Produced by Al Haines
[Transcriber's note: the plus (+) symbol is used in this etext to
indicate bolded text.]
THE NEW THEOLOGY
BY
R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A.
MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1907.
Reprinted April, 1907.
INTRODUCTION
This book has been undertaken at the request of a number of my friends
who feel that recent criticisms of what has come to be called the New
Theology ought to be dealt with in some comprehensive and systematic
way. With this suggestion my own judgment concurs, but only so far as
my own pulpit teaching is concerned. I cannot pretend to speak for
anyone else, and therefore this monograph must not be understood as an
authoritative exposition of the views held and expounded by other
preachers who may be in sympathy with the New Theology. From its very
nature, as I hope the following pages will show, the New Theology
cannot be a creed, but its adherents have a common standpoint. My only
reason for calling this book by that title is that a considerable
section of the public at present persists in regarding me as in a
special way the exponent of it; indeed from the correspondence which
has been proceeding in the press it is evident that many people credit
me with having invented both the name and the thing. It is of little
use objecting to the name, for to all appearance it has come to stay
and is gradually acquiring a marked and definite content. So long as
it is clearly understood that this book is but an outline statement of
my own personal views, the title will do no harm. The controversy
which is not yet over has been fruitful in misunderstandings of all
kinds, and a great many of the criticisms passed upon my teaching have
been wholly due to a mistaken notion of what it really is. In so far
as any of those criticisms have been directed against me personally, I
have nothing to say; I hope I can leave my vindication to the judgment
of whatever public may feel an interest in my work. The best rejoinder
that could be made to the various criticisms of the teaching itself
would be to publish them side by side, for they neutralise one another
most effectually. But a better and more useful thing to do is to let
the public know just what the teaching is and leave it to the test of
time. I do not greatly object to having it described as "new." The
fundamental principle of the New Theology is as old as religion, but I
am quite willing to admit that in its all-round application to the
conditions of modern life it is new. I do not see why a man should be
ashamed of confessing that he does his own thinking instead of letting
other people do it for him.
This book, then, is not the author's _Apologia pro Vita Sua_. It is
intended as a concise statement of the outlines of the teaching given
from the City Temple pulpit. It is neither a reply to separate
criticisms nor an _ex cathedra_ utterance. I think I am usually able
to say what I mean, and in the following pages my object is to say what
I mean in such a way that everyone can understand.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE NAME AND THE SITUATION
II. GOD AND THE UNIVERSE
III. MAN IN RELATION TO GOD
IV. THE NATURE OF EVIL
VI. THE ETERNAL CHRIST
VII. THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD
VIII. THE ATONEMENT.--I. ASSOCIATION OF THE DOCTRINE WITH JESUS
IX. THE ATONEMENT.--II. SEMITIC IDEAS OF ATONEMENT
X. THE ATONEMENT.--III. THE DOCTRINE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY
AND EXPERIENCE
XI. THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE
XII. SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME
XIII. THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
XIV. CONCLUSION
THE NEW THEOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE NAME AND THE SITUATION
+Religion and Theology.+--Religion is one thing and theology another,
but religion is never found apart from a theology of some kind, for
theology is the intellectual articulation of religious experience.
Every man who has anything worthy to be called a religious experience
has also a theology; he cannot help it. No sooner does he attempt to
understand or express his experience of the relations of God and the
soul than he finds himself in possession of a theology. The religious
experience may be a very good one and the theology a very bad one, but
still religion and theology are necessary to each other, and it is a
man's duty to try to make his theology as nearly as possible an
adequate and worthy expression of his religion. He will never succeed
in doing this in a permanent fashion, for the content of religious
experience is, or should be, greater than any form of statement. But
theology is everyone's business. We cannot afford to leave it to
experts or refrain from forming our own judgment upon the
pronouncements of experts. To speak of theology as though it had an
esoteric and an exoteric side, one for the man in the study and the
other for the man in the world, is a practical heresy of a most
dangerous kind. Neither should theology be confounded with
ecclesiasticism. It is my conviction that the battle with
ecclesiasticism has long since been decided, and civilisation has
nothing to fear from the official priest. Those who spend their time
in protesting against sacerdotal pretensions are only beating the
air--"We shall never go to Canossa," as Bismarck said. No, the real
danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to the immediate future of
mankind in every department of thought and action, arises from
practical materialism on the one hand and an antiquated dogmatic
theology on the other. I hope it will be understood by readers of
these pages that in any references I may make to dogmatic theology I am
passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian whose work is
being done in the field of historical criticism or archaeology or any
of the departments of scientific research into the subject-matter of
religion. Most of my readers will understand quite well what I mean.
