_THE INFLUENCE OF THE DEEPENING SENSE OF THE VALUE AND SACREDNESS OF
THE PERSON UPON THEOLOGY_
In the discussion of the influence of the social consciousness upon
theological doctrine, we turn now to ask concerning the third element
of the social consciousness, How does the deepening sense of the value
and sacredness of the person affect theology?
And with this sense of the value and sacredness of the person, we may
well include, so far as the influence upon theology is concerned, the
remaining elements of the social consciousness--the deepening sense of
obligation, and of love. For, as we have already seen, the sense of
obligation and of love follow so inevitably from a deep sense of the
value and sacredness of the person, that it would be a needless
refinement, probably, to try to analyze out their separate influence
upon theological thinking. We should find them all leading us to
essentially the same great emphases.
When, now, through the social consciousness, the personal has become
the supreme value for us, and regard for it our eternal motive and
goal, we cannot fail to demand that theology give a real personality
to God and man--a consciousness marked, in Professor Howison's
language, with "that recognition and reverence of the personal
initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of
the true person."[92]
I. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN MAN
In the first place, the social sense of the value and sacredness of
the person will emphasize the full personality of man.
1. _Man's Personal Separateness from God._--The sense of the value of
the person cannot admit for a moment such a one-sided emphasis upon a
universal cosmic evolution, or upon the immanence of God, as should
make impossible a true personality in man. It seeks, in its view of
both God and man, a really "_personal_ idealism." It does not forget,
but earnestly asserts, the dependence of all other spirits upon God;
and, consequently, looks for no metaphysical separateness in this
sense from God. But a genuine recognition of the personality of man
does require that man be conceived as separate from God in just this
sense: (1) that he has a clear self-consciousness of his own, and (2)
that he has real moral initiative, which makes his volition truly his
own. These two factors constitute all of separateness that need be
demanded for man. Possessing these, he is "outside of God" in the only
sense in which a "personal idealism" feels concerned to assert
separateness. But for these factors it is concerned; for without them,
it believes, no truly ideal view, no moral world, no religious life,
are possible.
2. _Emphasis Upon Man's Moral Initiative._--In particular, the
application of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person in
theology, means the emphatic recognition of the moral initiative of
man--of the possession of a real will of his own. The whole social
consciousness, especially in this third element of it, rests upon the
assumption that man has worth, as a being capable of character as well
as of happiness, and so deserves in some worthy sense to be called a
child of God. If the social consciousness is, as we have seen, with
any fairness to be called the recognition of the fully personal,[93]
this reverence for the personal initiative of men cannot be lacking in
it. Its influence upon theology at this point, therefore, is hardly to
be doubted.
And theology itself is vitally concerned. For the whole possibility of
the conceptions of government and providence requires this. These
terms are words without meaning, having absolutely no place in
theology or philosophy, if man has no moral initiative. Nor should it
escape our notice, that we strike at the very root of all possible
reverence for God, if we deny a real initiative to man. We have no
possible philosophic explanation of either sin or error, consistent
with any real reverence for God, if a true human will is denied.[94]
In Professor Bowne's vigorous language: In a system of necessity
"every thought, belief, conviction, whether truth or superstition,
arises with equal necessity with every other.... On this plane of
necessary effect the actual is all, and the ideal distinctions of true
and false have as little meaning as they would have on the plane of
mechanical forces.... The only escape from the overthrow of reason
involved in the fact of error lies in the assumption of freedom."
Moreover, if real human initiative is denied to men, we conceive God
as having really less respect for persons in his dealing with them,
than the most elementary ethics requires of men in their relations to
one another. A one-sided doctrine of immanence, thus, degrades both
man and God. It degrades man, in denying to him a true personality,
and so making him simply a thing. It degrades God, in making him the
real responsible cause of all sin and error, and in making him treat
possible persons as things. The influence of the social consciousness,
which leads us to measure the moral growth of a man and of a
civilization by the deepening sense of reverence for the person, is
fairly decisive at this point. It _must_ see in God the most absolute
guarding of man's personality, and especially of his moral initiative.
3. _Man, a Child of God._--The Christian faith, that man is a child of
God, is a faithful expression of the insistence of the social
consciousness upon the recognition of the full personality of man. It
expresses both man's entire dependence upon God for his being and
maintenance, and at the same time his infinite value and sacredness as
a spirit made in the image of God, capable of indefinite progress, and
capable of personal relation to God. It voices thus Christianity's
characteristic "humbly-proud" conception of man--humble in view of the
eternal and infinite plans of God; proud, as "called to an
imperishable work in the world." It is, indeed, but a concrete
statement of that faith in love at the heart of things, and in the
all-embracing plan of a faithful God, which we found required, if the
social consciousness itself was to have any justification.[95]
II. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN CHRIST
In the second place, under this impulse of the sense of the value and
sacredness of the person, theology is likely to insist on the
recognition of the personal in the conception of Christ.
1. _Christ a Personal Revelation of God._--This recognition of the
personal in Christ will mean, first, that we are to conceive Christ as
a _personal_ revelation of God, rather than as containing in himself a
divine substance.[96] It cannot forget, that if God is a person, and
men are persons, the adequate self-revelation of God to men can be
made only in a truly personal life; and that men need above all, in
their relation to God, some manifestation of his ethical will, and
this can be shown only in the character of a person. A merely
metaphysical conception of the divinity of Christ in terms of
substance or essence, as these are commonly thought, must, therefore,
wholly fail to satisfy. We must be able to recognize and bow before
the personal will of the personal God revealed in Christ, if we are
really to find God through him. A strong sense of the personal, then,
such as the social consciousness evinces, must see in Christ, above
all, a personal revelation of a person.
2. _Emphasizing the Moral and Spiritual in Asserting the Supremacy of
Christ._--This implies that the dominant sense of the value and
sacredness of the person will certainly tend to bring into prominence
the moral and spiritual in asserting the supremacy of Christ, rather
than the metaphysical or the simply miraculous. So far as these latter
come into its representation at all, they will follow rather than
precede, and be accepted because of the moral and spiritual, or as
simply working hypotheses enabling us to bring into a thought-unity
what we have to recognize in the moral and spiritual realm. If one
faces the matter fully and frankly, is it not plain that Christians of
all shades of belief are increasingly finding the real reason for
their faith in Christ in his moral and spiritual supremacy? Many may
choose to _express_ their faith in him, when once reached, in terms of
the miraculous or metaphysical; but the miraculous and the
metaphysical are not the primary _reasons_ for their faith. It is the
inner spirit of Christ himself which really masters us and calls out
our confident faith and our eager submission. And it is only when we
have already gotten this sense of the stupendousness of his
personality, that the so-called miraculous in his life becomes to our
thought natural and fitting, and we are driven to think him standing
in some unique relation to God and so requiring to be conceived in
unique metaphysical terms.
It is easy, no doubt, to indulge in a false polemic against the
miraculous and metaphysical. One of the surest bits of autobiography
we have from Christ, the narrative of the temptations, implies, as
Sanday has acutely pointed out,[97] the clear consciousness on the
part of Christ of the possession of what we call supernatural powers.
It is a far less simple problem to rid the gospels of the miraculous
element, than our age, with its greatly exaggerated estimate of the
mathematico-mechanical view of the world, is likely to think. The
so-called miraculous in connection with Christ is not to be
impatiently and dogmatically set aside.[98] So, too, the demand of
thought, that we form finally some metaphysical conception of the
great personality which we meet in Christ cannot be denied as wholly
illegitimate. All this is to be freely granted and asserted.
But it is of the greatest importance for Christian thought, that it
still keep Christ's own absolute subordination of both the miraculous
and metaphysical to the moral and the spiritual. The same narrative of
the temptation, that so clearly implies supernatural powers in Christ,
has its whole point in Christ's answering determination absolutely to
subordinate these supernatural powers to moral and spiritual ends. His
whole ministry evinces the greatest pains upon this point. And he
evidently thinks a theory of his metaphysical relation to God (as
ordinarily conceived) of so little vital importance that even such
slight hints as we get of it in the New Testament apparently do not
come from him at all. The present tendency, therefore, naturally
demanded by the social consciousness, to emphasize the moral and
spiritual in Christ in asserting his supremacy, is quite in harmony
with Christ's own insistence. He will be followed for what he is in
himself.
The real supremacy of Christ, his truest divinity, we may be sure,
comes out for our time in those statements which we are able to make
concerning his inner spirit. Here, and here only, the real power of
his personality gets hold upon us. What are these grounds of the
supremacy of Christ? How is it that we come to God through him?
3. _The Moral and Spiritual Grounds of the Supremacy of
Christ._[99]--(1) In the first place, _Jesus Christ is the greatest in
the greatest sphere_, that of the moral and spiritual; and this, by
common consent of all men. Both the depth and the consensus of
conviction concerning Christ are profoundly significant. If our earth
has ever seen one of whom it could be truly said, He is a moral and
spiritual authority, preëminently the one great authority in this
greatest sphere,--that person is Jesus Christ. Seeing the moral
problem more broadly than any other ever saw it, tracing the motives
of life more deeply than any other ever traced them, applying those
principles of the life which he sees with a tact and delicacy and
skill that no other ever approached, speaking with an authority in
this moral and spiritual sphere to which no other can for a moment lay
claim,--this man is easily the greatest in the greatest sphere.
It is, perhaps, to say only the same thing in a little different way,
when one says with Fairbairn, that Christ is transcendent among
founders of religion, "and to be transcendent here is to be
transcendent everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the
organizing and the regulating of our personal and collective
life."[100] The present age is, more than any other, the age of the
scientific study of religion. The last forty years, indeed, have seen
such attention to the study of comparative religion as the world never
saw before. What has been the outcome of that study? To make the
relative position of Jesus among the founders of religion lower? I do
not so understand it. No, the outcome is such that it is a manifestly
inadequate statement to say, that he is transcendent among the
founders of religion. The very most that we may hope to say about the
founder of any other religion is, that in some single particular at a
long distance he can be brought into comparison with Jesus. But let
one think for a moment what it means for a man to be a founder of
religion. We talk of leadership. Do we know what a founder of religion
does? He makes the light, in which millions of men look upon all the
events of their life, in which they see the past of the world's
history, in which they look forward to the entire future. The very
mood and atmosphere of men's lives are determined by these founders of
religion; and among these preëminent leaders, Jesus, beyond all
mistake, is transcendent.
