As you are aware, there are certain churches that have taken the name
of Evangelical, thereby, of course, putting forth the claim that in
some special or peculiar way they have the gospel in keeping. For
"Evangel" is the word translated "gospel," "Evangelist" is a "preacher of
the gospel," "Evangelical" is the appropriate name for the church whose
ministers preach the gospel. And the word "gospel," as you know,
translated, means good news. It is the proclamation of hope, of
something that the world has been groping in darkness for, a message
that should lift the burden off the human heart, make men stronger to
endure, fill them with cheer in the midst of life's difficulties and
dangers, and give them a trust with which to walk out into the darkness
that lies at the end.
A certain section, I say, of the Christian Church has appropriated this
name; and by common consent it has been conceded to it. And as usage
makes language, and the dictionaries only record the results of popular
usage, why, of course, we must confess that this use of words is right.
Right in that sense, I say. But I wish to go back of this popular usage
this morning, and raise the question as to whether these churches that
claim the title are the ones to whom it peculiarly or exclusively
belongs. I wish to put forward the claim that we, though the idea is
entirely against popular thought, are really the ones who are preaching
the gospel of God, and that the liberals of the world come nearer today
to proclaiming the actual original gospel of Jesus the Christ than do
any other body of Christians in the world. I wish to do this, not in
any spirit of antagonism, but simply by way of clear definition, and
that we may understand where we are, and may unfalteringly and
trustingly and loyally and hopefully go on to do the highest work that
was ever committed to human hands.
At the outset, though it will necessitate my saying certain things
which I have said to you before, I must outline briefly that body of
doctrine which goes by the name of "Evangelical." I will not go back
two or three hundred years to include in it such dogmas as
Foreordination, Election, the Damnation of non-Elect or non-Baptized
Infants, though these doctrines still remain in the creeds. I will take
what must be considered the simpler and fairer course of confining
myself to setting forth those beliefs which are generally accepted, and
which are made a part of the creed of the so-called "Evangelical
Alliance" that is, an organization including representatives of all the
great so-called Evangelical Churches. These beliefs, in brief, are that
God created the world perfect in the first place, but that in a very
short time it was invaded by the evil powers, and mankind rebelled
against the Creator, and became the subjects of the devil as the god of
this world. Then man, by thus rebelling against God, lost his
intellectual power to discern truth, became mentally unable to discover
spiritual truth, to find the divine way in which he ought to walk; and
that he became morally incapable, so that, even when the truth was
presented to him, he felt an aversion towards it, and was disinclined
to accept it. The next point is this being the condition of things that
God began to reveal himself to the world, first, by angel messengers,
by prophets, by inspired men, and that then at last, through certain
chosen mediums, he wrote a book telling men the truth about their
condition, about his feeling towards them, about what they ought to do,
and the destiny involved in the kind of life they should live here.
After the world had been in existence about four thousand years,
according to this teaching, and very little headway had been made even
among the chosen people, the few that had been selected from the great
outside and wandering nations, God himself comes down to earth, by
means of a woman specially prepared to be his mother he is born without
a human father. He lives, he suffers, he dies. This, after one theory
or another, I need not go into them, to make it possible for God to
forgive, and to enable him to save those who should accept the terms
which he should offer.
Then, after his withdrawal from the earth, his Church is organized
under the special guidance of the Holy Spirit. Its mission is to
proclaim the gospel among all nations. That proclamation has gone on;
but after two thousand years not a third of the world has heard the
gospel, not a third of the people who walk the planet knows anything
about the book that has been written. But they still stumble along in
darkness, worshipping anything except the one only and true God. So
that this effort up to the present time would strike us, if we judged
it as a human device, as being a sad and lamentable failure.
The upshot of this, according to the Evangelical creed, is that the
great majority of the world is to be permanently lost. Only a few,
those who are converted or those becoming members of the true Church,
connected with it sacramentally or in some way, only the few are to be
saved, and the great majority outcast forever.
