With many minds the difficulty of achieving an idea of God adequate for
our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual shift of
emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as
ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two
conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern
Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's
religious life in this next generation is the decision as to which of
these two ideas of the Church shall triumph. We may call one the
exclusive and the other the inclusive conception of the Church. The
exclusive conception of the Church lies along lines like these: that we
are the true Church; that we have the true doctrines and the true
practices as no other Church possesses them; that we are constituted as
a Church just because we have these uniquely true opinions and
practices; that all we in the Church agree about these opinions and
that when we joined the Church we gave allegiance to them; that nobody
has any business to belong to our Church unless he agrees with us; that
if there are people outside the Church who disagree, they ought to be
kept outside and if there are people in the Church who come to
disagree, they ought to be put outside. That is the exclusive idea of
the Church, and there are many who need no further description of it
for they were brought up in it and all their youthful religious life
was surrounded by its rigid sectarianism.
Over against this conception is the inclusive idea of the Church, which
runs along lines like these: that the Christian Church ought to be the
organizing center for all the Christian life of a community; that a
Church is not based upon theological uniformity but upon devotion to
the Lord Jesus, to the life with God and man for which he stood, and to
the work which he gave us to do; that wherever there are people who
have that spiritual devotion, who possess that love, who want more of
it, who desire to work and worship with those of kindred Christian
aspirations, they belong inside the family of the Christian Church.
The inclusive idea of the Church looks out upon our American
communities and sees there, with all their sin, spiritual life
unexpressed and unorganized, good-will and aspiration and moral power
unharnessed and going to waste, and it longs to cry so that the whole
community can hear it. Come, all men of Christian good-will, let us
work together for the Lord of all good life! That is the inclusive
idea of the Church. It desires to be the point of incandescence where,
regardless of denominationalism or theology, the Christian life of the
community bursts into flame.
As between these two conceptions there hardly can be any question that
the first idea so far has prevailed. Our endlessly split and shivered
Protestantism bears sufficient witness to the influence of the
exclusive idea of the Church. The disastrous consequences of this in
many realms are evident, and one result lies directly in our argument's
path. An exclusive Church narrows the idea of God. Almost inevitably
God comes to be conceived as the head of the exclusive Church, the
origin of its uniquely true doctrine, the director of its uniquely
correct practices, so that the activities of God outside the Church
grow dim, and more and more he is conceived as operating through his
favourite organization as nowhere else in all the universe. In
particular the idea grows easily in the soil of an exclusive Church
that God is not operative except in people who recognize him and that
the world outside such conscious recognition is largely empty of his
activity and barren of his grace. God tends, in such thinking, to
become cooped up in the Church, among the people who consciously have
acknowledged him. What wonder that multitudes of our youth, waking up
to the facts about our vast and growing universe, conclude that it is
too big to be managed by the tribal god of a Protestant sect!
The achievement of a worthy idea of God involves, therefore, the
ability to discover God in all life, outside the Church as well as
within, and in people who do not believe in him nor recognize him as
well as in those who do. Let us consider for a moment the principle
which is here involved. Many forces and persons serve us when we do
not recognize them and do not know the truth about them. This
experience of being ministered to by persons whom we do not know goes
back even to the maternal care that nourished us before we were born.
No mother waits to be recognized before she serves her child. We are
tempted to think of persons as ministering to us only when the service
is consciously received and acknowledged but, as a matter of fact,
service continually comes to us from sources we are unaware of and do
not think about.
"Unnumbered comforts to my soul
Thy tender care bestowed,
Before my infant heart conceived
From whom those comforts flowed."
This principle applies to mankind's relationship with the physical
universe. Through many generations mankind utterly misconceived it.
They thought the earth was flat, the heavens a little way above; yet,
for all that, the sun warmed them and the rain refreshed them and the
stars guided their wandering boats. The physical universe did not wait
until men knew all the truth about it before being useful to men and at
last, when the truth came and the glory of this vast and mobile cosmos
dawned on mankind, men discovered the facts about forces which, though
unknown and unacknowledged, long had served them.
This same principle applies also to man's relationship with social
institutions and social securities that have sustained us from our
infancy. If a boy knows that there is a Constitution of the United
States, he does not think about it. Then maturity comes and he begins
vividly to understand the sacrifices which our forefathers underwent in
building up the institutions that have nourished us. He recognizes
forces and factors of which he had been unconscious but whose value,
long unacknowledged, he now gratefully can estimate.
