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RELIGIOUS REALITY
A BOOK FOR MEN
A. E. J. RAWLINSON
Student of Christ Church, Oxford; Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of
Lichfield; Priest-In-Charge of St. John The Evangelist, Wilton Road,
S.W.; Formerly Tutor of Keble College and Late Chaplain to the Forces.
WITH A PREFACE
BY
THE BISHOP OF LICHFIELD
1918
PREFACE
BY
THE BISHOP OF LICHFIELD
This is a book which is wanted. Thoughtful men, in every class, are
not afraid of theology, _i.e._ of a reasoned account of their
religion, but they want a theology which can be stated without
conventions and technicalities; they do not at all care for a religion
which pretends to do away with all mystery, but they are glad to be
assured of the essential reasonableness of the Christian Faith; they
do not expect a ready-made solution of the problem of evil, but they
wish to see it honestly faced; above all, they want to know how
Christian truth bears on the real problems of life; the best of them
are not at all afraid of a religion which makes big demands on them,
but they know well enough the difficulty of responding to those
claims, and their greatest need of all is to find and to use that life
and power, coming from a living Person, without which our best
aspirations must fail and our highest ideals remain unrealized.
These needs seem to me to be satisfactorily and happily met in the
following pages. My friend and chaplain, Mr. Rawlinson, has had good
means of knowing what men are and what they want. He has had to do
with the undergraduate, with officers and men in the Army, and with
the ordinary civilian in parish life. He has been able to see the
nature and needs of our British manhood at different angles, and he is
the sort of man with whom men are not afraid to talk. He has had good
opportunity of diagnosing the situation, and this book shows his skill
in dealing with it.
I do not find myself in agreement with everything in these pages, but
when I am conscious of difference of view, I am no less grateful for
the stimulus to thought. I am specially thankful that the writer has
been so courageous in tackling the most difficult subjects.
I know that the author's one desire is to help men to be more real in
their religion. I share his hope, and I believe that this book will do
much to accomplish it.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
This book has grown out of the writer's experience in preparing men
and officers in military hospitals for Confirmation. It represents, in
a considerably expanded but--as it is hoped--still simple form, the
kind of things which he would have wished to say to them, and to
others with whom he was brought into contact, if he had had more time
and opportunity than was usually afforded him. It seemed necessary to
write the book, because there did not appear to be in existence any
reasonably short book on similar lines which covered the ground of
Christian faith and practice as a whole, and which approached the
subject from the point of view which seems to the writer to be the
most real.
The writer is consciously indebted in the first chapter to the
discussion of our Lord's teaching and character in Dr. T. B. Glover's
fascinating book, _The Jesus of History_. It is possible that there
are other and unconscious obligations which have been overlooked. Here
and there acknowledgment is made in footnotes, and an occasional
phrase, "lifted" from some other writer, has been placed in inverted
commas.
In Chapter VIII. of Part I. the author has echoed the thought, and to
a certain extent the wording, of parts of his own essay on "The
Principle of Authority" in _Foundations_.
For help in the correction of the proofs, and for criticisms and
suggestions which have led to numerous modifications and improvements
in matters of detail, the thanks of the writer are due to various
friends, and more particularly to his brother, Lieutenant A. C.
Rawlinson, of the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars; to the Rev. Austin
Thompson, Vicar of S. Peter's, Eaton Square; and to the Rev. Leonard
Hodgson, Vice-Principal of S. Edmund Hall, Oxford.
_November_, 1917.
CONTENTS
PREFACE BY THE BISHOP OF LICHFIELD
INTRODUCTION
PART I
THE THEORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
CHAP.
I. THE MAN CHRIST JESUS
II. THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER
III. THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT
IV. THE HOLY TRINITY
V. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
VI. SIN AND REDEMPTION
VII. THE CHURCH AND HER MISSION IN THE WORLD
VIII. PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC
IX. SACRAMENTS
X. THE LAST THINGS
XI. CLERGY AND LAITY
XII. THE BIBLE
PART II
THE PRACTICE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
I. THE CHRISTIAN AIM
II. THE WAY OF THE WORLD
III. THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH
IV. THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL
V. THE KINGDOM OF GOD
VI. CHRISTIANITY AND COMMERCE
VII. CHRISTIANITY AND INDUSTRY
VIII. CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS
IX. CHRISTIANITY AND WAR
X. LOVE, COURTSHIP, AND MARRIAGE
PART III
THE MAINTENANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
I. HOW TO BEGIN
II. PRAYER
III. SELF-EXAMINATION AND REPENTANCE
IV. CORPORATE WORSHIP AND COMMUNION
V. THE DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE
VI. ALMSGIVING AND FASTING
INTRODUCTION
Vital religion begins for a man when lie first discovers the reality
of the living GOD. Most men indeed profess a belief in GOD, a vague
acknowledgment of the existence of "One above": but the belief counts
for little in their lives.