This, in substance, makes up what has been called the gospel; and those
who claim that they are preaching the gospel are preaching these things
as true. I am well aware and I would not have anybody suppose that I
overlooked it that this creed is undergoing very striking and marked
changes, and that a great many of those things which some of us look
upon as more objectionable are being left out of sight, and not
preached, as they used to be, though they still remain in the creeds.
I am aware, for example, that what it is to be orthodox or evangelical
has been reduced to very low terms as compared with those which I have
just set forth; that is to say, reduced to very low terms in certain
quarters. For instance, Dr. Lyman Abbott, of Brooklyn, tells us that we
need not believe in the infallibility of the Bible any more; that we
need not believe in the old-time Trinity; that we need not believe that
Jesus was essentially different from a man; we need not believe in the
virgin birth, unless we find it easy to accept it. But the two things
which he tells us we must believe in order to be orthodox, or
evangelical, are that in some way, though he does not define how, the
Bible contains a special message from God to the world, and that in
some way Jesus particularly and specially represents God, and that he
reveals him to men, so that, when he speaks, he speaks with authority,
as representing divine truth. Everlasting Damnation eliminated,
Foreordination not referred to, the Trinity transformed, Infallibility
no longer insisted on, the humanity of Jesus granted, to be orthodox,
according to Dr. Abbott, has become a comparatively simple thing.
In my conversations with clergymen of other churches during the past
winter I have discovered that there, too, among certain men, the
conditions of being orthodox are a great deal simpler than they were a
hundred years ago. An Episcopalian tells me it is only necessary to
accept the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds, and that even then one is
at liberty to interpret them as he pleases; that this is what
constitutes Orthodoxy and makes one evangelical.
But this process of eliminating the hard doctrines has not gone on in
any authoritative way on the part of the Church itself. There has been
no proclamation of any such liberty allowed; and I am not aware that
the most of these men have made any public statement in their own
churches of these positions. It may be known through personal
conversations that they hold these views; and, if they are rendering
good service, they may not be disturbed by the church authorities in
their positions.
So much, then, for a statement as to what constitutes the Evangelical
Church, as to what must be the message of the minister who is to preach
"the gospel of Christ."
Now I wish to call your attention for a moment to another way of
looking at these doctrines. I am not to question their truth. I simply
wish to ask you to note as to whether, considering them true, we should
be inclined to speak of them as good news. Are they a gospel? Can we
with gladness proclaim them to men? For example, suppose God, after
creating the world, loses control of it, an evil power comes in, his
enemy, takes possession of his fair earth, alienates from him the
hearts of the only two of his children who are in existence here, and
who are to be the parents of a countless race. Suppose that is true. Is
it something we would like to believe? Is it good news? Can we call it
an integral part of a gospel?
Suppose, again, that God writes a book, an infallible book, and gives
it to whom? To a few people, to the little company of Jews who lived on
that little narrow strip of land on the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean. He does not give it to anybody else. He has given,
indeed, according to this theory, the Old Testament and the New to
Christendom since that day. But think a moment.
According to what we know to be true now, man was on this planet for
two or three hundred thousand years before God revealed himself at all;
and the race went stumbling on and falling in darkness, no light, no
hand stretched out to help, no voice speaking out of the silent
heavens, the world, apparently, absolutely forgotten, so far as God's
truth was concerned. Suppose that, after two or three hundred thousand
years, God did give an infallible book to the world. As I had occasion
to say a moment ago, comparatively a very small part of his children
have heard anything about it. And, then, what is very striking, the
proofs of its having come from him are so weak that most of the wisest,
the best, the noblest of the world, cannot accept any such claim on its
behalf. Is this, if it be true, good news? Would we speak of it as a
gospel, something of which to be glad, something to proclaim to mankind
as a cheer, a message from on high?