Let the nature of his kingdom, too, be his witness. He calmly aims to
found a kingdom that shall be spiritual, universal, eternal. One must
face the fact that this man of Nazareth in Syrian Galilee, purposes in
coolness of deliberation to found a kingdom that shall be absolutely
spiritual, that shall make no appeal to any of the lower elements of
man; one must see that this man, in those temptations through which he
passed concerning the form of his work, deliberately set aside the
kingdom by bread, the kingdom by marvel and ecstasy, and the kingdom
by force, and purposed to found a kingdom solely upon moral and
spiritual forces. And observe that he confidently expects this kingdom
to be universal--appealing to men of all races and of all times, and
to be eternal--still standing when all else shall have passed away.
And upon his belief in this character of his kingdom he stakes his
life, and calmly gives to himself as the goal of his life the
establishment of just such a kingdom; and remains to the end confident
of his success. The mere vitality of will in such a purpose is hard to
take in, and alone may well give us pause.
And because he is the greatest in the greatest sphere, transcendent
among founders of religion, the founder of a kingdom spiritual,
universal, and eternal, he becomes for us a "personalized conscience,"
a spiritual, moral authority for us even beyond our own conscience--an
authority that grows upon us with our growth, and submission to which
is earth's highest moral test.
(2) And there must be added to this first proposition, that Jesus is
the greatest in the greatest sphere, a second: _He alone is the
sinless and impenitent one._ And it is to be noticed that it is this
man who sees more clearly than any other the moral and spiritual, who
knows, as no other does, what character is and what moral life
means,--it is he, who claims to be the sinless one. No other ever
intelligently made this claim; for no other was it ever intelligently
made. The words of the great historian Ranke seem to us to be simple
truth when he says: "More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted
and more holy has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his
life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be
brought even afar off into comparison with it." Only such an one could
intelligently make for himself the claim of sinlessness. And for no
other was this claim of sinlessness ever intelligently made. Men know
each other too well to make it for others when moral consciousness has
fully awakened. But he fights his battle in the wilderness, and there
is no record of failure so far as he himself can see it, and none that
disciple ever ascribed.
And this claim of sinlessness for Christ is to be urged, not so much
because of any special statements by Christ as because of that
remarkable fact to which Dr. Bushnell has called attention,--his
impenitence. Jesus alone among all good men is a man of "impenitent
piety;" and by this he is marked off absolutely from every other good
man. What happens in the life of any other good man is this: that, as
he goes forward, the sense of sin grows upon him, the ideal rises
before him and he feels increasingly that his own life is inferior to
it. Of Jesus this is not true. He shows no sign of consciousness of
failure. There is no evidence that he feels that he has fallen short
in any degree. He is absolutely without that universal characteristic
of all other good men, absolutely without penitence. Contrast him for
a moment with the man, who perhaps all would agree was the greatest of
all his disciples, the man to whose devotion there seems to be no
limit--the Apostle Paul; and notice, that years after his persecution
of the church and of the cause of Jesus, with growing sense of what
Jesus is, and of his own inexhaustible debt to him, there comes over
him with increasing, not lessening, power the sense of his sin, and he
writes to the Ephesians, "Unto me, who am less than the least of all
saints, was this grace given me that I might preach unto the Gentiles
the unsearchable riches of Christ;" and in one of the very last
letters that comes down to us from him, says again, "Faithful is the
saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." What evidence have we that
Christ ever felt in the slightest degree such penitence?
(3) But more than this is true. _With the highest ideal, Jesus not
only does not consciously fall short of it, but consciously rises up
to it_, and, as Herrmann says, "compels us to admit that he does rise
to it." It were very much that a man with any ideal, however inferior,
should be able to say to himself, I have not fallen short of this
ideal; but that one, who sees more clearly than any other in the realm
of the moral and spiritual, and who has an ideal of simply absolute
love and of unbounded trust in God,--that he should show not only no
consciousness of falling short, but should consciously rise to his
ideal and compel us to admit that he rises to it: this is a fact
unparalleled in the history of the world. It is far more than mere
sinlessness; there is here a positiveness of moral achievement so
great--a fact so tremendous--that we seem able but feebly to take it
in.
(4) And even that is not all. _Jesus has such a character that we can
transfer it feature by feature to God_, not only with no sense of
blasphemy, not only with no sense of his coming short, but with
complete satisfaction. I do not now ask at all as to any man's
metaphysical theory about Jesus Christ; I only ask that it be noticed
that those who question common theories altogether still get their
ideal of God from Jesus Christ; and that this is the wonderful thing
that has happened on our earth: that there has once lived a man--daily
moving about among men, a concrete circumstantial account of whose
life in many particulars we have--the features of whose character one
can transfer absolutely to God and say, That is what I mean by God.
One simply cannot add anything to the character of God himself in the
highest moments of his imagination, that is not already revealed in
Jesus Christ. I take it that the words of Fairbairn are literally
true: he was "the first being who had realized for men the idea of the
Divine." When, therefore, Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the
Father and it sufficeth us," he could only reply as he might any day
to us, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me,
Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
(5) And one cannot stop here. _Jesus is consciously able to redeem all
men._ With such sense of the meaning of sin and of moral conduct as no
other ever had, understanding, therefore, the sin and need of men as
no other ever did, and having such a vision of what it is perfectly to
share the life of God as no other ever had, still, facing the masses
of men, he could say to himself, "I am able to take these men and lift
them into the very presence of God and present them spotless before
the throne of his glory." Have we taken in what it means, that, in the
consciousness of a man in form like ourselves, there could be, even
for a moment, the actual belief that he was the one that was to take
away the sin of the world, and had power to redeem men absolutely unto
God? In another's words: "Jesus knows no more sacred task than to
point men to his own person." He is himself God's greatest gift,
himself "the way, the truth, the life,"--not only fighting his own
battles, but consciously able to redeem all men.
(6) This simply implies, as Dr. Denison has suggested, that _Jesus has
such God-consciousness and such sense of mission as would simply
topple any other brain that the world has ever known into insanity_,
but which simply keeps him sweet, normal, rational, living the most
wholesome and simple and noble life the world has ever seen. How are
we to explain that fact? On the one hand, the sense of being of even a
little importance in the kingdom of God proves singularly intoxicating
to men. How often, when one is strongly possessed by the idea that he
is a special channel of manifestation for God, do moral sanity,
influence, and character all suffer! On the other hand, there is no
burden of suffering that men can bear so great as suffering in the sin
of one loved--thus bearing the sin of another. But here is one who can
believe that, when men come to him and simply see him as he is, they
catch their best vision of God; here is one who bears consciously the
sin of all men, and who can believe that he has absolute power to
revolutionize the lives of other men and make them what they were
meant originally to be, children of God; and yet, believing this, can,
under that consciousness, keep sweet and normal, wholesome and simple,
energetically ethical and thoroughly rational,--can keep sane. Indeed,
he lives a life so sane, that, to pass even from some of our best
religious books into the simple atmosphere of the story of his life
often seems like passing from the super-heated, artificially lighted,
heavily perfumed and exhausted atmosphere of the crowded drawing-room
into the open fresh air of day under the heaven of God. In the very
act of the most stupendous self-assertion, Jesus can still
characterize himself as "meek and lowly of heart," and we feel no
self-contradiction--so completely has he harmonized for even our
unconscious feeling his transcendent self-consciousness and his humble
simplicity of life. Has the world anywhere a phenomenon comparable to
this?
(7) In consequence of all this, _Jesus is in fact the only person in
the history of the race who can call out absolute trust_. As little
children, we knew something of what it meant to have complete trust.
There were a few years when it seemed to us that there was nothing in
either power or character that was not true of our fathers and
mothers. We soon lost such trust, even as children. Is there any way
back to the childlike spirit? Let us ponder these golden words of
Herrmann: "The childlike spirit can only arise within us when our
experience is the same as a child's; in other words, when we meet with
a personal life which compels us to trust it without reserve. Only the
person of Jesus can arouse such trust in a man who has awakened to
moral self-consciousness. If such a man surrenders himself to anything
or any one else, he throws away not only his trust, but himself."
There has been one life lived on earth, in whose hands one may put
himself with absolute confidence and have no fear as to the result.
Jesus, and Jesus alone, can call out absolute trust.
(8) Moreover, _Jesus is the only life ever lived among men in whom God
certainly finds us, and in whom we certainly find God_. And, once
again, I am not now asking whether one is able to come to any theory
of the nature of Christ. That is a matter of comparative indifference.
The great fact is this: That there has been lived among us men such a
life that, if a man will simply put himself in the presence of it and
stay there, he will have brought home to him with unmistakable
conviction the fact that God is, and is touching him and that he is
touching God; that, coupled with such a sense as he never had before
of his sin, there will be also the sense of forgiveness and
reconciliation with God, and so, such evidence of the contact of God
with his life as he can find nowhere else. So Harnack believes: "When
God and everything that is sacred threaten to disappear in the
darkness, or our doom is pronounced; when the mighty forces of
inexorable nature seem to overwhelm us, and the bounds of good and
evil to dissolve; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding God at
all in this dismal world,--it is then that the personality of Christ
may save us."
(9) And all this means, finally, that _Jesus is for us the ideal
realized_. Let not the commonplaceness of the words rob us of their
meaning. The fact is far enough from the commonplace. Philosophy must
always tell us that we have no right to expect anywhere a realized
ideal, except in the absolute whole of things. Certainly, we never
find in any of the inferior spheres a fully realized ideal. What does
it mean, then, that in this highest of all spheres, the sphere of the
moral and spiritual life, we have the ideal realized; that our very
highest vision is a fact? What is there that one would add to, what,
that one would take away from, the life of Christ, that it might be
more completely than it is the ideal realized?
"But Thee, but Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poet's Poet, wisdom's tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest,--
What _if_ or _yet_, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, thou crystal Christ?"