GOD, if He exists at all, must obviously be important: and it is
conceivable that He prefers the dogmatic atheism of a man here and a
man there, or the serious agnosticism of a slightly larger number, to
the practical indifference of the majority. "There are two attitudes,
and only two, which are worthy of a serious man: to serve GOD with his
whole heart, because he knows Him; or to seek GOD with his whole
heart, because he knows Him not."
The ordinary Englishman is in most cases nominally a Christian. As a
rule he has been admitted in infancy by baptism into the Christian
Church. But he is ignorant of the implications of his baptism, and
indifferent to the claims of a religion which he fails to understand.
These pages are written with the object of explaining what, in the
writer's judgment, the faith and practice of the Christian Church
really is.
PART I
THE THEORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
CHAPTER I
THE MAN CHRIST JESUS
It is best to begin with a study of the teaching and character of
Christ. Scholars for about a hundred years have been studying the
Gospels historically, "like any other books." It is now reasonably
certain that the first three Gospels--those which we know as the
Gospels according to S. Matthew, S. Mark, and S. Luke--though not, of
course, infallible or accurate in their every detail, reflect
nevertheless in a general way a trustworthy portrait of Jesus as He
actually lived. The sayings ascribed to Christ in their pages bear the
marks of originality. The outline of the events which they describe
may be taken as being in rough correspondence with the facts. The
Gospels as a whole represent pretty faithfully the impression made by
the life and character of Jesus upon the minds and memories of those
who knew Him best.
We are very apt to regard the Gospels conventionally. An inherited
orthodoxy which has made peace with the world takes them for granted
as "a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong." An
impatient reaction from orthodoxy sets them aside as incomprehensible
or unimportant. It is worth while making the effort to empty our minds
of prejudice, and to allow the Gospels to tell their own tale. We
shall find that they bring us face to face with a Portrait of
surprising freshness and power.
It is the portrait of One who spent the first thirty years of His life
in an obscure Galilaean village, and who in early manhood worked as a
carpenter in a village shop. He first came forward in public in
connexion with a religious revival initiated by John the Baptist. He
was baptized in the Jordan. What His baptism meant to Him is
symbolized by the account of a vision which He saw, and a Voice which
designated Him as Son of GOD. He became conscious of a religious
mission, and was at first tempted to interpret His mission in an
unworthy way, to seek to promote spiritual ends by temporal
compromises, or to impress men's minds by an appeal to mystery or
miracle. He rejected the temptation, and proclaimed simply GOD and His
Kingdom. He is said to have healed the sick and to have wrought other
"signs and mighty works": but He set no great store by these things,
and did not wish to be known primarily as a wonder-worker. He lived
the life of an itinerating Teacher, declaring to any who cared to
listen the things concerning the Kingdom of GOD. At times He was
popular and attracted crowds: but He cared little for popularity,
wrapped up His teaching in parables, and repelled by His "hard
sayings" all but a minority of earnest souls. He gave offence to the
conventionalists and the religiously orthodox by the freedom with
which He criticized established beliefs and usages, by His
championship of social outcasts, and by His association with persons
of disreputable life. Unlike John the Baptist, He was neither a
teetotaller nor a puritan. He was not a rigid Sabbatarian. He despised
humbug, hypocrisy, and cant: and He hated meanness and cruelty. He
could be stern with a terrible sternness. His gaze pierced through all
disguises, and He understood the things that are in the heart of man.
He saw things naked. He has been called "the great Son of Fact." He
was never under any illusions.
He faced the hostility of public opinion with unflinching courage. He
expected to be crucified, and crucified He was. He warned those who
followed Him to expect a similar fate. He claimed from men an
allegiance that should be absolute: the ties of home and kindred, of
wealth or position in the world, were to be held of no account:
anything which stood in the way of entire discipleship to Himself,
however compelling its immediate claim, was to be sacrificed without
hesitation for His sake. He saw nothing inconsistent between this
concentration of men's allegiance upon His own person, and His
insistence upon GOD as the one great Reality that mattered.
The motive of His whole life was consecration to the will of GOD. He
was rich towards GOD, where other men are poor. The words were true of
Him, as of no one else, "I have set GOD always before me." His mission
among men He fulfilled as a work which His Father had given Him to do.
"Lo, I come to do Thy will, O GOD." He loved men, and went about doing
good, because He knew that GOD loved men, and meant well by them, and
desired good for them, and not evil. He was pitiful, because GOD is
pitiful. He hated evil, because GOD hates it. He loved purity, because
GOD is pure.