Once more, suppose, after the world had been in existence for two or
three hundred thousand years, God comes down, incarnates himself, wears
a human body, and does what he can to save men. If it is true, in the
economy of the divine government, that human souls could be saved in no
other way, is that good news? Would we think of it as a gospel to
proclaim to mankind, that God himself must suffer, must be outcast, be
spit upon, be reviled, be put to death, and that only so could he
forgive one of his wandering children, and bring him back to himself?
Then, once more, suppose all this to be true, and suppose that, as the
outcome of it all, the countless millions of men and women and children
that have walked the earth during the last three hundred thousand
years, until the Jews received their first light from heaven, suppose
that they have been lost: that is a part of this gospel. Suppose that
since that time all the nations outside of Christendom have been lost:
that is a part of this gospel. Suppose that not only this be true, but
that all people in Christendom who have not been members of churches
have been lost. Suppose even, as I used to hear it preached when I was
a boy, that large numbers of those who were church members were not
really children of God, and would be lost. Suppose this most horrible
doctrine be true. Is it good news? Could we proclaim it with any heart
of courage as a part of the gospel of God?
It seems to me, then, that I am bringing no railing accusation when I
say that those Churches that claim to be Evangelical are not
proclaiming a gospel to the world. But, though this be literally true,
they may claim that they are delivering the message of Jesus the
Christ, and that, from their point of view, this is relatively a piece
of good news, good news, at any rate, to the few who are going to be
saved. So I ask you now to turn, while I examine with you for a few
moments the essence of the gospel which Jesus proclaimed. Note its
terms. Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of
God, and saying: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at
hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel;" that is, this proclamation of
good news, the coming of God's kingdom. Was this the essential thing in
the gospel of Christ?
Let me ask you now to look with me for a few moments. You are perfectly
well aware of the fact that the Jews cherished a belief in the coming
of a Messiah and the establishment of God's kingdom here on earth and
among men. You are not so well aware, perhaps, unless you have made a
study of it, that a belief like this has not been confined to the Jews.
In many other nations a similar expectation has been cherished. We find
it, for example, among some of the tribes of our North American
Indians. It is world-wide, in other words, in its range. It is no
peculiarity of the Jews. But let us confine ourselves a moment to their
particular hope. It is a perfectly natural belief. It required no
revelation in order for it to grow up. They believed that the God of
the world, of the universe, was their God; that they were his chosen
people. Do you not see what a necessary corollary would be a belief in
their ultimate prosperity and triumph? God would certainly bless and
give the kingdom to that people which he had specially selected for his
own. And so, as the coming of the kingdom was postponed, they believed
that it was because they had not complied with the divine conditions,
they had not kept the law or they had not been good, they had not
obeyed him. Somehow, they had done wrong; and that was the reason the
kingdom so long delayed.
Remember another thing. We have come, in this modern time, to place the
kingdom away off in another world after the close of this life. The
Jews had no such belief about it. They expected it to come right here
on this poor little planet of ours; and they expected that a kingdom
was to be set up which was not only to place them at the head of
humanity, but through them was to bless all mankind. Different thinkers
among them held different views, but this in substance was the belief;
and they were constantly looking for signs of this imminent revolution
which was to make the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our God
and of his Christ, that is, his Anointed One.
John the Baptist preached that this kingdom was coming. But he was
imprisoned and beheaded, having come into conflict with the civil
authority. Jesus, then, having come from Nazareth, where he had studied
and thought and brooded over the divine will, takes up this broken work
of John, and begins a proclamation of the gospel; and the one thing
which constituted that gospel was: The kingdom of God is at hand,
repent and believe; accept this statement. And note that "repent" on
the lips of Jesus did not mean what we have been accustomed to
associate with it. The New Testament word translated "repent" means
change your purpose, change your method of life. You have not been in
accord with the truth, you have not been obedient to God; turn about,
come into accord with the divine law, become obedient to the divine
message.
