_THE THOROUGH ETHICIZING OF RELIGION_
I. THE PRESSURE OF THE PROBLEM
The social consciousness looks to the thorough ethicizing of
religion. If the social consciousness is to be regarded as
historically justified, it must believe that this growing sense of
brotherhood and consequent obligation is simply our response to the
on-working of God's own plan, God's own will expressing itself in us.
The purpose to recognize the will of God, thus necessarily involves
the recognition of human relations, since, as soon as conscience is
strongly stirred in any direction, religion can but feel, in this
demand of conscience, the demand of God, and, therefore, must bring
the convictions of the social consciousness into religion. Indeed, it
may be well believed that Kaftan is right in his insistence that it is
exactly through the practical, that is, in the realm of the ethical,
that knowledge arises from faith.[43]
In any case, it is evident that the old problem of faith and works, of
religion and ethics, of the first and second commandments, meets us
here in a way not to be put aside. With an ethical demand so insistent
as that of the social consciousness no religion can be at peace that
is not with equal insistence ethical. We are bound, then, to show how
communion with God, the supreme desire to find God, necessarily
carries with it active love for men. We must show how we truly commune
with God in such active service. The social consciousness, thus,
positively thrusts upon every religious man, who believes in it, the
problem of the thorough ethicizing of religion. Or, to put the matter
in a slightly different way, if the sense of the value and the
sacredness of the person is one of the two greatest moral convictions
of our time, then religion must be clearly seen to hold this
conviction, or lose its connection with what is most real and vital to
us. This is the problem.
II. THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
All will probably agree that religion is communion with God. We have
seen why the social consciousness cannot accept a falsely mystical
view of that communion. For similar reasons, it must make absolutely
subordinate all non-ethical and simply mysterious means which make no
appeal to the conscience and to the reason--the falsely sacramental.
Only the person is truly sacramental. Much else may be of value, but
the touch of personal life is the only absolute essential in religion.
We have seen, also, why the social consciousness tends to regard
religion as a strictly personal relation.
Our problem thus becomes: How does the desire for personal relation
with God, the desire for God himself, lead directly into the ethical
life--into the full and practical recognition of the ethical demands
of the social consciousness?
To guard against any possible misconception, it is, perhaps, well to
say at the start that the desire for a personal relation with God has
no purpose of returning by another route to the false position of
mysticism, in the claim of special private revelations that are
exclusively for it. It expects, rather, personal conviction of that
great revelation that is common to all, and, moreover, it knows well
that no personal relation is essentially sensuous, and it certainly
looks for no sensuous relation to God.
It may be worth while, too, to reverse our question for a moment, and
ask how morality necessarily involves religion. The true moral life is
the fulfilment of all personal relations, and as such can least of all
omit the greatest and most fundamental relation which gives being and
meaning and value to all the rest--the relation to God. The fully
moral life, therefore, must include religion. The unity of the two may
be thus seen.
But the present inquiry looks at the matter from the other side, and
seeks a careful and thoroughgoing answer to the question: Why is the
Christian religion, as a personal relation to God, necessarily
ethical?
III. THE ANSWER
1. _Involved in Relation to Christ._--In the first place, then, it
probably may be safely claimed that there is no test of the moral life
of a man so certain as his attitude toward Christ. Setting aside, now,
any special religious claims of Christ altogether, and recognizing him
only as earth's highest character, the supreme artist in living, who
knows the secret of the moral life more surely and more perfectly than
any other, he becomes even so the surest touch-stone of character; and
the iron filings will not be more certainly attracted to the magnet
than will the men of highest character be attracted to Christ when he
is really seen as he is. There is no test of character so certain as
the test of one's personal relation to the best persons. The personal
attitude toward Christ is the supreme test. In receiving him, in
becoming his disciples in a completer sense than we own ourselves the
disciples of any other, we make the supreme moral choice of our lives;
and, if no more is true than has been already said, we so accept as a
matter of fact the fullest historical revelation of God at the same
time. The ethical and religious here fall absolutely together. And all
the subsequent choices of our Christian life, if true to Christ, are
necessarily moral.
2. _The Divine Will Felt in the Ethical Command._--In the second
place, the sense of the presence of God, of the divine will laid upon
us, if we have the religious feeling at all, comes to us nowhere in
our common life so certainly and so persistently as in a sense of
obligation which we cannot shake off, a sense of facing a clear duty.
To run away from this, we are made to feel, is plainly to run away
from God. Is this not a simply true interpretation of the common
consciousness? Here, then, the religious experience is in the very
sphere of the ethical, and identical with it.