He delighted in friendships both with men and women: but you could not
imagine anything unclean in His friendships. He was not married, but
He looked upon marriage as an utterly pure and holy thing, taught that
a man should leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife so that
they twain should be one flesh, and recognized no possibility of
divorce except--and even this is not quite certain--on the ground of
marital unfaithfulness. He had one and the same standard of purity for
men and women.
He loved children, the birds and the flowers, the life of the open
air: but He was equally at home in the life of the town. He went out
to dinner with anybody who asked Him: He rejoiced in the simple
hilarity of a wedding feast. He was a believer in fellowship, and in
human brotherhood. He was everybody's friend, and looked upon no one
as beyond the pale. He loved sinners and welcomed them, without in the
least condoning what was wrong. He looked upon the open and
acknowledged sinner as a more hopeful person from the religious point
of view than the person who was self-satisfied and smug. He said that
He came to seek and to save those who knew themselves to be lost.
He chose twelve men to be in an especial sense His disciples--learners
in His school. To them He sought to reveal something of His deeper
mind. He tried to make them understand that true royalty consists in
service; that if a man would be spiritually great he should choose for
himself the lowest room, and become the servant of all; that the
privilege of sitting on His right hand and on His left in His Kingdom
was reserved for those for whom it was prepared by His Father; the
important thing was whether a man was prepared to drink His cup of
suffering, and be baptized with His baptism of blood. But He did speak
of Himself as King, He accepted the designation of Himself as the
Christ of GOD, and spoke strange words about His coming upon the
clouds of heaven to judgment. He held that by their relation to
Himself and to His ideals the lives of all men should be tested, and
the verdict passed upon their deeds. For making these and similar
claims He was convicted of blasphemy and put to death.
His disciples failed to understand Him. The Gospels are full of the
contrast between their minds and His. Of the chosen Twelve who, as He
said, had continued with Him in His trials and to whom He promised
that they should eat and drink at His table in His Kingdom, and sit on
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, one betrayed and one
denied Him when the time of crisis came, and the rest forsook Him and
fled. The fact that their faith and loyalty were subsequently re-
established--that the execution which took place on Calvary was not
the complete and summary ending of the whole Christian movement--that,
in the days that followed, the recreant disciples became the confident
Apostles, requires for its explanation the assertion in some form of
the truth of the Resurrection.
With regard to the precise form which the Resurrection took there may
be room for differences of opinion: the accounts of the risen Jesus in
the various Gospel records cannot be completely harmonized, and the
story may here and there have been modified in the telling. The fact
remains that apart from the assumption as a matter of historical truth
that Jesus was veritably alive from the dead, and that He showed
Himself alive to His disciples by evidences which were adequate to
carry conviction to their incredulous minds, the origins of historical
Christianity cannot really be explained.
In the Gospel according to S. John it is stated that the crowds said
of Jesus, "This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the
world": and so much, at the least, the average Englishman is ready to
admit: for to call Jesus Christ a Prophet--even to call Him the
supreme Prophet--is to claim for Him no more than a good Mohammedan
claims for Mohammed.
The word "prophet" in itself means one who speaks on behalf of
another: and a prophet is defined to be a spokesman on behalf of GOD.
He is essentially a man with a message. In so far as he is a true
prophet he is one who by an imperious inner necessity is constrained
to declare to his fellows a word which has come to him from the Lord.
And the prophet's word is urgent: it brooks no delay. It is impatient
of conventionalisms and shams. It breaks through the established order
of things in matters both social and religious. It is dynamic, vivid,
revolutionary. It goes to the root of things, with a startling
directness, a kind of explosive force. It disturbs and shatters the
customary placidities of men's lives. It forces them to face spiritual
realities, to look the truth in the face.
All this is true in a pre-eminent degree of the words of Christ. There
is a force and directness, an energy and intensity about His teaching,
which is without parallel in the history of the world. It might have
been thought impossible for His utterances, in any age or under any
circumstances, to become conventionalized: but the miracle has been
achieved. Christianity is to the average Englishman an established
convention and nothing more.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit," said Jesus: but _we_ say rather,
"Blessed are the rich in substance."
"Blessed are they that mourn": but that is not the general opinion.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"--but who
amongst us really believes it?
"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they
shall be filled."
"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy": but to-day a
more popular maxim is, "Be not merciful unto them that offend of
malicious wickedness."
"Blessed are the pure in heart"--and how many of us are that?
"Blessed are the peace-makers": but in a time of war they are not very
favourably regarded.
"Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness' sake"--is
that _your_ ambition, or mine?