Jesus taught no kingdom in any other world. He believed that the
kingdom was to be here. For, even after he had disappeared from the
sight of men, and this reflects in the clearest possible way the burden
of his message, his disciples expected, not that they were to be
transferred to some other planet or into an invisible world to find the
kingdom, but that Jesus was to come back, to return in the clouds of
heaven, and establish the kingdom here.
The kingdom, then, that Jesus preached was a kingdom of righteousness
here on this earth, among just the kind of people that we are. And,
note, he said, This kingdom of God does not come by observation. You
are not to say, Lo here, Lo there, look for wonders. He says, The
kingdom of God is within you, or among you. It is translated both ways;
and, I suppose, nobody knows which way it ought to be. I believe both.
The kingdom of God that Jesus preached is essentially in us. It is
also, after it is in a few of us, among us, right here already, so far
as it extends, and reaching out its limits and growing as rapidly as
men discern it and become obedient to its laws.
Now I have been asked a great many times how I can be sure, or
practically sure, as to what sayings in the Gospels are really those of
Jesus and what are traditional in their authority, what are doubtfully
his. I cannot go into a long explanation this morning; but I want to
suggest one line of thought. And I do this because I wish it to be the
basis of a statement that Jesus has not made any of these things that
are to-day labelled "Evangelical" any essential part of his gospel at
all. Jesus, for example, does not preach any Garden of Eden or any Fall
of Man. Jesus says nothing about any infallible book. Jesus says not a
word about any Trinity. He nowhere makes any claim to be God. His
doctrine concerning the future is doubtful. But one thing which I wish
to insist upon is perfectly clear: the conditions of citizenship in the
kingdom of God are the simplest conceivable. He says, Not those that
say, Lord, Lord, not those that multiply their services and ceremonies,
but those that do the will of my Father shall enter the kingdom. The
only condition that Jesus ever established for membership in the
kingdom of heaven is simple human goodness, never anything else.
I am perfectly well aware that somebody may quote to me, "He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not
shall be damned." But the reply to that would be, The acknowledged
statement to-day on the part of all competent scholars is that Jesus
never uttered those words. They are left out of the Revised Version of
the New Testament: they are no authentic part of the story of his life
or his teaching.
How can we find his words? In the first place there are the great
central, luminous truths which Jesus uttered, the fatherhood of God,
the brotherhood of men, goodness as the condition of acceptance on the
part of God. And, on the theory that he did not contradict himself, we
are at liberty to waive one side those statements which grew up under
the influence of later tradition, popish or ecclesiastical, and which
plainly contradict these. But the main point I have in mind is one
which scholars have wrought out under the name of the Triple Tradition.
It takes for its central thought, "In the mouth of two or three
witnesses every word shall be established." We know that the Gospels
grew up through a long process of accretion after a good many years.
They were not written or planned by any one person; and, so far as we
know, they may not have been written by anybody whose name is
traditionally connected with them to-day. If, however, we find that
three of the four witnesses agree in reporting that he said or did a
certain thing, we feel surer about it than when only one witness
reports it. And if two report, why, even then we feel a little more
certain than we do when the report is from only one. And yet, of
course, the three may have omitted that which only one has recorded,
and which is true. But scholars have wrought out along this line what
is called the Triple Tradition; that is, they have constructed a
complete story of the life and the teaching and the death of Jesus out
of the words which are common to three of the gospel writers. All of
them tell this same story; and this story of the Triple Tradition has
no miraculous conception, it has no resurrection of the body, no
ascension into heaven. The miracles are reduced to the very lowest
terms, becoming almost natural and easy to be accounted for. In this
story Jesus teaches none of the things of which I have been speaking.
I say, then, that along the lines of the very best critical
scholarship, coming as near to the teaching of Jesus as we possibly can
to-day, we are warranted in saying that this which has usurped the name
of the gospel of Christ is not only not good news, but it is not the
news which Jesus brought and preached. As has been said a good many
times, it is a gospel about Christ instead of being the gospel of
Christ.