3. _Involved in the Nature of God's Gifts._--Again, God's gifts in
religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the
unwilling soul; just to receive them, therefore, implies willingness
to use them; and faith becomes inevitably both "a gift and an
activity." However one names God's gifts in religion, so long as the
relation is kept a spiritual one at all, receiving the gift requires a
real ethical attitude in the recipient. A real forgiveness, for
example, involves personal reconciliation, restored personal
relations; and reconciliation is mutual. One cannot, then, be said in
any true sense to accept forgiveness from God who is not himself in an
attitude of reconciliation with God, of harmony of will with him. In
the same way, peace with God, the gift of the Spirit, life, God's own
life, cannot be really given to any man without an ethical response on
his part in a definite attitude of will. Anything arbitrary here is,
therefore, necessarily shut out. God's gifts in religion are of such a
kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul. They are
not things to be mechanically poured out on men. We have no need,
consequently, to guard our religious statements in this respect. We
cannot even receive from God the spiritual gifts of the religious
relation without the active will. Here, too, religion is certainly
ethical.
4. _Communion with God, through Harmony with His Ethical Will._--Or,
one may say, desire for real communion with God seeks God himself, not
things, or some experience merely. But the very center of personality
is the will; any genuine seeking of God himself, therefore, to commune
with him, requires unity with his ethical will. The deepest religious
motive is at the same time, thus, an impulse to character.
5. _The Vision of God for the Pure in Heart._--Christ's own
statement--"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see
God"--suggests another aspect of this essential unity of the religious
and the ethical. The connection in the beatitude is no chance one. The
highest and completest revelation of personality, human or divine, can
be made only to the reverent. God reveals himself to the reverent
soul, and most of all to the pure--to those souls that are reverent of
personality throughout and under the severest pressure. Therefore, the
pure in heart shall see God. "The secret of the Lord is with them that
fear him."[44] The vision of God requires the spirit that is reverent
of personality, and this spirit is the abiding source of the finest
ethical living.
6. _Sharing the Life of God._--But perhaps the clearest and most
satisfactory putting of the relation is this. The very meaning of
religion is sharing the life of God. As soon, now, as God is conceived
as essentially holy and loving, a God of character, a living will and
not a substance--and Christianity to be true to itself, must always so
conceive him--so soon religion and morality are indissolubly united.
God's life, according to Christ's teaching, is the life of constant
and perfect self-giving. To share the life of God, therefore, to share
his single purpose, is to come into the life of loving service. The
two fall together from the point of view of the social consciousness.
And we are "saved," we come into the real religious life, only in the
proportion in which we have really learned to love. "Everyone that
loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God."[45] The old separation of
religion and character is impossible from this point of view.
7. _Christ, as Satisfying Our Highest Claims on Life._--But we may
still profitably press the question: Is the Christian religion--the
special faith in the revelation of God in Christ, the best way to
righteousness? does it necessarily, most naturally, most
spontaneously, and most joyfully carry righteousness of life with it?
If this is to be true, Christian faith, in Herrmann's language, "must
give men the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty."[46] It
may be doubted whether any one has dealt with this question as
satisfactorily as Herrmann himself, and a few sentences may well be
quoted from his discussion. "We know that the ordinary instinctive way
in which men seek the satisfaction of all the needs of life makes it
impossible to submit honestly to the demands of duty, and we see,
also, the falsity of the childish idea of the mystics that this
instinct should be extirpated; it follows, then, that we can only seek
moral deliverance in a true and perfect satisfaction of our craving
for life.... Now just such a feeling of perfect inner contentment is
possible to the Christian, and he has it just in proportion as he
understands that God turns to him in Christ.... This is redemption,
that Christ creates within us a living joy, whose brightness beams
even from the eye of sorrow, and tells the world of a power it cannot
comprehend. And the power that works redemption is the fact that in
our world there is a Man whose appearance can at any moment be to us
the mighty Word of God, snatching us out of our troubles and making us
to feel that he desires to have us for his own, and so setting us free
from the world and from our own instinctive nature."[47]
Christ, that is, has no desire to withdraw himself from the test of
the largest life. He is able to satisfy the highest demands for life.
He courts the trial. He claims to offer life, the largest life. "I
came," he says, "that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly."[48] His way of deliverance is not negative but positive,
not limiting but fulfilling. He is able to give such largeness of life
in himself, such inner satisfaction of the craving for life, as makes
a lower life lose its power over us, the larger and higher life
driving out the meaner and lower. This is positive victory,
supplanting the lower with the higher; just as in literature, in
music, in friendship, and in love, we expect the best to break down
the taste for the lower.
8. _The Vision of the Riches of the Life of Christ, Ethically
Conditioned._--But the thought of Christ's satisfying our highest
claim on life deserves to be carried further, if it is to be saved
from vagueness and to have its full power with us. The highest value
in the world is a personal life. So Christ has made us feel. It is
finally the only value, for all other so-called values borrow their
value from persons. The highest joy conceivable is entering into the
riches of another's personal life through his willing self-revelation.