4. _Christ's Double Uniqueness._--It seems hardly possible to do
justice to the facts now passed in review, without recognizing, at
least, that they point to a double uniqueness on the part of Christ in
his relation to God, reflected in his own language concerning himself
and in the spontaneous confessions of his disciples in all times. He
alone, in the emphatic sense, is _the_ Son. The contrasts between
Christ and other men, which the simple facts of the life and
consciousness of Christ have compelled us to make, naturally, then,
demand recognition from thought. The recognition of the facts _is_ the
vital matter, but thought can hardly see them unmoved. How are we to
_think_ of Christ? With clear remembrance, now, that Christian
teaching itself insists upon the kinship of God and men; that absolute
barriers, therefore, cannot anywhere be set up; that a revelation
unrelated to all else could be no revelation; and that Christ himself
often pointed out the likeness between his own life and work and those
of his disciples;--still we may not ignore actual differences, and
must honestly strive to do justice to them in our own conception of
Christ. One may not forget that there is much here that we can hardly
hope ever to fathom; and that into this secret of Christ's relation to
the Father theology has often tried to press with a precision of
statement that was quite beyond its possible knowledge, and that
damaged rather than helped the religious consciousness; but one may
try to think in simple, straightforward fashion what the facts mean.
Now these actual and momentous moral and spiritual differences already
pointed out seem, at least, to assert, I say, a genuine double
uniqueness in Christ. Christ's relation to God is absolutely unique,
that is, in two senses: in the absolutely unique purpose of God
concerning him; in the absolutely perfect response of Christ to that
purpose. If one chooses to use the language, he may say, that the
first uniqueness is metaphysical; the second, ethical.[101]
First, then, God has a purpose concerning Christ, that he has
concerning no other, for he purposes to make in him his supreme
self-manifestation. This sets him apart from all others. His
transcendent sense of God and sense of mission only correspond to the
absolute uniqueness of this eternal purpose of God concerning him. We
are utterly unable to see that they could be borne by any being that
we know as man. He is the manifested God--"the visible presentation of
the invisible God." This cannot be said, in the same sense, of any
other. Now, our only adequate statement of the inner reality--the
essential meaning--of any being, can be given only in terms of the
purpose which God calls that being to fulfil. To see, then, that God's
purpose concerning Christ is absolutely unique, and that God's purpose
is, to make in Christ the completest possible personal manifestation
of himself, is to see that Christ's essential relation to the Father
is absolutely his own, unshared by any other. And, it may be added,
there is no reason why this purpose of God concerning Christ should
not be regarded as an eternal purpose, eternally realized.
But Christ is as clearly unique in his simply perfect response to this
purpose of God. Our facts seem to point directly to the conclusion,
that in him there was no moral hindrance to the fullness of the
revelation God would make through him. His life is perfectly
transparent, allowing the full glory of the character of God to shine
through it. The harmony of his will with God's will is complete. If it
be said that this last uniqueness is, after all, only difference in
degree from other men, it must be answered, first, that degree here is
so vast as to be practically kind. This is the perfect of Christ set
over against the varyingly imperfect of all other men. Moreover, to
ask here for difference in kind in any other sense, is probably to
make an unintelligent and impossible demand; for, in the nature of the
case, the relations involved are spiritual and personal, and there
cannot be, in strictness, in the fulfilment of such relations any real
differences in kind.
5. _The Increasing Sense of Our Kinship with Christ, and of His
Reality._--Side by side with this recognition of the nature of
Christ's uniqueness, there deserves to be set, as another outcome of
the emphasis upon conceiving Christ as a personal revelation of God,
the increasing sense of our kinship with Christ and of his reality.
The connection here is by no means accidental, though it may seem
almost paradoxical. We have plainly come in our day to our clearest
recognition of the divinity of Christ through the sense of his
transcendent character. But revelation in character requires the
reality of his human life. The very route, therefore, by which we have
most certainly reached our sense of Christ's divinity, leads also to
an increasing sense of kinship with Christ, and so of his reality. So
long as we seemed driven to conceive the divinity of Christ in terms
that had no relation and no meaning for human life, just so long must
he seem to us to be really moving in another world and to take on the
unreality of that other world quite hidden from us. But now Christ's
life has meaning; we can enter into it and feel that it is real. With
all its transcendence, the life does not move now simply in the sphere
of the mysterious. It is no unreal drama, no play-struggle,--utterly
failing to meet our real moral and spiritual needs. Least of all, in
this supreme work for man, can the revealing life be only a show. It
feels real. It is real. And, with clear sense of the inevitable
inadequacy of the analogy, we still rest confidently in the conviction
that God's relation to Christ may be best conceived after the analogy
of the relation of the Spirit of God to our spirits; and that, when we
try to press beyond that, we are attempting to rise into that sphere
of a supposed supra-personal, for which we have no possible organ of
vision, and where, therefore, we are thinking not more, but less,
truly.[102]
With this sense of the reality of the personal, spiritual life of
Christ, there naturally comes home to us the appropriateness and
_practicability of his ideals_. They are seen to belong to us more
surely, and properly to make demands upon us. It is, probably, not too
much to say that, under the influence of the social consciousness,
there has been a definite, growing approach to Christ's way of
thinking, and to his ideal of life. This means a consciousness
increasingly Christian in tone, and, therefore, in turn, increasingly
better able to interpret the teaching and life of Christ, and so to
give promise of a more Christian theology. None of us, probably, are
fully conscious of the more subtle inconsistencies of even our best
theological thinking, when measured by a completely Christian spirit.
At least, with the insistence upon Christ as a personal revealer of a
personal God, it must become more true that the meaning of all terms
for the work of Christ shall be more clearly reasonable, more
consistently ethical, and more completely spiritual; and then the
immediate rooting of Christian theology in the Christian religion can
be seen and felt.
III. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN GOD
The sense of the value and sacredness of the person must lead to the
special recognition of the personal not only in man and in Christ, but
also in God. We have already seen reasons for believing that the
social consciousness is peculiarly bound strongly to emphasize the
personality of God, as in the end absolutely essential to its own
justification. The social consciousness represents an ethical movement
that can live only in the atmosphere of the personal.
1. _The Steady Carrying through of the Completely Personal in the
Conception of God. Guarding the Conception._--This pressure of the
social consciousness toward an imperative faith in the fully personal
God is most valuable, as offsetting the tendency in many quarters
toward a scientific or even idealistic pantheism or monism that is
quite impersonal. "For," in the language of Professor Howison, "the
very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who
recognizes others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own,
and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to
other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and
rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of
all the rest."[103] As this is preëminently the spirit of the social
consciousness, it is plain that we have in the social consciousness an
increasingly powerful motive for guarding the full personality of God.
It needs particularly to be noted, that we know no _definite_
"supra-personal." Pantheism or any impersonal monism is forced,
therefore, when it leaves the personal conception of God, to take a
lower line of development, not a higher. The result is, that it is
obliged to deny the highest attributes to God, and then, as Browning
is fond of arguing, man steps at once into the place of God. Men
cannot permanently remain satisfied with a philosophical view, of
which that is the logical outcome. Certainly, such a view can get no
support from the social consciousness, with its deep conviction of the
supreme value and sacredness of the person.
Moreover, it is not to be forgotten, in estimating the value of a
cosmic monism, that what the cosmological really means, ethically and
religiously, to a people, must always depend upon their social ideals.
The natural in itself contains no command. For any effective vital
interpretation, therefore, even of its impersonal Absolute, pantheism
is constantly thrown back upon the personal.
Only a clear, steady carrying through by theology of the completely
personal in its conception of God can ultimately satisfy this sense of
the value and sacredness of the person. Professor Nash does not speak
too strongly when he says: "To fulfil her function the church must
develop the doctrine of a Divine Personality. She has not always been
true to it in the past. Too often, by her sacraments, by her theology,
by her theory of inspiration, she has glorified the impersonal."[104]
Now, such an attempt, it is perhaps worth saying once more, is not to
be thought of as a running away from a thorough-going metaphysical
investigation. It rather takes the ground, indicated in the earlier
discussion, of what may be called, in Professor Howison's language,
personal idealism; and holds that spirit, person, _is_ for us the
ultimate metaphysical fact: the one reality to which we have immediate
access; the reality from which all our metaphysical notions are
originally derived; and, in consequence, the one reality which we can
take as the key to the understanding of all else. And it believes that
even essence and substance, the great words of the old metaphysics,
can be really understood only as they are interpreted in personal
terms. Ultimately, theology would hold, this would mean the
interpretation of the essence of things in terms of the purpose of God
concerning them--what he meant them to be.
In the attempt, then, clearly and steadily to carry through the
conception of God as completely personal, theology may well guard
carefully certain points. In the first place, theology does not mean
to transfer to God human limitations; rather, it conceives him to be
the only complete personality with perfect self-consciousness and full
freedom, no part of whose being is in any degree foreign to himself.
Nor, in the second place, does it mean to forget that the personal
relations in which God stands to other persons are unique, and that,
in three definite respects: that conviction of the love of God, as of
no other, must underlie, as a great necessary assumption, all our
thinking and all our living; that God is himself the source of the
moral constitution of man, which must thus be regarded as an
expression of the personal will of God, and the personal relation to
God so have universal moral implications such as no other personal
relation can have; and in that God is such in his universal love for
all, that it is impossible to come into right personal relation to
God, and not at the same time come into right relation to all moral
beings.[105]
2. _God is Always the Completely Personal God._--If, now, theology is
to do justice to the demands of the social consciousness for a full
recognition of the personal in God, it must see clearly that God is
_always_ the completely personal God. Certain conclusions, not always
admitted, are believed to follow from this position.
(1) _The Consequent Relation of God to "Eternal Truths."_--In the
first place, there can be no sphere of eternal truths, thought of as
either created outright by the will of God, or as existing of
themselves independently of God and only to be recognized by him.
The difficulty is not merely that at least one of these views would
put God in the same dependent relation to truth as we finite beings,
and thus practically put a God above God. Nor is the difficulty merely
that it is impossible to think the real existence of such a sphere of
eternal truth, since truths or laws can be said to exist only in one
of two ways: either as the actual mode of action of reality, or as the
perception and formulation in an observing mind of that mode of
action. And these difficulties are both sufficiently serious.
