I
We may well begin our final lecture, on the interplay between the idea
of progress and the idea of God, by noting that only faith in God can
satisfy man's craving for spiritual stability amid change. The central
element in the conception of a progressive world is that men's thoughts
and lives have changed, are changing and will change, that nothing
therefore is settled in the sense of being finally formulated, that
creation has never said its last word on any subject or landed its last
hammer blow on any task. Such an outlook on life, instead of being
exhilarating, is to many disquieting in the extreme. In particular it
is disquieting in religion, one of whose functions has always been to
provide stability, to teach men amid the transient to see the eternal.
If in a changing world religious thought changes too, if in that realm
also new answers are given to old questions and new questions rise that
never have been answered before, if forms of faith in which men once
trusted are outgrown, man's unsettlement seems to be complete. The
whole world then is like a huge kaleidoscope turning round and round
and, as it turns, the manifold elements in human experience, even its
religious doctrines and practices, arrange and rearrange themselves in
endless permutations. How then in such a world can religion mean to us
what it has meant to the saints who of old, amid a shaken world, have
sung:
"Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou, Who changest not, abide with me!"
This fear of the unsettling effects of the idea of progress accounts
for most of the resentment against it in the realm of theology, and for
the desperate endeavours which perennially are made to congeal the
Christian movement at some one stage and to call that stage final.
Stability, however, can never be achieved by resort to such reactionary
dogmatism. What one obtains by that method is not stability but
stagnation, and the two, though often confused, are utterly different.
Stagnation is like a pool, stationary, finished, and without
progressive prospects. A river, however, has another kind of
steadfastness altogether. It is not stationary; it flows; it is never
twice the same and its enlarging prospects as it widens and deepens in
its course are its glory. Nevertheless, the Hudson and the Mississippi
and the Amazon are among the most stable and abiding features which
nature knows. They will probably outlast many mountains. They will
certainly outlast any pool.
The spiritual stability which we may have in a progressive world is of
this latter sort, if we believe in the living God. It is so much more
inspiring than the stagnation of the dogmatist that one wonders how any
one, seeing both, could choose the inferior article in which to repose
his trust. Consider, for example, the development of the idea of God
himself, the course of which through the Bible we briefly traced in a
previous lecture. From Sinai to Calvary--was ever a record of
progressive revelation more plain or more convincing? The development
begins with Jehovah disclosed in a thunder-storm on a desert mountain,
and it ends with Christ saying: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship
him must worship in spirit and truth;" it begins with a war-god leading
his partisans to victory and it ends with men saying, "God is love; and
he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him;" it
begins with a provincial deity loving his tribe and hating its enemies
and it ends with the God of the whole earth worshiped by "a great
multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all
tribes and peoples and tongues;" it begins with a God who commands the
slaying of the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling,"
and it ends with a Father whose will it is that not "one of these
little ones should perish;" it begins with God's people standing afar
off from his lightnings and praying that he might not speak to them
lest they die and it ends with men going into their inner chambers and,
having shut the door, praying to their Father who is in secret. Here
is no pool; here is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of
God.
Consider as well the course of the idea of God after the close of the
New Testament canon. The Biblical conception of God in terms of
righteous and compassionate personal will went out into a world of
thought where Greek metaphysics was largely in control. There God was
conceived in terms of substance, as the ontological basis and ground of
all existence--immutable, inscrutable, unqualified pure being. These
two ideas, God as personal will, and God as metaphysical substance,
never perfectly coalescing, flowed together. In minds like St.
Augustine's one finds them both. God as pure being and God as gracious
and righteous personal will--St. Augustine accepted both ideas but
never harmonized them. Down through Christian history one can see
these two conceptions complementing each other, each balancing the
other's eccentricities. The Greek idea runs out toward pantheism in
Spinoza and Hegel. The Biblical idea runs out toward deism in Duns
Scotus and Calvin. In the eighteenth century an extreme form of deism
held the field and God, as personal will, was conceived as the Creator,
who in a dim and distant past had made all things. In the nineteenth
century the thought of God swung back to terms of immanence, and God,
who had been crowded out of his world, came flooding in as the abiding
life of all of it.
As one contemplates a line of development like this, he must be aware
that, while change is there, it is not aimless, discontinuous, chaotic
change. The riverbed in which this stream of thought flows is stable
and secure; the whole development is controlled by man's abiding
spiritual need of God and God's unceasing search for man. One feels
about it as he might about man's varying, developing methods of telling
the time of day. Men began by noting roughly the position of the sun
or the length of shadows; they went on to make sun-dials, then
water-clocks, then sand-glasses; then weight-driven clocks were
blunderingly tried and, later, watches, used first as toys, so little
were they to be relied upon. The story of man's telling of the time of
day is a story of progressive change, but it does not lack stability.