I am ready now to make the claim that we liberals of the modern world
are the ones who come nearer to preaching the gospel of Christ than any
other part of the so-called Christian Church. For what is it that we
preach? We preach that the kingdom of God is at hand. We preach that
there is not a spot on the face of the earth where we are not at the
foot of a ladder like that which Jacob saw in his dream, and which
leads up to the very throne of the Almighty. Jesus taught that the
kingdom of God might begin anywhere and at any time in any human heart.
Note what Matthew Arnold has called the secret and the method of Jesus.
He says, The secret of Jesus is that he who selfishly seeks his life
shall lose it: he who throws it away for good and God finds it. Do we
need to go very deeply into human life to discover the profound truth
of that saying? Seek all over the world for good and happiness, and
forget to look within, and you do not find it. The kingdom of heaven is
within. It is in the spirit, the temper of the heart, the disposition,
the life. And the secret of it is in cultivating love and truth and
tenderness and care, those things which bring us into intimate
connection with which we mean when we say, Be unselfish, and that in
doing this we find our own souls. For the man who gives out of himself
love and tenderness and care, of necessity cultivates the qualities of
love and tenderness and care; and those are the ones which are the
essence of all soul-building. And he who looks outside for the greatest
things of life misses them; while he who looks within, and cultivates
the spirit, finds God and happiness and truth.
This gospel, then, that the kingdom of God is at hand, is always ready
to come, is the gospel which we proclaim. And now I wish to extend that
idea a little. The form in which Jesus held his dream of human good has
changed in the process of the centuries. We no longer expect a
miraculous revelation of a kingdom coming out of the heavens to abide
on earth. The form of it is changed; but the essence of it we hold
still, the same perfect condition of men here on earth and in the
future which Jesus held and proclaimed.
Now let me hint to you a few of the elements that make up this hope for
man which we liberals proclaim everywhere as the gospel, the good news
of the coming kingdom of God.
In the first place, we proclaim the possibility of human conquest over
this earth. What do I mean by that? I mean that man is able and he is
showing that ability ultimately to control the forces of this planet,
and make them his servants. Within the last seventy-five years this
increasing conquest has changed the face of the planet. We now use
water power not only, but steam, electricity, magnetism. All these
secret forces that thrill from planet to planet and sun to sun we use
as our household and factory drudges, our every-day servants. And it
needs only a little imagination, looking along the lines of past
progress, to see the day when man shall stand king of the earth. He
shall make all these forces serve him. I believe that we have only just
begun this conquest. Already the wonders about us eclipse the wonders
of novelist and dreamer; and yet we have only begun to develop them.
What follows from this? When we have completed the conquest of the
earth, when we have discovered God's laws of matter and force and are
able to keep them, it means the abolition of all unnecessary pain,
unnecessary pain, I say; for all that pain which is not beneficent,
which is not inherent in the nature of things, is remedial. And we
preach the gospel, the coming of God's kingdom when pain shall be
abolished, and shall pass away.
Another step: We preach the gospel of the abolition of disease. We have
already, in the few civilized centres of the world, made the old
epidemics simply impossible. They are easily controlled. Nearly every
one of those that rise to threaten Europe and America to-day come from
the religious, ignorant, wild fanaticism of Asia, beyond the range of
our civilized control. The conditions of disease are discoverable; and
the day will come when, barring accidents here and there, well-born
people may calmly expect to live out their natural term of years. We
preach this gospel, then, of the kingdom of God in which disease shall
no more exist.