Everyone knows that, broadly speaking, certain ways of stating
Christian truth are taken for granted both in pulpit and pew; the
popular or generally accepted theology of all the churches of
Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is fundamentally the same,
and somehow the modern mind has come to distrust it. There is a
curious want of harmony between our ordinary views of life and our
conventional religious beliefs. We live our lives upon one set of
assumptions during six days of the week and a quite different set on
Sunday and in church. The average man feels this without perhaps quite
realising what is the matter. All he knows is that the propositions he
has been taught to regard as a full and perfect statement of
Christianity have little or nothing to do with his everyday experience;
they seem to belong to a different world. He does not know how
comparatively modern this popular presentation of Christianity is.
What is wanted therefore is a restatement of the essential truth of the
Christian religion in terms of the modern mind.
_The New Theology and the Immanence of God._--Where or when the name
New Theology arose I do not know, but it has been in existence for at
least one generation. It is neither of my invention nor of my choice.
It has long been in use both in this country and in America to indicate
the attitude of those who believe that the fundamentals of the
Christian faith need to be rearticulated in terms of the immanence of
God. Those who take this view do not hold that there is any need for a
new religion, but that the forms in which the religion of Jesus is
commonly presented are inadequate and misleading. What is wanted is
freshness and simplicity of statement. The New Theology is not new
except in the sense that it seeks to substitute simplicity for
complexity and to get down to moral values in its use of religious
terms. Our objection is not so much to the venerable creeds of
Christendom as to the ordinary interpretations of those creeds. And,
creeds or no creeds, we hold that the religious experience which came
to the world in Jesus of Nazareth is enough for all our needs, and only
requires to be freed from limiting statements in order to lay firm hold
once more upon the civilised world.
The New Theology is an untrammelled return to the Christian sources in
the light of modern thought. Its starting point is a re-emphasis of
the Christian belief in the divine immanence in the universe and in
mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but it requires to be
placed effectively in the foreground of Christian preaching. In the
immediate past the doctrine of the divine transcendence--that is, the
obvious truth that the infinite being of God must transcend the
infinite universe--has been presented in such a way as to amount to a
practical dualism, and to lead men to think of God as above and apart
from His world instead of expressing Himself through His world. I
repeat that this dualism is practical, not theoretical, but that it
exists is plain enough from such statements as that of the present-day
theologian who speaks of God's "eternal eminence, and His descent on a
created world." This kind of theologising leads straight to the
conclusion that God is to all intents and purposes quite distinct from
His creation, although He possesses a full and accurate knowledge of
all that goes on in it and reserves to Himself the right to interfere.
In what sense language like this leaves room for the divine immanence
it is difficult to see. The New Theology holds that we know nothing
and can know nothing of the Infinite Cause whence all things proceed
except as we read Him in His universe and in our own souls. It is the
immanent God with whom we have to do, and if this obvious fact is once
firmly grasped it will simplify all our religious conceptions and give
us a working faith.