This same principle also applies to our unconscious indebtedness to
people who have helped us but whom we have not known. This is a far
finer world because of souls who have been here through whom God has
shined like the sun through eastern windows, but we can go on year
after year absorbing unconsciously the influence of these spirits
without ever knowing them. I lived for twelve years in a community to
which in its early days a young minister had come, and where for forty
years he stood as the central influence in the town's life. He brought
it up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. As was said of Joseph
in Potiphar's prison, "Whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of
it." The height of his mind, the unselfishness of his spirit, the
liberality of his thought, made all the people gladly acclaim him as
the foremost citizen of the town. There is a quality in the town's
life yet which never would have been there had it not been for him.
Sometimes yet his spirit must brood above that community which for
forty years he cherished and must say to people whom he never knew, but
who are being blessed by the benedictory influence of his life, what
Jehovah said to Cyrus the Persian, "I girded thee, though thou hast not
known me."
So, from multitudinous sources services flow in upon us that we do not
recognize. It should be impossible then to think that God never
touches men until men welcome him. Some people seem to suppose that
God ministers to men, saves them, transforms them, raises them up and
liberates them only when they confessedly receive him. That cannot be
true of the God of the New Testament. He is too magnanimous for that.
Jesus says a man is unworthy of his discipleship when he serves only
the friends who are responsive, that we must serve the hostile and
ungrateful, too. Can it be that God is less good than Jesus said we
ought to be? We in the churches have drawn our little lines too tight.
We have been tempted to divide mankind into two classes, the white and
the black: in the Church the white, the saved, who recognize God;
outside, the black, the unsaved, the ungodly who do not recognize him.
By that division we sometimes seem to imply that those outside the
Church are outside the reach of God's transforming grace and power. We
are tempted to look for God's activity chiefly, if not altogether,
inside the organization that avows him. But that cannot be true. He
comes in like the sun through every chink and crevice where he can find
a way of entrance. He does not wait to be welcomed. He does not
insist on being consciously recognized before he enters a man's life.
Rather, through any door or window left unwittingly ajar where he may
steal in, even though unobserved, to lift and liberate a life, there
the God of the New Testament will come--"the light which lighteth every
man coming into the world."
Consider, for illustration, the many people in this generation who have
given up active relationship with the Church and assured faith in God.
They may even call themselves agnostics. Would it not be true to speak
to them like this: You have not succeeded in getting rid of God. There
is a flame in your heart that will not go out. You try to say there is
no God and then you go out under the stars at night and you begin to
wonder how such a vast, law-abiding universe could come by accident, as
if a man were to throw a font of type on the floor and by chance it
should arrange itself into a play of Shakespeare. Strange universe,
without God! You try to say there is no God and you pick up a book: a
life of Phillips Brooks or David Livingstone or Francis Xavier, and you
begin to wonder that, amid these whirling stars and solar systems, a
race of men should have emerged with spiritual life like that which we
possess, with ideals that beckon us, conscience that warns us and
remorse that punishes us! You cannot easily think that this long
spiritual struggle and achievement of the race is an accident struck
off unwittingly like sparks from falling stones in a material world
without abiding meaning. Or you try to say there is no God, and then
you are married and your first baby is born and there wells up in your
heart that purest love that man can know, the feeling of a parent for a
little child. And you cannot help wondering how a man can walk about
the world with love like that in the center of his life, thinking that
there is nothing to correspond with it in the reality from which his
heart and his baby came. You try to say there is no God, and then you
begin to grow old and the friends you love best on earth pass away, as
Carlyle said his mother did, like "the last pale rim or sickle of the
moon which had once been full, sinking in the dark seas." You cannot
help wondering whether great souls can be so at the mercy of a few
particles of matter that when these are disturbed the spirit is plunged
into oblivion! You never really have gotten rid of God. There is a
flame in the center of your heart which you cannot put out. If there
were no God it would be easier to disbelieve in him than it is. You
cannot get rid of him because the best in you is God in you. The flame
is he and there in the center of your life, recognized or unrecognized,
he is burning up as best he can.
This principle of God's unrecognized presence applies to a special
group of people that has been growing rapidly in the last few years:
the men and women who give themselves with high spirit to human service
in science or philanthropy but who never think of attributing their
service or love of truth to religious motives. To this group belong
many of our scientists. They give themselves no rest, seeking for
truth which will help human need. In obscure and forgotten
laboratories to-day they search for remedies for ancient, lamentable
ills. They make it a point of professional honour not to take profit
for themselves when they have succeeded, but to give freely to the
world the knowledge they have achieved. The pulpit has often quarreled
with the scientists. Let the pulpit honour them for their amazing
outpouring of service to the world. To this group also belong many of
our philanthropists, to whom sacrifice for the common weal has become
the moral equivalent of war. Yet often these men and women, useful
public servants of the generation as they are, do not know God. They
are great spirits. Let us not pretend that they are not. They are
making a deep and beneficent impress upon their own times, and our sons
and our sons' sons will rise up to call them blessed; yet they do not
know God. What are we to say of such men and women? You know what
some people do say about them. They use them as arguments against
religion. They say, See these fine men living without God. That is an
utter fallacy. They are not living without God. They only think they
are. They are the supreme examples of the work of the unrecognized
God. One wishes that those men and women would recognize God. God can
do much more through responsive than through unresponsive lives. But
we may not say that they are living without God. There, in the center
of their life, in the ideals they work for, in the service they render,
in the love they lavish, in the mission that has mastered them, there
_is_ God.