"Ye are the salt of the earth" and "the light of the world"--then the
earth, it is to be feared, is a somewhat insipid place, and its light
comparable to darkness visible. "If any man will come after Me, let
him take up his Cross, and follow Me": but most of us make it a tacit
condition of our Christianity that we shall _not_ be crucified.
Is it not true that we habitually refuse to take seriously His
teaching about man; that we water down His paradoxes and
conventionalize His sayings; that we blunt the sharpness of His
precepts, and shirk the tremendous sternness of His demands?
And does His teaching about GOD fare any better? GOD was to Jesus
Christ the one Reality that mattered; is that in any serious sense
true of us? GOD, He taught, cares for the sparrows, numbers the hairs
of our heads, sees in secret, and reads our inmost hearts. GOD knows
all about us, loves us individually, thinks out our life in all its
relations, and makes provision accordingly. There is nothing which He
cannot or will not do for His children.
He is near and not far off: He is also on the throne of all things--
the Universe is in our Father's hand, and His will directs it. "O ye
of little faith, wherefore did ye doubt?" Fear, on the ground that
things are stormy, is a thing Christ simply cannot understand.
GOD, moreover, is loving and generous, royal and bounteous: forgiving
sinners: sending His rain with Divine impartiality upon the just and
the unjust alike. "His flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man's
garden." He loves even His enemies, for He is equally the Father of
all.
And man is made for GOD, and belongs to GOD. GOD and man need one
another: all that is requisite is that they should find one another:
and that is the Good News. The discovery of GOD is the Pearl of great
price, a Treasure worth the sacrifice of everything else: the
experience of a life-time, and a life-time's acquisitions, apart from
GOD, are not worth anything at all.
We who call ourselves Christians, do we seriously believe these
things? Do we really share Christ's outlook upon GOD, or His hope for
man? Is our view of life centred in GOD, as was His? Or do His words
of reproach fit us, as they fitted S. Peter--"You think like a man,
and not like GOD"?
"The way to faith in GOD, and to love for man," it has been said, "is
to come nearer to the living Jesus." If we would learn Christ's great
prophecy about man and GOD, we must read the Gospels over again, with
awakened eyes. We must take seriously the man Christ Jesus. We must
hear the words of His prophecy, and face honestly the challenge of His
sayings. We must confront the central Figure of the Gospels in all its
tremendous realism, watering down nothing, explaining nothing away;
"wrestling with Jesus of Nazareth as Jacob wrestled with the angel,
and refusing to let Him go except He bless us." In the end He does
bless those who wrestle with Him, and we shall not in the end be able
to stop short of confessing Him as GOD.
For the message of the Gospel story is ultimately not even the
teaching of Christ: it is Christ Himself. He, alone among the world's
teachers, perfectly practised what He preached, and embodied what He
taught. And therefore the truth of GOD and the ideal for man in Him
are one. In Him we see man as he ought to be, man as he is meant to
be. And because we instinctively judge that the highest human nature
is divine, and because also we feel that GOD Himself would be most
divine and worshipful if we could conceive of Him as entering in and
sharing our human experience and revealing Himself as man, those who
have reflected most deeply about the matter have commonly been led to
believe that so indeed it is. They have felt that in Jesus Christ man,
as the mirror and the Son of GOD, reflects the Father's glory. They
have felt that in Jesus Christ GOD, the Eternal Source of all things,
has expressed and revealed Himself in a human life: that GOD has
spoken a Word, a Word which is the expression of Himself: and that the
Word is Christ. "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou
not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father." For
there is, in truth, something in Jesus of Nazareth which compels our
worship. And if we will take seriously the human Jesus we shall
discover in the end Deity revealed in manhood, and we shall worship
Him in whom we have believed.
But that, of course, is dogma: in other words, it is the deliberate
judgment of Christian faith. It is the expression, as a truth for the
mind, of the value which a soul which is spiritually awake comes to
set upon Jesus because it cannot do otherwise. A judgment like that is
the conclusion--it ought not to be taken as the starting-point--of
faith. There are many, of course, who are willing to begin by assuming
provisionally that it is true, upon the authority of others who bear
witness to it: and that is not an unreasonable thing to do, provided a
man afterwards verifies it in the experience of his own life. But
belief in the divinity of Jesus is too tremendous a confession lightly
to be taken for granted by mere half-believers of a casual creed.
Convictions worth having must sooner or later be fought for: they must
be won by the sweat of the brow. And if a man is not content
permanently to defer to the authority of others, he ought not to begin
by taking for granted the doctrine that Jesus is GOD. He ought to
begin as the Apostles began, by taking seriously the _Man_ Christ
Jesus.