We preach a gospel that promises a time when war shall be no more. At
present wars are now and then inevitable; but they are brutal, they are
unspeakably horrible. And how any one who uses the sympathetic
imagination can rejoice, not over the victory, but over the destruction
of life and property which the victory entails, I cannot understand. We
have reached a time when civilized man no longer thinks he must right
his wrong with his fists or a club or a knife or a pistol. On the part
of individuals we call this a reversion to barbarism. The time will
come, and we are advancing towards it, when it will be considered just
as much a reversion to barbarism on the part of families, states,
nations, and when we shall substitute hearts and brains for bruises and
bullets in the settlement of the world's misunderstandings. We preach,
then, a gospel of the coming of the kingdom in which there shall be no
more war. And then life under the fair heavens will be sweet.
There shall be no more hunger in that kingdom. To-day see what
confronts us, bread riots in Spain and in Italy, thousands of people
hungry for food. And yet, if we would give ourselves to the development
of the resources of this planet instead of to their destruction, this
fair earth could support a hundred times its present population in
plenty and in peace. There shall be no more famine in that kingdom the
gospel of which we preach.
Then, when men have lived out their lives, learned their lessons, and
stand where the shadow grows thicker, so that we try in vain to see
beyond, what then? We preach a gospel of life, of an eternal hope. We
believe that death, instead of being the end, is only a transition, the
beginning really of the higher and the grander life. We cannot look
through the gateway of the shadow; but we catch a gleam of light beyond
that means an eternal day, when the sun shall no more go down. This we
believe.
And we do not partition that world off into two parts, the immense
majority down where the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever, and
only a few in a city gold-paved and filled with the light of peace.
Rather we believe it is a human life there just as here, that we are
under the law of cause and effect, that salvation is not a magical
thing, that we are saved only in so far as we come into accord with the
divine law and the divine life. And, if anybody says we preach an easy
gospel because we eliminate an arbitrary hell, let him remember we
preach a harder gospel, a more difficult salvation, not a salvation
that can be purchased by a wave of emotion or by the touch of priestly
fingers, a salvation that must be wrought out through co-working with
God in the building of human character, a salvation that is being
right.
This is our gospel; but it is a gospel of eternal and universal hope,
because we believe that every single soul is under doom to be saved
sometime, somewhere. We preach the inevitable results of law-breaking,
are they to last one year, five, a hundred, a thousand, a million, ten
millions? There is no possibility of heaven except as people are in
perfect accord with the divine law and the divine life; for that is
what heaven means. You can no more get heaven out of a disordered
character than you can get music out of a disordered piano. This
salvation which we preach is the constituent element of life. You
cannot have a circle if you break the conditions of a circle. You
cannot have a river if you break the conditions the very existence of
which constitutes a river. So of anything in God's natural world. There
are certain essential things that go to make these what they are. So
heaven, righteousness, happiness, the constituent elements of these are
right thinking, right feeling, right acting, obedience to the laws of
God, which make them possible.
We believe that God, through pain, through suffering, down through the
winding ways of darkness and ignorance, one year, a million years, must
pursue the soul of any one of his children until that child learns that
suffering follows wrong, and must follow it, and that God himself
cannot help it, and so, learning the lesson, by and by turns, comes
back, and says: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee,
and am not worthy to be thy son: make me at least as one of thy hired
servants. And then the love that has pursued all the way, that has been
in the light and that has been in the dark, shall go out to meet him,
and fall on his neck in loving embrace, and rejoice that he who was
dead is alive again, and he who was lost is found.
This is the gospel we preach, a gospel of God's eternal, boundless
love, the good news that every human being is God's child; that here on
earth, co-operating with God and discovering his laws, we may begin the
creation of his kingdom now; that we may broaden and enlarge it until
it encloses the world; and that it reaches out into the limitless ages
of the future. And this, as I said, is the gospel of the Christ,
changed in its form, if you please, but one in its essence; for he
came, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: The time
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Change your purpose,
accept the message, and come into accord with the divine life. This is
the gospel that the Christ preached: this is the gospel we preach
to-day.
Do I make, then, an extraordinary claim when I say that we are the
Evangelical Church, that the church which preaches the gospel is here?