The sun and stars and the revolution of the earth abide. The changes
in man's telling of the time have been simply the unfolding of an
abiding relationship between man and his world.
So the development of man's religious ideas from early, crude
beginnings until now is not a process which one would wish to stop at
any point in order to achieve infallible security. The movement is not
haphazard and discontinuous change, like disparate particles in a
kaleidoscope falling together in new but vitally unrelated ways. Upon
the contrary, its course is a continuous path which can be traced,
recovered in thought, conceived as a whole. We can see where our ideas
came from, what now they are, and in what direction they probably will
move. The stability is in the process itself, arising out of the
abiding relationships of man with the eternal.
Indeed, the endeavour to achieve stability by methods which alone can
bring stagnation, the endeavor, that is, to hit upon dogmatic finality
in opinion, is of all things in religion probably the most disastrous
in its consequence. Until recent times when reform movements invaded
Mohammedanism and higher criticism tackled the problem of the Koran,
one could see this achievement of stagnation in Islam in all its
inglorious success. The Koran was regarded as having been infallibly
written, word for word, in heaven before ever it came to earth. The
Koran therefore was a book of inerrant and changeless opinion. But the
Koran enshrines the best theological and ethical ideas of Arabia at the
time when it was written: God was an oriental monarch, ruling in
heaven; utter submission to the fate which he decreed was the one law
of human relationship with him; and on earth slavery and polygamy and
conversion of unbelievers by force were recognized as right. The Koran
was ahead of its day, but having been by a theory of inspiration
petrified into artificial finality it became the enemy of all opinions
which would pass beyond its own.
When, now, one contrasts Mohammedanism with Christianity, one finds an
important difference. For all our temptation, succumbed to by
multitudes, to make the Bible a Koran, Christianity has had a
progressive revelation. In the Bible one can find all the ideas and
customs which Mohammedanism has approved and for which it now is hated:
its oriental deity decreeing fates, its use of force to destroy
unbelievers, its patriarchal polygamy, and its slave systems. All
these things, from which we now send missionaries to convert
Mohammedans, are in our Bible, but in the Bible they are not final.
They are ever being superseded. The revelation is progressive. The
idea of God grows from oriental kingship to compassionate fatherhood;
the use of force gives way to the appeals of love; polygamy is
displaced by monogamy; slavery never openly condemned, even when the
New Testament closes, is being underminded [Transcriber's note:
undermined?] by ideas which, like dynamite, in the end will blast to
pieces its foundations. We are continually running upon passages like
this: "It was said to them of old time, . . . but I say unto you;"
"God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by
divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days
spoken unto us in his Son;" "The times of ignorance therefore God
overlooked; but now he commandeth men that they should all everywhere
repent;" and over the doorway out of the New Testament into the
Christian centuries that followed is written this inscription: "The
spirit of truth . . . shall guide you into all the truth." In a word,
finality in the Koran is behind--it lies in the treasured concepts of
600 A. D.--but finality in the Bible is ahead. We are moving toward
it. It is too great for us yet to apprehend. Our best thoughts are
thrown out in its direction but they do not exhaust its meaning.
"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."
Such is the exultant outlook of a Christian believer on a progressive
world. If, however, one is to have this exultant outlook, he must
deeply believe in the living God and in the guidance of his Spirit.
What irreligion means at this point is not fully understood by most
unbelieving folk because most unbelievers do not think through to a
conclusion the implications of their own skepticism. We may well be
thankful even in the name of religion for a few people like Bertrand
Russell. He is not only irreligious but he is intelligently
irreligious, and, what is more, he possesses the courage to say frankly
and fully what irreligion really means:
"That Man is the product of causes which have no prevision of the end
they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,
his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined
to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole
temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the
debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond
dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects
them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths,
only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's
habitation henceforth be safely built." [1] Such is the outlook on
human life of a frank and thoroughgoing irreligion, and there is
nothing exhilarating about it. All progress possible in such a setting
is a good deal like a horse-race staged in a theatre, where the horses
do indeed run furiously, but where we all know well that they are not
getting anywhere. There is a moving floor beneath them, and it is only
the shifting of the scenery that makes them seem to go. Is human
history like that? Is progress an illusion? Is it all going to end as
Bertrand Russell says? Those who believe in the living God are certain
of the contrary, for stability amid change is the gift of a
progressive, religious faith.