But, from our present point of view, the great difficulty is, that
trying to conceive God as either creating or coming to the recognition
of truth, assumes, as Lotze points out, a _fragmentary_ God, a God for
whom truth is _not yet_. It assumes an action of the will of God apart
from his reason, that is, a God not yet completely personal, not yet
the full God of truth and character. A God for whom truth and duty are
not yet, is certainly no true person. Most, if not all, of our
metaphysical puzzles connected with the relation of God to what we
call eternal truths, seem to me to grow out of this thought of an
essentially fragmentary God.
We are driven, consequently, to a denial of both the Scotist and
Thomist positions, as ordinarily conceived. It is true neither that
the truth is true and the good is good because God wills it, nor yet
that God wills the true because it is true and the good because it is
good. Both views alike assume the possibility of a fragmentary God, a
God for whom at some time truth and goodness were not yet. But God has
_always_ been the completely personal God of truth and love, never a
bare will and never a bare intellect. Hence, neither as an independent
object to be recognized, nor yet as the external product of his will,
can we think of the realm of eternal truth and goodness. We must
rather say, God alone is the eternal being and absolute source of all,
always complete in the perfection of his personality; and, therefore,
what we call the eternal truths are only _the eternal modes of God's
actual activity_. This alone seems to the writer to give a
thorough-going theistic view, free from self-contradiction.[106]
(2) _Eternal Creation._--But, further, if God is to be thought as
_always_ the completely personal God, we are led, also, immediately to
the doctrine of eternal creation.
If God has had always a completely personal life, his entire being
must have been always in exercise. Can we really think of such a God
as simply quiescent, and not as always active? Is not his activity
involved in his complete personality? The thought of his possible
quiescence arises probably out of an unconscious, but nevertheless
unwarranted, transfer to God of our finite separation of will and act.
But God is here, too, no fragmentary God; he has always been the
completely personal God, always acting.
A second consideration carries us to the same conclusion. Theologians
have felt that they have made a distinct step in advance in tracing
creation to love in God, as, for example, Principal Fairbairn does.
But this gives no real help as an explanation of creation as
_beginning in time_; for one must at once ask, Was not the love of God
eternal, and if this were the real reason leading to creation, must
not, then, creation be eternal?
So far as I am able to see, there is nothing to lose and much to gain
in clearness and satisfactoriness of thought in a frank acceptance of
the doctrine of eternal creation. Not, of course, in the sense of an
eternal dualism, in the sense of the thought of an eternity of matter
set over against God, but in the clear sense of the eternal creative
activity of God. And to such a doctrine of eternal creation, the
social consciousness, in its emphasis on the completely personal,
seems to me to lead.
(3) _The Unity and Unchangeableness of God._--And, once more, if God
is always the completely personal God, we shall conceive his own unity
not as monotonous self-identity, but only as consistency of meaning.
We shall not, therefore, transfer to God, pluming ourselves meanwhile
upon a highly philosophical view, the mechanical unchangeableness of a
rock; but we shall be rather concerned with the consistency of his
character and the unchangeableness of his loving will, which would be
the very reasons for his changing, adapting attitude toward his
changing children. From this point of view, too, the sphere of law and
the sphere of the actual, will seem to us, necessarily, to root in the
sphere of the ideal; the _is_ and the _must_, to rest in the _ought_;
though we may not hope to trace the connections in detail. In a God,
then, who is a completely harmonious person, never acting in
fragmentary fashion, whose will and whose reason and whose love are
never at cross purposes--only in such a God can the world find its
adequate and unifying source. The world itself has real unity only in
so far as it is the expression of the consistency of meaning of the
purpose of God concerning it.
And this same thought of the consistency of the meaning of the purpose
of God, I have elsewhere argued,[107] saves us from the necessity of a
self-contradictory conception of the miraculous or supernatural, by
its recognition of the dominant spiritual order. It also enables us to
see, with Professor Nash, if the word personal is given sufficient
breadth, that "the true supernatural is the personal, and wheresoever
the personal is discovered, whether in the life of conscience or the
life of reason, whether in Israel or Greece, there the supernatural is
discovered. Upon this conception of the supernatural as the personal,
apologetics must found the claims of Christianity. The divine and the
human personality stand within 'Nature,' that is, within the total of
being. But they both, the human as well as the divine, transcend the
scope and reach of visible Nature."[108]
(4) _The Limitations of the Conception of Immanence._--Indeed, it
ought to be clearly recognized on all sides by those who believe in
religion at all, that we cannot so exclusively emphasize the immanence
of God, as many are now doing, and have a God at all, beyond the
finite manifestations. When the matter is so conceived, there is no
real personal God with whom there can be any personal communion.
Religion, thus, in any ordinary sense of it, is by this process made
simply impossible; Positivism is the only logical result, and Frederic
Harrison becomes the one sole, clear-sighted prophet among us, a lone
voice crying in the wilderness. Such an outcome is possible for any,
because, and in so far as, they are not true to the social
consciousness in its demand for the completely personal God, who, in
Martineau's language, is a genuinely "free spirit."[109]
3. _Deepening the Thought of the Fatherhood of God._--But the
influence of the social consciousness in its deepening sense of the
value and sacredness of the person, of obligation and of love, not
only tends to insist upon the completely personal in the conception of
God, but also tends to deepen our thought of the Fatherhood of God.
(1) _History no Mere Natural Process._--No mere on-going of an
unfeeling Absolute, whatever name be given it, will ever satisfy the
social consciousness. The new sense of the sorrow and ethical meaning
of the historical process demands, in the first place, that history
shall not be regarded as a mere necessitated development, but a
movement in which men effectively coöperate, never more consciously
and clearly than to-day; and secondly, it demands a _God_ who cares,
who loves, who guides. History cannot be a mere holocaust to God.
(2) _God, the Great Servant._--Rather, as we saw in the fourth
chapter, the social consciousness requires a God whose purpose shall
completely support its own purpose, and so requires us, with
Fairbairn, to put Fatherhood before Sovereignty, not Sovereignty
before Fatherhood, and requires us definitely to conceive God after
Christ, as self-giving ministering love. It is one of the anomalies of
Christian history, that the church has been so slow to cast off a
pagan conception of God, and to come to a truly Christian view. We can
hardly take in Christ's own revelation of God without some sharing in
his sympathy for men. Some experience of our own is needed to unlock
the revelation. And, so, the steady deepening of the social
consciousness, both as to the value of the person and as to the sense
of obligation, has certainly helped us to see that if God is to be
highest, he must be love, and thus the great servant, with
transcendent obligations, entering really and sympathetically into all
our life.
(3) _No Divine Arbitrariness._--With such a conception of God, every
trace of arbitrariness disappears. Calvinism, however strenuously
insisted upon, means a far different thing for any man who really
feels the pressure of the modern social consciousness, who has come to
some real sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that is,
who really sees God in Christ. The great truth of Calvinism, that God
is the ultimate source of all, was perhaps never more secure than
to-day; but that God, who is the absolute and ultimate source of all,
is the fully personal God, whose will is never divorced from his
reason and love, who knows no such abstraction as a bare and empty
omnipotence without content or direction, but who is himself always
living love. The bane of much so-called Calvinism is in this
supposition of a fragmentary God, like a motion without direction or
rate of speed. Arbitrary decrees are conceivable only from such a
fragmentary God, not yet full and complete in his reality and
personality.
(4) _The Passibility of God._--It would seem, also, that any vital
defense of the Fatherhood of God, required by the social
consciousness, involves further the frank admission of the passibility
of God, whether it has the look of an ancient heresy or not. We must
unhesitatingly admit that, without which God can be no real God to us.
"Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God. If
he is capable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering, and were he
without the capacity for either he would be without any feeling of the
evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth that comes by Jesus
Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God."[110]
With the growing sensitiveness of the social consciousness, the
problem of suffering and of sin presses increasingly, and itself
almost compels the assertion of the passibility of God. Nothing less
can satisfy our hearts, nor indeed allow us to keep our reverence for
God.
Certainly, with the increasingly clear vision, which the social
consciousness is giving us, of sympathetic, unselfish, definitely
self-sacrificing, loving leadership even among men, we shall not rest
satisfied with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, loving
God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, bearing as a burden the
sin of each, and not satisfied while one child turns away; no mere
on-looker, but in all our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of
Christ, then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of God's
seeking, suffering love.
4. _As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity._--One inference for
theology widely drawn from the social consciousness, it ought in
fairness, perhaps, to be said, seems to me unjustified,--the doctrine
of a so-called "Social Trinity." One must question the constant cool
assumption made in these discussions of a social Trinity, that this
view is the only alternative to what is called an "abstract
simplicity." In any case, one would suppose, we must have in God all
the richness and complexity of a complete personal life, freed from
the limitations of finite personality. Something of the much that that
involves we have been trying to point out. Here certainly is no
"abstract simplicity."
Moreover, the conception of a social Trinity, so far as the writer can
see, carries us inevitably to a tritheism of the most unmistakable
kind. "Social" involves full personality. Nothing requires more
complete personality than love, which the view affirms to exist
between the persons of the immanent Trinity, between the distinctions
in the very Godhead. The relations of Christ to God were, of course,
distinctly and definitely personal; but it must not be forgotten that
we are not permitted, on any careful theological view, to transfer
these directly to the immanent relations of the Godhead.
The distinction drawn by Dr. W. N. Clarke,[111] between the doctrine
of the biblical Trinity and the doctrine of the Triunity, I count of
decided value; but after one has made the distinction, one may doubt
the value of the contribution made by the doctrine of the Triunity.
The really immanent relations of the Godhead are necessarily hidden
from us, and are, also, so far as the writer can see, without ethical
or religious significance for us, except in the way of possible injury
through substituting some supposed altogether mysterious and
incomprehensibly sacred, for the well-known and truly sacred shown in
the ethical relations of common life.