+The decline of organised Christianity.+--For a generation or more in
every part of Christendom there has been a steady drift away from
organised religion as represented by the churches, and the question is
being seriously asked whether Christianity can much longer hold its
own. Protestant controversialists frequently draw attention to the
decline of church-going in Latin countries as evidence of the decay of
sacerdotalism, particularly in the church of Rome. But outside Latin
countries it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of Rome than
in any other church. The masses of the people on the one hand and the
cultured classes on the other are becoming increasingly alienated from
the religion of the churches. A London daily paper made a religious
census some years ago and demonstrated that about one-fifth of the
population of the metropolis attended public worship, and this was a
generous estimate. Women, who are more emotional, more reverent, and
more amenable to external authority than men, usually form the majority
of the worshippers at an ordinary service. Mr. Charles Booth in his
great work on the "Life and Labour of the People in London" asserts
that the churches are practically without influence of any kind on the
communal life. This I believe to be an exaggeration, but it will
hardly be denied that the average working, business, or professional
man looks upon the churches almost with indifference. In many cases
this indifference passes into hostility or contempt. Intelligent men
take little notice of preachers and sermons, and the
theologically-minded layman is such a rarity as to be noteworthy. Most
significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that much of the moral
earnestness of the nation and of social redemptive effort exists
outside the churches altogether. I am well aware that there is a great
deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs from selfish
materialism, and I gladly recognise that in almost any ordinary church
to-day brave and self-denying work is being done for the common good,
but this does not invalidate my general statement. The plain, bald
fact remains that the churches as such are counting for less and less
in civilisation in general and our own nation in particular. One of
the ablest of our rising young members of Parliament, a man of strong
religious convictions and social sympathies, recently declared that we
were witnessing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation
breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. To be sure, the
same thing has been said before and has proved to be wrong. It was
said in the eighteenth century when men with something of the prophet's
fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights of Man, declaring at the
same time that institutional religion was at an end, utterly
discredited, and impossible of acceptance by any intelligent being. In
France during the Revolution the populace turned frantically upon the
established faith, tore it to shreds, burlesqued it, and set up the
worship of the Goddess of Reason, as they called it, typified by a
Parisian harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its chilly hand
not only upon the world of scholars and men of letters, but even upon
the church. An English king is reported to have said that half his
bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion reasserted itself
all over the civilised world. Napoleon with shrewd insight realised
that the people could not do without it, and so effected the Concordat
with Rome which has now been dissolved; Wesley began the movement in
England which has since created the largest Protestant denomination in
the world; Germany produced a succession of great preachers and
scholars the like of whom had hardly ever been known in Europe before.
+Will religious faith regain its power?+--Will this happen again? For
assuredly Christianity has for the moment lost its hold. Can it
recover it? I am sure it can, if only because the moral movements of
the age, such as the great labour movement, are in reality the
expression of the Christian spirit, and only need to recognise
themselves as such in order to become irresistible. The waggon of
socialism needs to be hitched to the star of religious faith. But have
the churches spiritual energy enough to recover their lost position?
That depends upon themselves. If they consent to be bound by dogmatic
statements inherited from the past, they are doomed. The world is not
listening to theologians to-day. They have no message for it. They
are on the periphery, not at the centre of things. The great rolling
river of thought and action is passing them by. Scientific scholarship
applied to the study of Christian origins is extremely valuable, but
the defender of systems of belief couched in the language of a by-gone
age is an anachronism and the sooner we shake ourselves free of him the
better. The greatest of all the causes of the drift from the churches
is the fact that Christian truth has become associated in the popular
mind with certain forms of statement which thoughtful men find it
impossible to accept not only on intellectual but even on moral
grounds. Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the Fall, the
scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of
salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only
misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these
notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do
with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much
less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the
scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned,
is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The
consequence is that religion has come to be thought of as something
apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and
Bible readings, instead of what it really is,--the coördinating
principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a
nutshell,--popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological
college Christianity) does _not_ interpret life. Consequently the
great world of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about it.
+Theologians and preachers rarely realise the situation.+--One would
think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would
see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see
it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in
a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the
need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The
professional theologian rarely does even as much as this. He takes
himself very seriously; sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of
deviation from the accepted standards; mounts some denominational chair
or other and thunders forth his view of the urgent necessity for
rehabilitating truth in the grave-clothes of long-buried formulas. I
mean that the language he habitually uses implies some kind of belief
in formulas he no longer holds. He hardly dares to disinter the
formulas themselves,--that would not be convenient even for him,--but
he goes on flapping the shroud as energetically as ever, and the world
does not even take the trouble to laugh. Wherever and whenever
religious agencies succeed it is rarely because of the driving power of
what is preached, but because the preacher's gospel is glossed over or
put in the background. We have popular services by the million in
which devices are used to attract the public which ought not to be
necessary if their framers had any real message to declare. But they
have not. Popular pulpit addresses rarely or never deal with the
fundamental problems of life. The last thing one ever expects to hear
in such addresses is a real living representation of the beliefs the
preacher professes to hold. He makes passing allusions to them, of
course, such as appeals to come to the cross, and such like, but they
generally sound unreal, and the pill has to be sweetly sugared. The
ordinary way of preaching the gospel is to avoid saying much about what
the preacher believes the gospel to be.
To be sure there are many social activities in connection with
Christian churches. If it were not for these the churches would have
to be shut up. They are quite admirable in their way, and often
produce excellent results, but they imply another gospel than the one
supposed to be preached from the pulpits. They ignore dogmatic
beliefs, and assume the salvability of the whole race and the
possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth. Wherever the
churches are alive to-day, and not merely struggling to keep their
heads above water, it is not their doctrine but their non-theological
human sympathy that is doing it.