Now it is no fine fancy that the supremely rich life of the world's
history is Christ's. God can only be known, if we are not to fall back
into the vagaries of mysticism, in his concrete manifestation; and God
opens out in Christ, the New Testament believes, the inexhaustible
wealth of his own personal life. It is God's highest gift, the gift of
himself. "No one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any
know the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to
reveal him."[49] "This is life eternal, that they should know thee,
the only true God, and him whom thou didst send."[50] So it seemed to
Paul: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this
grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of
Christ."[51] Do we not here catch a glimpse of what the depth of that
satisfaction with the inner life of God in Christ may be?
"For He who hath the heart of God sufficed,
Can satisfy all hearts,--yea, thine and mine."
Only the riches of a personal life can satisfy our claim on life, our
desire for life; and, ultimately, we can be fully satisfied only with
God's own life in the fullest revelation he can make of it to us men.
Only this can be "the unspeakable gift." The thirst for God, for the
living God, is a simply true expression of the human heart when it
comes to real self-knowledge.
But the riches of the personal life of Christ are necessarily hidden
to one who does not come into the sharing of Christ's purpose. The
condition of the vision is ethical. The very satisfaction, therefore,
of our craving for life constantly impels to a more perfect union with
the will of Christ; for such complete entering into the life of
another with joy implies profound agreement. The desire for life,
therefore, for God's own life, for communion with God, itself impels
to character. Faith does here give "the power to submit with joy to
the claims of duty," and religion is ethical in the very heart of it.
9. _The Moral Law, as a Revelation of the Love of God._--The same
unity of the religious and ethical life is helpfully seen, if we put
the matter in one further and slightly different way. Only the
Christian religion, faith in God as Father revealed in Christ, enables
us to welcome the stern demands of duty and so gives us inner
deliverance, joy, and liberty in the moral life; for now the moral
demand is seen, not as task only, but as opportunity. For Christ, the
law of God is a revelation of the love of God; it is a gracious
indication--a secret whispered to us--of the lines along which we are
to find our largest and richest life; it is not a limitation of life,
but a way to larger life. Not, then, the avoidance, as far as
possible, of the law of God, but the completest fulfilment of it is
the road to life--following the hint of the law into the remotest
ramifications, and into the inmost spirit, of the life.
The other attitude which assumes that the law is a hindrance to life
is a distinct denial of the love of God. It implies that God lays upon
us demands which are not for our good. It refuses to accept as reality
Christ's manifestation of God as Father. Real belief in the love of
God, on the other hand, must take the fearful out of his commands. To
be "freed from the law," now, has quite a different meaning: not the
taking off from us of the moral demand, but the inner deliverance,
that would not have the command removed, but finds life _in_ it, and
obeys it freely and joyfully. Only a thoroughgoing and fundamental
faith in the Fatherhood of God can bring such inner deliverance, even
as we have seen that only such a faith can really ground the social
consciousness. And such a faith only Christ has proved adequate to
bring.
With this light, now, we feel, in every demand of duty, the presence
of God, and in this presence of God the pledge of life, not a
limitation of life. The religious life desires God, and it finds God
never so certainly as in the purpose fully to face duty. Every one of
the relations of life is, thus, turned to with joy by the religious
man, as sure to be a further channel of the revelation of God. The
thirst for God drives to the faithful fulfilment of the human
relation. Religion becomes joyfully ethical.
Nor is there any possibility of abandonment to the will of God _in
general_, as the mystic seems often to feel. God's will means
particulars all along the way of our life; and there is no communion
with God except in this ethical will in particulars. At no point,
therefore, can the religious life withdraw itself from the daily duty
and maintain its own existence. The constant inevitable condition of
the religious communion is the ethical will. Our providential place is
God's place to find us. Where God has put us, just there he will best
find us. This is further seen in the fact that the true Christian
experience is a constant paradox: God ever satisfying, and yet ever
impelling--never allowing us to remain where we are, but holding up to
us the always higher ideal beyond; the law is ever, "Of his fulness we
all received, and grace in place of grace."[52] The deepening
communion with God is only through a constantly deepening moral life.
Such a thoroughgoing ethicizing of religion as the social
consciousness demands, we need not hesitate, therefore, to believe is
possible. The truer religion is to its own great aspiration after God,
the more certainly is it ethical.
But the social consciousness, so far as it influences religion, not
only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize
the personal and the ethical, it also tends to emphasize in religion
the concretely, historically Christian.
[43] Cf. _American Journal of Theology_, Oct., 1898, p. 824.
[44] Psalm 25:14.
[45] I John 4:7.
[46] _The Communion of the Christian with God_, p. 230.
[47] _Op. cit._, pp. 232-234.
[48] John 10:10.
[49] Matt. 11:27.
[50] John 17:3.
[51] Eph. 3:8.
[52] John 1:16. Cf. Herrmann, _Op. cit._, pp. 92, 93.