The doctrine of the Triunity seems to have been originally intended to
enable the church to hold the divinity of Christ. If we now get at
that and hold that from quite a different point of view, the older way
becomes less essential. We must, indeed, keep the ancient treasure,
but we need not keep it in the same ancient chest. None of us--not the
most orthodox--really find the _reasons_ for holding the divinity of
Christ in the doctrine of the Triunity. It is interesting to observe
how widely separated from the doctrine of the Triunity are the
considerations which really move men to faith in the divinity of
Christ. That doctrine is, at the very most, only our philosophical
supplement intended to bring that, which on other grounds we have come
to believe, into unity with our thought of God.
But, at least, we must so conceive the divinity of Christ, as not to
get two or three Gods. And a "Social Trinity" does not seem to me to
avoid that, except in terms. However, therefore, we are to solve our
problem, we are not to take _that_ way out.
What Dr. Clarke calls the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, on the
other hand, seems to me to contain the very heart of Christianity,
whatever philosophical theory we put beneath it; and it became,
therefore, as expressed in the baptismal and benediction formulas, the
great daily confession of the church, since it strongly expresses that
of which we have been speaking,--the living love of God, a life of
absolutely self-giving love, of eternal ministry.
The biblical Trinity is, in truth, what it has sometimes been called,
the trinity of redemption; and, for me, directly emphasizes the great
facts of redemption. Here there are three great facts: First, the
Fatherhood of God, that God is in his very being Father, Love,
self-manifesting as light, self-giving as life, self-communicating,
pouring himself out into the life of his children, wishing to share
his highest life with them, every one. Second, the concrete,
unmistakable revelation of the Father in Christ, revealed in full
ethical perfection, as an actual fact to be known and experienced; no
longer an unknown, hidden, or only partially and imperfectly revealed
God, but a real, living God of character, counting as a real,
appreciable, but fully spiritual fact in the real world. And, third,
the Father revealing himself by his Spirit in every _individual_ heart
that opens itself to him, in a constant, intimate, divine association,
which yet is never obtrusive, but reverent of the man's personality,
making possible to every man the ideal conditions of the richest life.
What metaphysical theory we put under that confession of our full
Christian faith, does not seem to me to be of prime importance. Men
may count it of great importance; but it can hardly be of first
importance, since, at the very most, only the beginnings of such a
theory can be found in the great New Testament confession of Christ.
5. _Preëminent Reverence for Personality, Characterizing all God's
Relations with Men._--But the very heart of the conviction, on the
part of the social consciousness, of the value and sacredness of the
person, is its _reverence for personality_; and this thought has much
significance for theology, for, if this judgment of the social
consciousness is justified, it must be regarded as preëminently
characterizing God in all his relations with men.
(1) _Reflected in Christ._--When, in the first place, we turn to
Christ as the supreme revelation of God, we cannot fail to see that
this reverence for the personal marks every step he takes. It begins,
of course, in the priceless value which Christ gives to each person,
as a child of the living, loving Father.
And it seems to determine his _whole method_ with his generation and
with his disciples. It is shown in the initial battle in the
temptations, as to the form his work was to take, and as to the means
to be employed. There was here, as we have seen, from the start an
absolute subordination of all unspiritual and unethical methods in the
building of the kingdom. There is to be no over-riding of the free
personality anywhere. He faced successively the temptations to place
his dependence on the mere meeting of men's material needs--the
kingdom by bread; the temptation to place his dependence on that which
appealed most strongly to the oriental mind--the use of wonder-working
power--the kingdom by marvel or ecstasy; the temptation to place his
dependence on force--the kingdom by force. But Christ sees clearly
that God is no mere supplier of bread; that God is no mere
wonder-worker, no mere giver of wonderful experiences; and that God is
not a tyrant to conquer by force. Everywhere, therefore, he sets aside
whatever may override the free personality. He would replace all the
attractive and seemingly rapid methods of the kingdom by bread, the
kingdom by marvel, and the kingdom by force, with the slow and tedious
and costly but reverent method of the spiritual kingdom by spiritual
means, the kingdom of God by God's way--of a trust freely won, a
humility spontaneously arising, a love gladly given. He can take no
pleasure in any kingdom but one of free persons.
In the same way, in his dealings with the inner circle of his
disciples, there seems to have been the most scrupulous regard for
their own needed initiative. He apparently makes no clear announcement
of himself as Messiah even to the disciples until late in his public
ministry, and, then, only after they have been brought, through weeks,
if not months, of unusually close personal contact and impression of
his spirit, into their own confession of him. He steadily abjures,
that is, all dogmatism about himself, and leads them along by a purely
spiritual method to a confession of him, that may be truly their own.
There is no piling up of proof-texts from the Old Testament, to show
that he is the Messiah. He seems never to have attempted any proof
with his disciples. Indeed, he seems purposely to have chosen the
rather ambiguous title, "the Son of Man," that men might be left free
to come by moral choice to him.
The surpassingly significant fact, that Christ's chief work in the
establishment of the kingdom of God, as seems to me beyond doubt, was
his personal association with a few men; that, probably, a full third,
perhaps more, of his very brief so-called public ministry was taken up
with a period of definitely sought comparative retirement with the
inner circle of the disciples--all this points to the same recognition
of the fundamental importance in Christ's eyes of such a reverence for
the person. The kingdom of God can be founded only by the full winning
of free persons into his discipleship. The kingdom is first and last a
kingdom of free persons, in Dr. Mulford's language, always a "Republic
of God." Professor Peabody's emphasis on the essential importance of
Christ's individualism, that "Jesus approaches life from within,
through the inspiration of the individual,"[112] it need not be said,
goes upon the same assumption of Christ's reverence for the person.
In his really public ministry the same spirit appears; for Jesus seems
to me here constantly to be standing with a kind of moral shudder
between the spirit of contempt in the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the
outraged personality of the common people, even of the publicans and
sinners. He feels the contempt even for these least, as a blow in his
own face.
That glimpse which the Revelation gives us of Christ standing and
knocking at the heart's closed door, is a true picture forevermore not
only of the attitude of Christ's earthly life, but of God's eternal
relation to us. Men may over-ride and outrage us, and even think that
they show the more love thereby; God, never. This principle, then, we
may take as absolutely crucial, in our judgment of God's dealings with
us.
(2) _In Creation._--It is fundamental even in creation. The very fact
of the creation of persons implies it. Such a creation can have no
significance, if, in the language already quoted from Howison, God's
"consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the
personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the
test of the true person."
And if love is, for a moment, to be thought of as the motive of
creation, it required for any satisfaction of it, persons who could
freely respond to that love.
The definite bestowal of the fateful gift of moral freedom, with the
practical certainty of sin--the creation of beings who could choose
against him--shows how deeply planted in the very being of God is this
principle of reverence for the person.
Here, too, the impossibility of arbitrary divine decrees meets us.
This would be treating a person as a thing, and God himself may not do
that and remain God. If a man cannot see his way to a faith both in
the divine foreknowledge and in the moral initiative of men,
therefore, he must not hesitate to choose even the divine nescience of
the free acts of men, rather than think of God as compelling men. Our
whole moral universe tumbles about our ears, if he who is the source
of all is not in earnest with persons. And yet there is much
theological thinking, of which the common notions of a personal reign
of Christ on the earth may be taken as an example, that practically
looks to a kingdom by compulsion. A kingdom of free spirits cannot be
merely decreed.
(3) _In Providence._--And this same principle of reverence for
personality must be felt to be the guiding motive and key, as well, in
the providence and government of God. God keeps his hands off. He must
so act as to call out, not to suppress, individual initiative.
This is, perhaps, the deepest reason for a sphere of law, that there
may be a realm in which a person can have his own free development,
uninterfered with by any moral compulsion.
If, now, this sphere of law is to be any true training ground for
character, as we saw in the third chapter, results must not be
forthwith set aside, the mutual influence of men must hold all along
the line.
Even in the case of great evils, God does not step in at once to set
things right. Character is an exceedingly costly product. This is no
play-world, either as to mutual influence or as to freedom. God guards
most jealously the freedom and personality of men. He never forgets
that character must be from within. He will not accept, as Christ
would not, a faith compelled by "signs." Hence, too, we are left to
_ask_, and much is left to depend on our asking. So, also, God does
not remove all difficulties and give sight in place of faith. He seems
even careless, often, of how things go; for he would not only appeal
to the heroic in us, but he wishes to make it impossible for us to
confuse prudence and virtue in ourselves or others, and so to give us
the opportunity and the joy of a real moral victory, of knowing that
we have made a genuinely unselfish surrender to the right.
In the light of this deep-lying principle of God's sacred reverence
for the person, one learns to hush his former complaints, and with
full heart to thank God that he lives in a world where righteousness
and happiness do not always seem to fall together, and where,
therefore, he can "serve God for naught." Oh, let us know, that it is
not that God does not care, but that he cares so much--too much to
sacrifice to present comfort the character of the child he loves--too
much to shut him out from his highest opportunity.
(4) _In Our Personal Religious Life._--And the same principle holds in
our personal religious life. The unobtrusiveness of God's relation to
us, of which we often complain, is rather to be taken as evidence of
his sacred respect for our own moral initiative, and proof of his
careful adaptation to our moral need. Wherever a strong personality is
in relation to a weaker, the stronger must maintain a conscientious
self-restraint, lest he dominate the personality of the other, to the
other's moral injury and to the hindering of his individuality. It
_is_ possible for a boy to be injuriously "tied to his mother's
apron-strings." Much more is it necessary that God's relation to us
should not be obtrusive. God must guard our freedom and our
individuality. He must even take pains to hide his hand, as a strong,
influential, but wise friend would do. As we go higher, our life is
and must be increasingly one of faith, the Father's relation less and
less obtrusive.[113] The times of vision are given to make us patient
in our progress toward the goal. And after the vision comes often what
Rendel Harris calls "the dark night of faith, when every step has to
be taken in absolute dependence upon God and assurance that the vision
was truth and was no lie."[114] We need the invisible God for
character.
