
followers began building churches. Just as the Wesleyans had to leave
the Church of England, not because they wanted to, but because the
Anglicans would not keep them, so the Christians, not because they
planned to, but because the synagogue was not large enough to hold them,
had to leave the synagogue. They began building creeds; they had to.
Every one of the first Christian creeds was written in sheer
self-defense. If we had been Christians in those first centuries, when a
powerful movement was under way called Gnosticism, which denied that God,
the Father Almighty, had made both the heaven and the earth, which said
that God had made heaven indeed but that a demigod had made the world,
and which denied that Jesus had been born in the flesh and in the flesh
had died, we would have done what the first Christians did: we would have
defined in a creed what it was the Christians did believe as against that
wild conglomeration of Oriental mythology that Gnosticism was, and we
would have shouted the creed as a war cry against the Gnostics. That is
what the so-called Apostles' Creed was--the first Christian battle chant,
a militant proclamation of the historic faith against the heretics; and
every one of its declarations met with a head-on collision some claim of
Gnosticism. Then, too, the early Christians drew up rituals; they had
to. We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of
courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it--we bow, we take off
our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have
innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could
they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian life
without such expression.
So historic Christianity grew, organized, creedalized, ritualized. And
ever as it grew, a peril grew with it, for there were multitudes of
people who joined these organizations, recited these creeds, observed
these rituals, took all the secondary and derived elements of
Christianity, but often forgot that vital thing which all this was meant
in the first place to express: a first-hand, personal experience of God
in Christ. That alone is vital in Christianity; all the rest is once or
twice or thrice removed from life. For Christianity is not a creed, nor
an organization, nor a ritual. These are important but they are
secondary. They are the leaves, not the roots; they are the wires, not
the message. Christianity itself is a life.
If, however, Christianity is thus a life, we cannot stereotype its
expressions in set and final forms. If it is a life in fellowship with
the living God, it will think new thoughts, build new organizations,
expand into new symbolic expressions. We cannot at any given time write
"finis" after its development. We can no more "keep the faith" by
stopping its growth than we can keep a son by insisting on his being
forever a child. The progressiveness of Christianity is not simply its
response to a progressive age; the progressiveness of Christianity
springs from its own inherent vitality. So far is this from being
regrettable, that a modern Christian rejoices in it and gladly recognizes
not only that he is thinking thoughts and undertaking enterprises which
his fathers would not have understood, but also that his children after
him will differ quite as much in teaching and practice from the modernity
of to-day. It has been the fashion to regard this changeableness with
wistful regret. So Wordsworth sings in his sonnet on Mutability:
"Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
Its crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time."
Such wistfulness, however, while a natural sentiment, is not true to the
best Christian thought of our day. He who believes in the living God,
while he will be far from calling all change progress, and while he will,
according to his judgment, withstand perverse changes with all his might,
will also regard the cessation of change as the greatest calamity that
could befall religion. Stagnation in thought or enterprise means death
for Christianity as certainly as it does for any other vital movement.
Stagnation, not change, is Christianity's most deadly enemy, for this is
a progressive world, and in a progressive world no doom is more certain
than that which awaits whatever is belated, obscurantist and reactionary.
[1] Leonard Huxley: Scott's Last Expedition, Vol. I, The Journals of
Captain R. F. Scott, Rn., C. V. O., p. 417.
[2] Kirby Page; The Sword or the Cross, p. 41.
[3] Tertullian: De Virginibus Velandis, Cap. I--"Regula quidem fidei una
omnino est, sola immobilis et irreformabilis."
[4] Vatican Council, July 18, 1870, First Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church of Christ, Chapter IV, Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the
Roman Pontiff.
[5] The Papal Syllabus of Errors, A. D. 1864, Sec. 1, 5.
[6] Exodus 6:3; Chap. 19.
[7] Exodus 33:22-23.
[8] Numbers 21:14.
[9] Exodus 15:3.
[10] Judges 11:24.
[11] I Samuel 26:19.
[12] II Kings 5:17.
[13] Jeremiah 23:24.
[14] Psalm 96:5.
[15] William Sanday: Christologies Ancient and Modern.