This, then, is the situation. The main stream of modern life is
passing organised religion by. Where is the remedy to be found?
+We seek to save religion rather than the Churches.+--Let me say
plainly that I do not think our object should be to find a remedy which
will save the churches. That would be putting the cart before the
horse. What is wanted is a driving force which will enable the
churches to fulfil their true mission of saving the world, or, to put
it better still, will serve to bring mankind back to real living faith
in God and the spiritual meaning of life. Hardly anyone would
seriously deny that the world is waiting for this. Men are not
irreligious. On the contrary there is no subject of such general
interest as religion; it takes precedence of all other subjects just
because all other subjects are implied in it. Religion is man's
response to the call of the universe; it is the soul turning towards
its source and goal. How could it fail to be of absorbing interest?
What is wanted is a message charged with spiritual power, "Where there
is no vision the people perish." Mere dogmatic assertions will not do.
The word of God is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life
and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of man. That message
is here now. It is being preached, not by one man only, but the wide
world over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches if they will
not hear. Religion is necessary to mankind, but churches are not.
From every quarter of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence
is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human is the evidence
of God, and that Jesus held the key to the riddle of existence.
Although this comes to us as with the freshness of a new revelation, it
is not really new. It is the spirit which has been the inspiration of
every great religious awakening since the world began. In this country
and in other parts of the English-speaking world that spirit is
becoming associated with the name the New Theology. To associate it
with any one personality is to belittle the subject and to obscure its
real significance. There are many brave and good men in the churches
and outside the churches to-day, men of true prophetic spirit, who
would reject utterly the name New Theology, but who are thoroughly
imbued with this new-old spirit and are leading mankind toward the
light. In the church of Rome the movement is typified by men like
Father Tyrrell, whose teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit
order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The present condition of
the church of Rome is not unhopeful to those who believe as I do that
that venerable church has been used of God to great ends in the past
and that her spiritual vitality is by no means exhausted. Father
Tyrrell and such as he are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men
than are the latter to those Protestants who pin their faith to
external standards of belief. It is a curious but indisputable fact
that the most extreme anti-Romanist Protestants are themselves in the
same boat with Rome: they insist on the absolute necessity for external
authority in matters of belief and are unwilling to trust the
individual soul to recognise truth as it comes. In all the churches
those who believe in the religion of the Spirit should recognise one
another as brothers. In the church of England a large and increasing
band of men are looking in this direction and are making their
influence felt. Of these perhaps the most outstanding is Archdeacon
Wilberforce, but he is by no means alone. A movement has begun in the
Lutheran church. It has existed for a long time in French
Protestantism as represented by the late Auguste Sabatier and his
friend Réville. In the congregational and other evangelical churches
of England and America the same attitude is being taken by many who are
not even aware that the name New Theology is being applied to it. In
this country the movement in the free churches is typified by men like
the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams of Bradford. There are many Unitarians
who are preaching it; indeed, there are some who would assert that the
New Theology is only Unitarianism under another name. But, as I shall
hope to show, this is very far from being the case. It may or may not
be professed by exponents of Unitarianism, but it is not a surrender to
Unitarianism.
+The New Theology is spiritual socialism.+--The great social movement
which is now taking place in every country of the civilised world
toward universal peace and brotherhood and a better and fairer
distribution of wealth is really the same movement as that which in the
more distinctively religious sphere is coming to be called the New
Theology. This fact needs to be realised and brought out. The New
Theology is the gospel of the kingdom of God. Neither socialism nor
any other economic system will permanently save and lift mankind
without definitely recognised spiritual sanctions, that is, it must be
a religion. The New Theology is but the religious articulation of the
social movement. The word "theology" is almost a misnomer; it is
essentially a moral and spiritual movement, the recognition that we are
at the beginning of a great religious and ethical awakening, the
ultimate results of which no man can completely foresee.
+And also the religion of science.+--Again, the New Theology is the
religion of science. It is the denial that there is, or ever has been,
or ever can be, any dissonance between science and religion; it is the
recognition that upon the foundations laid by modern science a vaster
and nobler fabric of faith is rising than that world has ever before
known. Science is supplying the facts which the New Theology is
weaving into the texture of religious experience.