It is for this reason, no doubt, that God makes so rare use of
overwhelming experiences in the religious life. He would be chosen
with clear and rational self-consciousness, and so he rarely
overpowers. And even in experiences which seem most overpowering, if
the person is really awake to their true ethical and spiritual import,
they will probably be found delicately adapted to call out the
individual's own response. But for most of us such experiences prove a
real temptation, because we allow the passively emotional to absorb
our attention, and so lose the ethical and spiritual fruit. Where
these marvelous experiences have been most marked, and have plainly
given real help, they seem still, usually, to have been needed because
of some false conception of God and the spiritual world that required
a powerful corrective. Here they seem really to have been granted, as
probably the transfiguration of Christ was to the disciples, as a
concession to men's weakness, God consenting reluctantly to use for
the time a lower line of appeal, because men are unable to rise to the
higher appeal.
We have already seen the danger of the neo-platonic over-estimation of
emotional experience, and of sudden and magical crises in religion;
and this danger is especially seen in much that is said concerning the
work of the Holy Spirit. It seems as if it were simply true, for many
earnest and sincere Christians, that the superstitions, which they had
conscientiously put aside elsewhere in religion, all came back in
their thought of the work of the Spirit. Here their relation to God
has ceased to be thought of as a personal or moral or truly spiritual
one; and they are looking more or less definitely for bodily thrills,
for marked and overwhelming emotional experiences, or for sudden
transformations--hardly to be called transformations of character--in
the passive half-magical removal of temptations altogether. That is,
they are looking for moral and spiritual results from unmoral and
unspiritual processes. The exact point is this: Doubtless we are not
narrowly to limit what the personal influence of the personal Spirit
of God may do in transforming human life--the possibilities probably
far transcend what we think--but we are clearly to see that the
relation is personal, that the influence is spiritual and under
strictly ethical conditions, if we are to escape from simply pagan
superstition. Let us see that, if God is a Personal Spirit and not an
impersonal substance, then, as Herrmann says, he "communes with us
through manifestations of his inner life, and when he consciously and
purposely makes us feel what his mind is, then we feel himself."[115]
And, then, let us add, as has been already earlier said, that the
deepening life in the Spirit becomes plainly a deepening personal
friendship and communion with God, with laws--those of a growing
friendship--that we may study and know and obey; and among these laws,
none is of more central importance than this of the reverence for the
person.
(5) _In the Judgment._--And when we turn to God's relation to us in
the judgment, we can be sure, I think, of a further application of
this principle, contrary to common teaching and expectation. We have
no reason to look forward to a time when the secrets of all, or of
any, hearts shall be laid bare to all. In so doing, God would violate,
it seems to me, the principle of his entire dealing with men, and give
the lie to his own revelation in Christ and in history. For myself,
Dr. Clarke's words carry immediate conviction: "No man needs to know
the secrets of his neighbor, and be able to trace the justice of God
through his neighbor's life, and no man who respects the sacredness of
individuality will desire it. Neither revelation of his own secrets
nor knowledge of another's seems a good thing to a self-respecting
soul."[116]
Even the judgment itself proceeds, no doubt, in clear recognition of
the free personality. We are "judged by the law of liberty." And we
really choose our own destiny, as Phillips Brooks suggests in one of
his most striking paragraphs. "By this law we shall be judged. How
simple and sublime it makes the judgment day! We stand before the
great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch the closed lips of
the Eternal Judge, and our hearts stand still until those lips shall
open and pronounce our fate, heaven or hell. The lips do not open. The
Judge just lifts his hand and raises from each soul before him every
law of constraint whose pressure has been its education. He lifts the
laws of constraint, and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic
nature of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's law of liberty
becomes supreme. And each soul, without one word of commendation or
approval, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place.... The
freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature dictates
its own destiny. Could there be a more solemn judgment seat? Is it not
a fearful thing to be judged by the law of liberty?"[117]
And we may be most certain, that, in any judgment by God, there can be
no thought of "human waste." The man must remain for God, to the end,
a child of God, a person of sacredness and value, to be dealt with
always as capable of character. And it is along just this line that,
independently of exegetical grounds, it seems to me, we are led to a
decisive rejection of the doctrine of annihilation. And I know no more
convincing putting of the matter than this brief but comprehensive
statement of Fairbairn: "If there is any truth in the Fatherhood,
would not annihilation be even more a punishment of God than of man?
The annihilated creature would indeed be gone forever--good and evil,
shame and misery, penalty and pain, would for him all be ended with
his being; but it would not be so with God--out of his memory the name
of the man could never perish, and it would be, as it were, the
eternal symbol of a soul he had made only to find that with it he
could do nothing better than destroy it."[118]
(6) _In the Future Life._--Doubtless our difficulties are not at an
end even so; but, at least, our conception of God is saved from
self-contradiction; and the Father is seen as suffering in the sin of
the son, and perpetually desiring and seeking his return, never
satisfied so long as any child of his still refuses his place in the
Father's love. This deep-going principle of reverence for personality,
with which we are dealing, is the finest flower of human ethical
development, and seems completely to shut out the possibility of
compulsion by God at any time in the future life. A person will never
be treated as a thing. The soul that turns to God must be won
voluntarily.
And if, then, the abstract possibility of endless resistance to God by
men cannot be denied; so neither can the possibility--perhaps one
might even say, the practical probability--be denied that God, in his
infinite love and patience and wisdom, may finally win them all out of
their resistance. And the eternal hope is at least open; but it is
open, it should be noted, only upon the fulfilment by men of precisely
those moral conditions which hold now in the earthly life, and which
ought now to be obeyed. There will never be an easier way to God. It
is shallow thinking that supposes that, if there be any possibility of
turning to God in the future life, it is of small moment that one
should now put himself where he ought to be. The full results of all
our evil sowing, we must receive. The utmost that on any rational
theory, then, can be held out to men, is the hope that, facing a
greater heritage of evil than now they face, they might return to God
under the same condition of absolute moral surrender, which now holds,
and the fulfilment of which is now far more easily possible to them.
And it ought not to be overlooked that, even if the principle of
reverence for personality be much less far-reaching than is here
affirmed, the annihilation of a soul by God could seem justified only
upon the assumption that God foresaw the entire future, and knew that
the soul would never turn to righteousness and God. But if the
doctrine of annihilation is to be justified on _that_ ground, it is to
be observed, that the same foreknowledge would have enabled God to
know before creation all the finally incorrigible, if there were to be
any such, and so he need not have called these into being at all. A
goal, therefore, as great if not far greater, than that offered by the
annihilation theory would be, thus, attainable simply upon the same
assumption that must rationally be made by that theory, and, at the
same time, the great objection to that theory--its violation of
personality--would be avoided.
It seems probable that this very principle of reverence for
personality contains the chief reason why more has not been revealed
to us concerning the future life. Christianity is very far from
satisfying our curiosity here. It gives little more than the
absolutely needed assurance of the fact and worth of the life beyond.
Details are either quite lacking, or given only in broadest symbols.
This reticent silence of revelation seems needed if our individual
initiative is not to be hindered, either by excess of motive on the
one hand, or by the depression of an unappreciated ideal on the other
hand.
On the one hand, that is, so far as we could understand a detailed
revelation of the future life, to set it forth with the realism of the
present life would be to interfere with that unobtrusive relation of
God to us, which we have seen to be so necessary to our highest moral
training. We need, in this time of our training, a certain obscurity
of spiritual truth; we need to walk by faith, not by sight. To be able
so obviously to weigh the eternal realities against the temporal,
would hinder rather than help our growth in loyal, unselfish
character.
On the other hand, if a complete and indubitable revelation of the
future life were given us, no doubt there would be much that could
make but small appeal to us, and might even prove positively
depressing, because we have not yet the experience which would
interpret to us its meaning and open to us its joy. Our earthly life
may furnish us an analogy. The joy of a grown man is often
preëminently in his work, but he would find it difficult to explain to
a child the source of his joy. And if the child were told that there
would come a time in a few years when his chief joy would be found in
work, the prospect would probably not seem to him inviting. The wisest
of us may be as little prepared to enter in detail into the meaning of
the future life.
We may be content to know that the future life is, and is of value
beyond that which we can now understand; and we may be assured that at
least what we have already seen to be the ideal conditions of the
richest life,[119] as now we understand life, will be fully met in the
future life. We can hardly doubt, therefore, that the two great
centers of the life beyond must be association and work; though we may
not know the precise forms that these will take, nor how greatly both
may deepen beyond our present conception. Steadily deepening personal
relations, rooted in the one absolutely satisfying relation to God in
Christ, there must be; and work, in which one may lose himself with
joy, because it is God's work. This, at least, the future life will
contain. We can hardly go farther with assurance.
But perhaps even this may suggest, that men may vary much in the
proportionate emphasis laid upon these two great sources of life, and
still alike come into a genuine and rewarding relation to God. That
God has counted individuality among men to be of prime significance,
the facts of creation hardly allow us to doubt. Possibly it is only
another application of this same principle of reverence for the
person, in the recognition of that individuality which has its great
joy in work, which is to be found in what Professor George F. Genung
suggestively calls "an apocalypse of Kipling." In Kipling's poem to
Wolcott Balestier, Professor Genung sees "the discovery of a religion,
or assignable and eternally rewardable relation to God, in those whose
inner life is not introspective or self-expressive." Their spiritual
life "serves God with the joy which comes of following and satisfying,
in the sphere of his plans, the eager bent of a conquering will." "It
is the religion of work and of daring." And "it is only in the open
vision of an eternal world that their secular ardor, which was
unconsciously serving God all along, begins to come to the perception
of a transcendent master and to be transformed into an adoration, an
obedience and loyalty, a 'will to serve or to be still as fitteth our
Father's praise.'"
It is quite possible that through our very failure to enter into God's
own deep reverence for the person, in the recognition of man's
divinely given individuality, as well as through failure to recognize
the essential like-mindedness of men, we have been shutting the door
of hope, where God has not shut it, and have limited beyond warrant
the divine mercy. Even in the life of heaven men cannot be all alike.
"Who art thou that judgest the servant of another? to his own lord he
standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be made to stand; for the Lord hath
power to make him stand."[120]
[92] _The Limits of Evolution_, p. x.
[93] Cf. above, pp. 22, 66, 106.
[94] See especially Bowne, _Theory of Thought and Knowledge_, pp.
239, 377, 378; James, _The Will to Believe_, pp. 145 ff.
[95] Cf. above, p. 44 ff
[96] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 241 ff.