Some time ago I wandered down Broadway, in the small hours of the
morning, with one of the prominent citizens of the community. At the
heart of his life is the passion to be of use. Because his character
is stalwart and his ability great, the scope of his service is far
wider than the capacity of most of us. Amid the hurrying crowds and
the flashing lights of Broadway we talked together hour after hour
about God and immortality. He said that he could not believe in God.
He wistfully wished that he could. He was sure that it must add
something beautiful to human life, but for himself he thought that
there was no possibility except to live a high, clean, serviceable life
until he should fall on sleep. All the way home that night I thought
of other people whom I know. Here is a man who believes in God. He
always has believed in God. He was brought up to believe in God and he
has never felt with poignant sympathy enough the abysmal, immedicable
woes of human-kind to have his faith disturbed. He never has had any
doubts. The war passed over him and left him as it found him. The
fiercest storm that ever raged over mankind did not touch the surface
of his pool of sheltered faith. How could one help comparing him with
my friend who could not believe? For he, in high emotion, had spoken
of the miseries of men, of multitudes starving, of the horrors of war,
of the poor whose lives are a long animal struggle to keep the body
alive, of the woes that fall with such terrific incidence upon the
vast, obscure, forgotten masses of our human-kind, and out of the very
ardour of his sympathy had cried: "How can you believe that a good
Father made a world like this?"
Now, I believe in God with all my heart. But the God whom I believe in
likes that man. Jesus, were he here on earth as once he was, would
love him. I think Jesus would love him more than the other man who
never had faced human misery with sympathy enough to feel his faith
disturbed. This does not mean that we ought contentedly to see men
ministered to by a God whom they do not recognize. It is a pity to be
served by the Eternal Spirit of all grace and yet not know him. In
Jean Webster's "Daddy Long Legs," Jerusha Abbott in the orphanage is
helped by an unknown friend. Year after year the favours flow in from
this friend whom she does not know. She blossoms out into girlhood and
young womanhood and still she does not know him. One day she sees him
and she does not recognize him. She has always thought of him as
looking other than he does, and so even when she sees him she does not
know him. Suppose that the story stopped there! It would be
intolerable to have a story end so. To be served all one's life by a
friend and then not to know him when he seeks recognition is tragedy.
So it is tragedy when God is unrecognized, but behind that is a deeper
tragedy still--people who believe in God but who have thoughts of him
so narrowly ecclesiastical that they themselves do not perceive his
presence, acknowledged or unacknowledged, in all the goodness and truth
and beauty of the universe.
Such an enlargement of the idea of God to meet the needs of this new
world is one of the innermost demands of religion to-day. When a man
believes in the living God as the Creative Power in this universe,
whose character was revealed in Christ and who, recognized or
unrecognized, reveals himself in every form of goodness, truth and
beauty which life anywhere contains, he has achieved a God adequate for
life. To such a man the modern progressive outlook upon the world
becomes exhilarating; all real advance is a revelation of the purpose
of this living God; and, far from being hostile to religion, our modern
categories furnish the noblest mental formulae in which the religious
spirit ever had opportunity to find expression. We who believe this
have no business to be modest and apologetic about it, as though upon
the defensive we shyly presented it to the suffrages of men. It is a
gospel to proclaim. It does involve a new theology but, with
multitudes of eager minds in our generation, the decision no longer
lies between an old and a new theology, but between new theology and no
theology. No longer can they phrase the deepest experiences of their
souls with God in the outgrown categories of a static world. In all
their other thinking they live in a world deeply permeated by ideas of
progress, and to keep their religion in a separate compartment,
uninfluenced by the best knowledge and hope of their day, is an
enterprise which, whether it succeed or fail, means the death of vital
faith. To take this modern, progressive world into one's mind and then
to achieve an idea of God great enough to encompass it, until with the
little gods gone and the great God come, life is full of the knowledge
of him, as the waters cover the sea, that is alike the duty and the
privilege of Christian leadership to-day.
In a world which out of lowly beginnings has climbed so far and seems
intended to go on to heights unimagined, God is our hope and in his
name we will set up our banners.
[1] Bertrand Russell: Philosophical Essays, II, The Free Man's Worship,
pp. 60-61.
[2] Max Nordau: The Interpretation of History, p. 217.