[97] Hastings, _Dictionary of the Bible_, Vol. II, p. 626.
[98] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, Chaps. VI and VII.
[99] I aim here to bring out with some fullness the significance of the
propositions briefly summarized in the _Reconstruction in Theology_,
p. 244; and I venture to repeat, also, two quotations from that book,
because they fit so closely into the argument here.
[100] _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 378.
[101] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 232, 233, 248, 249.
[102] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 209; and below, p. 209.
[103] _The Limits of Evolution_, p. 7.
[104] _Ethics and Revelation_, p. 270.
[105] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 205 ff.
[106] Cf. Lotze, _The Microcosmus_, Vol. II, pp. 690 ff.
[107] See _Reconstruction in Theology_, Chapter VI.
[108] _Ethics and Revelation_, p. 270.
[109] See the fuller statement in the _Reconstruction in Theology_,
pp. 96-108.
[110] Fairbairn, _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 483.
[111] _Outline of Christian Theology_, pp. 161, ff.
[112] _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, p. 101.
[113] Cf. Fairbairn, _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, pp.
434, 435.
[114] _Union with God_, p. 109.
[115] _The Communion of the Christian with God_, p. 143.
[116] _An Outline of Christian Theology_, p. 464.
[117] _The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons_, p. 197.
[118] _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 467.
[119] See above, pp. 68 ff.
[120] Romans 14:4.
INDEX
Abbott, Lyman, reference to, 131.
_American Journal of Theology, The_, reference to, 86.
Analogy of Organism. See Organism.
Annihilation, doctrine of, why rejected, 239 ff.
Arbitrariness, excluded in God, 220 ff.
Aristotle, quoted, 26;
his position abandoned by mysticism, 56.
Association, personal, in redemption, 149 ff;
in personal relation to God, 159 ff;
in confessions of faith, 167 ff.
Assumption of the book, 3.
Atonement, in the light of social consciousness, 147 ff, 150 ff;
the cost of, 150;
substitution and propitiation in, 150 ff;
analogy of father and child in, 154 ff;
blood covenant applied to, 157.
Baldwin, J. M., reference to, 12.
Biblical Trinity, 224, 225.
Blood covenant, as applied to doctrine of atonement, 157.
Böhme, Jacob, referred to, 71.
Bowne, B. P., on causality and purpose, 43;
on freedom, 182, 183.
Bradley, F. H., on the religious feeling in philosophy, 129.
Brooks, Phillips, reference to, 28, 146;
on the intellectual life of Jesus, 81;
on the emotional life of Jesus, 84;
on the universal interest of Jesus, 124;
on the likeness of men, 126;
on judgment according to the law of liberty, 238.
Bruce's _The Kingdom of God_, reference to, 52.
Bushnell, H., on impenitence of Jesus, 193.
Calvinism, 220.
Causality and purpose, 42, 43.
Christ, See Jesus.
Christian, the historically, emphasized by the social consciousness,
102 ff.
Christianity, as contributing to sense of mutual influences, 13;
sometimes unconscious, 130.
Church, the, importance of the doctrine of, 177 ff.
Clarke, W. N., referred to, 116, 224;
quoted, 132, 133, 152;
on propitiation, 151;
on doctrine of Trinity and Triunity, 223;
on revelation of inner life at judgment, 237.
Common qualities and interests, most valuable, 177 ff.
Confessions of faith, Christian fellowship in, 167 ff;
uniformity in, impossible, 169 ff;
and undesirable, 171 ff.
Corinthians, first, twelfth chapter of, as expression of analogy of
organism, 23;
against false mysticism, 60-61, 83.
Cornill, reference to, 64.
Creation, eternal, 214 ff;
reverence for person in, 230 ff.
Creed, Christian fellowship in, 167 ff;
uniformity in, impossible, 169 ff;
and undesirable, 171 ff.
Denison, J. H., referred to, 197.
Devotional literature, difficulty in, 84;
referred to, 141.
Dewey, John, referred to, 12.
Drummond, H., reference to, 21;
on sin, 140.
Du Bois, Patterson, on true spirit of fatherhood, 110.
Edwards, Jonathan, referred to, 22.
Election, in Paul, 116;
a choice for service, 116.
Emotion, extreme emphasis on, a danger in mysticism, 71;
cf. 135 ff.
Eternal creation, 214 ff.
"Eternal truths," God's relation to, 212 ff.
Ethical, the, in religion, 86 ff;
proofs that religion must be, 89 ff.
Ethicizing of religion, 89 ff;
involved in relation to Christ, 89;
the divine will in ethical command, 90;
involved in nature of God's gifts, 91;
communion with God through harmony with his will, 92;
the vision of God for the pure in heart, 92;
sharing the life of God, 93;
Christ, as satisfying our claims on life, 94;
attraction to Christ, ethically conditioned, 96;
the moral law, a revelation of the love of God, 98.
Ethics and religion, 87, 89 ff.
Everett, C. C, criticism of Nietzsche, 120.
_Expository Times, The_, reference to, 64.
Fairbairn, A. M., his _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_,
mentioned, 110;
on the Christian consciousness, 112;
referred to, 119, 196, 215, 234;
on sense of sin, 143;
on Christ as transcendent, 189;
on passibility of God, 221;
on annihilation, 239.
Faith, necessity of, in life, 43, 44.
Faith in men, increased by sense of likeness, 128.
Father and child, the analogy of, applied to redemption, 154 ff.
Favorites, none with God, 116 ff.
Fellowship, Christian, help of, in coming into kingdom, 159 ff;
within the kingdom, 162 ff;
in intercessory prayer, 164 ff;
in confessions of faith, 167 ff.
Fiske, John, reference to, 21.
Freedom, in man, 181 ff;
Bowne on, 182, 183;
references on, 182.
Fremantle, W. H., reference to, 141.
Friendship, laws of, as holding in religion, 67.
Future life;
moral reality of, 132 ff;
reverence for person in, 240 ff.
Galatians, Epistle to, referred to, 83.
Genung, G. F., on "an apocalypse of Kipling," 245.
Giddings, F. H., reference to, 9, 10, 19, 20, 62, 117;
on the "social mind," 138.
God, immanence of, as related to social consciousness, 40 ff;
his will, ethical basis of social consciousness, 44 ff;
sharing in our life, 48;
will of, felt in ethical command, 90;
his gifts require ethical attitude to receive them, 91, 92;
our sharing his life, 93;
we cannot do his will in general, 100;
a thoroughly personal conception of, needed, 207 ff;
guarding the conception of, 208 ff, 211;
suprapersonal in, 209;
Nash on doctrine of personality of, 210;
always completely personal, 212 ff;
relation to eternal truths, 212 ff;
as eternally creating, 214 ff;
unity and unchangeableness of, 216 ff;
limiting conception of immanence of, 217 ff;
deepening thought of Fatherhood of, 218 ff;
as the great servant, 219;
no arbitrariness in, 220;
passibility of God, 221;
trinity in, 222 ff.
Grahame, Kenneth, on love, 123;
referred to, 124.
Harnack, A., on Christ, 200.
Harris, J. R., quoted, 234.
Hegel, on greatest in art, 119.
Heredity, not to be over-emphasized, 37;
James, on, 37, 38.
Herrmann, W., referred to, 22, 70, 173;
his definition of mysticism, 56, 57;
on pantheistic tendency in mysticism, 58, 74;
on our satisfaction in Christ, 94;
on the help of the fellowship of the church, 161;
on Christ's rising to his ideals, 194;
on Christ's calling out absolute trust, 199;
on personal relation to God, 237.
Historical, the, under-estimated by mysticism, 72.
Historical justification needed by social consciousness, 59 ff, 102 ff.
Historically, the, Christian, emphasized by the social consciousness,
102 ff.
History, no mere natural process, 218 ff;
God in, vii, 219.
Holy Spirit, doctrine of, often made superstitious, 236.
Honesty of the world, double meaning of, 80.
Hope for men, increased by sense of likeness, 128.
Hosea, as illustration of inter-play of human and divine relations, 68.
Howells, W. D., his _A Boy's Town_, quoted, 118;
referred to, 123.
Howison, G. H., on the person, 180, 208, 230;
referred to, 210.
Humanity, idea of, from Christianity, 13.
Ideal view, requires the facts of the social consciousness, 29 ff, 32 ff.
Imitation, to be avoided, 172 ff.
Immanence of God, as metaphysical ground of facts of social
consciousness, 40 ff;
Lotze on, 40, 41;
limitations in conception of, 217 ff.
"Immortability," discussed, 124 ff.
Immortality, J. S. Mill on, 50;
Sully on, 50;
doctrine of, as affected by sense of likeness of men, 124 ff;
references on, 125.
Indian mysticism, 74.
Israel, significance of its social struggle, 63;
ecstasy among its prophets, 64.
James, William, on heredity, 37;
on metaphysics, 40;
on sense of reality, 72;
on nitrous-oxide-gas intoxication, 74;
on the world as a confusion, 78;
reference to, 79, 122, 124, 126;
on compensations, 117;
on varied ideals, 128;
on catching faith and courage, 147.
Jesus, Brooks on his intellectual life, 81;
on his emotional life, 84;
relation to, necessarily ethical, 89, 94, 96;
satisfies our highest claims on life, 94;
his social emphases, 111 ff;
Brooks on his interest in the uninteresting, 124;
the great Christian confession, 174 ff;
loyalty to, best assurance for doctrine, 175;
the personal in, 184 ff;
a personal revelation of God, 184 ff;
the moral and spiritual in his supremacy, 185 ff;
grounds of his supremacy, 188 ff;
among founders of religion, 189 ff;
his sinlessness, 192 ff;
his impenitence, 193;
rises to highest ideals, 194 ff;
shows character of God, 195 ff;
consciously able to redeem all men, 196;
transcendent God-consciousness and sense of mission, 197 ff;
calls out absolute trust, 198 ff;
in him God certainly finds us, 199 ff;
the ideal realized, 200 ff;
his double uniqueness, 201 ff;
sense of kinship with, and reality of, 205 ff;
divinity of, as related to Trinity, 224;
reverence for person in, 226 ff.
Judgment, according to light, 132 ff;
how God's can be favorable, 153 ff;
reverence for person in, 237 ff;
according to law of liberty, 238 ff.
Kaftan, J., referred to, 86.
Keim, quoted, 52.
King, references to his _Reconstruction in Theology_, 16, 20, 23,
43, 67, 185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 212, 217, 218.
Kipling, R., on the value of the common, 119;
G. F. Genung on, 245.
Lanier, S., quoted, on Christ, 201.
Leibnitz, referred to, 172.
Life, the richest, ideal conditions of, 68 ff.
Like-mindedness of men, 9 ff;
an element of social consciousness, 9 ff, 47;
influence on theology, 115 ff;
summary on, 134;
seen under diverse forms, 121 ff.
Lotze, reference to, 13, 25, 31, 42, 213, 214;
on passion for construing everything, 25, 26;
on immanence of God, 40.
Love, sense of, 20;
element in social consciousness, 20, 51;
as motive in creation, 215.
Man, the personal in, 180 ff;
separateness from God, 180 ff;
freedom in, 181 ff; a child of God, 183 ff.
Matheson, George, on sacrifice, 49.
McConnell, S. D., objection to one part in his argument as to
immortality, 124 ff.
McCurdy, on the significance of the social struggle in Israel, 63.
Metaphysical, not to be emphasized, in conception of Christ, 185 ff;
how to be thought, as to Christ, 203, 204;
in doctrine of Trinity, 226.
Mill, J. S., on immortality, 50.
Moral world, prerequisites of, 30 ff;
sphere of law, 30;
ethical freedom, 30;
some power of accomplishment, 31;
members one of another, 32.
Mistiness in mysticism, 73.
Moral initiative in men, 181 ff.
Moral law, a revelation of the love of God, 98.
Mulford, E., referred to, 229.
Münsterberg, H., referred to, 79;
reference to his _Psychology and Life_, 79.
Mutual influence of men, 11 ff;
contributing lines of thought, 11 ff;
threefold form of the conviction, 13 ff;
as element of social consciousness, 11 ff, 50;
influence upon theological doctrine, 136 ff;
for good, 144 ff;
in attainment of character, 145 ff;
in personal relation to God, 160 ff;
in confession of faith, 167 ff.
Mystical, the falsely, opposition of the social consciousness to,
55 ff, 57 ff;
Nash's definition of, 55, 56;
Herrmann's definition of, 56, 57;
unethical, 58;
no real personal God, 58;
belittles personal in man, 59;
Paul's rejection of, 60, 61;
leaves historically Christian, 62 ff.
Mystical, the truly, emphasized by the social consciousness, 66 ff,
70 ff;
requires laws of a deepening friendship, 67;
requires ideal conditions of the richest life, 68;
protest in favor of whole man, 78 ff;
its self-controlled recognition of emotion, 82 ff.
Mysticism, its relation to the social consciousness, 55 ff;
false, 55 ff;
true, 66 ff, 70 ff;
justifiable and unjustifiable elements in, 71 ff;
its dangers:
emotionalism, 71;
subjectivism, 72;
under-estimating historical, 72;
mistiness, 73;
pantheism, 73 ff;
symbolism, 76.
justifiable elements in, summed up, 77.
Nash, H. S., on ethical basis of social consciousness in will of God,
45 ff;
his definition of the mystical, 55, 56;
referred to, 70;
on doctrine of divine personality, 210;
on the supernatural, 217.
Neo-Darwinian school, referred to, 37.
Neo-Platonic mysticism, 55 ff, 74.
_New World, The_, reference to, 12, 120.
Neitzsche, criticism of, by Everett, 120.
Obligation, sense of, 18 ff;
element in social consciousness, 18, 51.
Organism, analogy of, 23 ff;
value of, 23;
classical expression in I Cor. 12;
inadequacy of, for social consciousness, 24 ff:
comes from the sub-personal world, 24;
access to reality only through ourselves, 24;
mistaken passion for construing everything, 25;
tested by definition of social consciousness, 26 ff.
Orr's _The Christian View of God and the World_, reference to, 51.
Pantheism, tendency to, in mysticism, 58, 74.
Paul, his rejection of the falsely mystical, 60, 61, 83.
Paulsen, on key to reality, 25;
reference to, 30, 129;
on necessity of faith, 46, 47.
Peabody, F. G., referred to, 65;
on the social principles of Jesus, 111;
on Christ's individualism, 229.
Person, value of, 16 ff, 50;
influence of sense of value of, on theology, 179 ff;
reverence for, characterizing all God's relation to men, 226 ff.
Personal, the, recognition of, 179 ff;
recognition of, in man, 180 ff;
recognition of, in Christ, 184 ff;
recognition of, in God, 207 ff.
"Personal idealism," 180, 181, 210.
Personal relation, in religion, emphasized by social consciousness,
66 ff;
leads to the truly mystical, 70 ff.
Philo, as representative of mysticism, 55.
_Philosophical Review, The_, reference to, 40.
Philosophy, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 12.
Plato, his position abandoned by mysticism, 56.
Plotinus, as representative of mysticism, 55.
Prophets, the, their standpoint abandoned by Philo, 55;
their sense of the significance of the social struggle in Israel, 63;
ecstasy in, 64.
Propitiation, ethical meaning of, 150 ff, 156, 158 ff.
Providence, reverence for person in, 232 ff.
Psychology, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 12.
Purpose and causality, 42, 43.
Race-connection, not prime cause of unity of men, 35 ff.
Race, real unity of, 136 ff;
its solidarity, how conceived, 16, 35, 30, 137.
Ranke, on Christ, 192.
Rational, two senses of, 80.
_Reconstruction in Theology_, references to, 16, 20, 23, 43, 67,
185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 212, 217, 218.
Redemption, as viewed from point of view of mutual influence for good,
147 ff;
the cost of, 150;
substitution and propitiation in, 150 ff.
Religion, and theology, 6, 113;
influence of the social consciousness upon, 53 ff, 70 ff;
the personal relation in, emphasized by the social consciousness,
66 ff;
its thorough ethicizing demanded by social consciousness, 86 ff;
and ethics, 87;
a supreme factor in life, 189.
Reverence for the person characterizing all God's relations to men,
226 ff;
reflected in Christ, 226 ff;
in creation, 230 ff;
in providence, 232 ff;
in the personal religious life, 233 ff;
in the judgment, 237 ff;
in the future life, 240 ff.
Ritschl, A., referred to, 137.
Royce, Josiah, reference to, 12.
Sabatier, A., reference to, 171.
Sanday, W., reference to, 187.
Schiller, F. C, S., reference to, 40.
Science, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 11.
Scotist position as to God, 213.
Separateness from God, meaning of, 180 ff.
Sin, sense of, deepened by social consciousness, 139 ff;
Drummond on, 140;
lack of sense of, among Greeks, 140;
when most feared, 143.
Smith, G. A., reference to, 64.
Social consciousness, definition, 9 ff;
elements in, 9 ff;
meaning of, for theology, 5 ff;
analogy of organism, inadequate for, 24 ff;
analogy, tested, 26 ff;
necessity of its facts for ideal interests, 29 ff;
the question, 29;
else, no moral world, 30 ff, 32 ff;
ultimate explanation and ground of, 35 ff;
metaphysical ground, 35 ff:
not due to physical race-connection, 35 ff;
nor primarily to heredity, 37 ff;
nor to mystical solidarity, 37 ff;
but to immanence of God, 40 ff;
ethical basis, 44 ff;
supporting will of God, 44;
Nash on, 45;
Paulsen on, 46;
God's sharing in our life, 48 ff;
consequent transfiguration of, 49 ff.
its influence upon religion, 53 ff;
opposed to the falsely mystical, 57 ff;
emphasizes personal relation in religion, and so the truly mystical,
66 ff;
demands the ethicizing of religion, 86 ff;
needs historical justification, 102 ff;
its influence upon theological doctrine, 105 ff:
general results, 105 ff;
influence of like-mindedness of men, 115 ff;
of mutual influence of men, 136 ff;
of sense of value of person, 179 ff.
"Social mind," real meaning of, 138;
Giddings on, 138.
"Social Trinity," 222 ff.
Solidarity, a mystical, not to be pressed, 39.
Solidarity of race, often falsely conceived, 16, 35, 39, 137 ff.
Stevenson, R. L., on the poetical and ideal in men, 122;
referred to, 123, 124.
Subjectivism, tendency to, in mysticism, 72.
Substitution, ethical meaning of, 150 ff, 158 ff.
Sully, J., on immortality, 50.
Supra-personal, the, in God, 209.
Symbolism, strong tendency to, in mysticism, 76.
Sympathy with men, increased by sense of likeness, 127.
Tennyson, his self-hypnotism, 74.
Theme of the book, 1 ff.
Theologian, the, an interpreter, 5;
a believer in the supremacy of spiritual interests, 6;
assumes the fact of religion, 6;
assumes a personal God, 7;
takes point of view of Christ, 7.
Theologian's, the, point of view, 5 ff.
Theology, and religion, 6, 113;
in personal terms, 106 ff;
Fatherhood of God, determining principle in, 109;
as influenced by social consciousness, 105 ff;
general results in, 105 ff;
influence of likeness of men on, 115 ff;
influence of mutual influence of men on, 136 ff;
influence of value of person on, 179 ff.
Thomist position as to God, 223.
Trinity, doctrine of, 222 ff;
biblical, 224, 225.
"Trinity, Social," 222 ff.
Tritheism, involved in a real social trinity, 222 ff.
Triunity of God, doctrine of, 223 ff.
"Truths, eternal," God's relation to, 212 ff.
Unchangeableness of God, 216 ff.
Unconscious Christianity, 130.
Uniqueness, a double, in Christ, 201 ff;
metaphysical, 203, 204;
ethical, 204, 205.
Value and sacredness of person, 16 ff;
sense of, element in social consciousness, 16, 50.
Weismann, referred to, 37.
Transcriber's Notes: Page 182, "GOd" changed to "God". Inconsistent
hyphenation retained. Apparent printer's punctuation errors
corrected. Italics indicated by _underscores_ and transliterated
Greek by +plus signs+.