what is christianity

WHAT IS CHRISTIAITY? Edited by Glenn Pease

1. WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? BY W. H. Griffith Thomas, D.D.

What Is Christianity?

*'Thou art permitted to speak for thyself I

beseech thee to hear me patiently." — -Acts xxvi. 1, 3.

THE question^ "What is Christianity?'' has been very prominent of late years in the minds of men. Scholars in several lands have been writing on "The Essence of Christianity/* The question is a natural and necessary one, and certainly most important. What is Christianity? Not what is its irreducible minimum, not how little a man may accept, and yet be a Christian, but what are the characteristic and distinctive elements of Christianity, what must he accept if he would really profess and call himself a Christian? One of the best ways to answer this question is to take the life, or some point in the life, of one of the finest men and truest Christians that ever lived, the Apostle Paul, and try to discover what Christianity meant to him. We may do this in a variety of ways^ but for the present we confine ourselves almost entirely to one episode in the Apostle's life^ his appearance before Agrippa and Festus^ as recorded in Acts xxvi. In this remarkable story we have a striking picture of St. Paul. As a man he is seen at his best. There is no constraint in his utterances ; he is in his element; the subject suits him^ and he yields himself to it, and the result is this magnificent apologia. As we listen to him, we can see something of the reality of his splendid manhood, and are reminded of the well-known words:

*'The elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, 'This was a man.' "

This is all the more noteworthy when we remember that the man before whom he stood was one of earth's meanest creatures. And it would almost seem as if St. Paul realised this, for, as we listen to him, we forget the first picture of Paul the man, and become wholly absorbed in the second and larger view of Paul the Apostle. He goes far beyond a mere defence of himself, and pleads for the Master Whom he loved and served.

As though realising the characters and lives of Agrippa and Bernice, he proclaims the everlasting Gospel, and thus we have not simply a picture of Paul the prisoner, defending and justify- ing himself; but chiefiy a picture of Paul the ad- vocate, proclaiming and defending his Master. Paul at the bar of Agrippa becomes merged into the far nobler scene of Christianity at the bar of the world. Christianity speaks here in the person of Paul, and in the opening words of the chapter we have the salient features of its message.

CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

"Thou art permitted to speak/' said Agrippa: and if only the world allows this to Christianity, it may speak, for it has something to say. It has a threefold Gospel.

The Gospel of the Resurrection. This was the basis and burden of the Apostolic message, "Jesus and the Resurrection.'' "Why," said Paul to Agrippa, "should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead.'*" On the fact of the Resurrection the Apostles took their stand, and preached it everywhere. This message of the Resurrection was the cause of all the opposition they encountered, especially from the Jewish rulers, who were angered by the procla- mation of the Risen One of Nazareth. Now wc naturally enquire why the Resurrection should have caused such enmity and persecution. Be- cause of that which it implied, the Godhead of Jesus Christ. The opposers knew very well that

10 The Christian Life

to accept the Resurrection was to accept Christ as God^ for by the Resurrection all His claims were irrefragably established. And this^ too, was the reason of the prominence of the Resurrection in the Apostolic preaching, the witness it bore to the Godhead of Christ. It proclaimed Him to be God, and as God Whom the world needs ; not some distant Being, Who, having created the world, is no longer intimately concerned with it; but God Who is near, approachable, available for our every- day life. Three times in one epistle St. Paul calls the Gospel "the Gospel of God," and this not only because it comes from God, but because it declares Him. God, as the Source of life and power, was proclaimed in the Resurrection of Christ, and this is the first part of that "something" which Chris- tianity has to say.

The Gospel of the Kingdom, The words of St.

Paul (in verse 15,) clearly show that acceptance of Christ as God carried with it the acceptance of Him as Lord and Master, and implied the acknowledgment of our position as subjects and serv- ants. Since Christ is God, He is supreme, He is King and Ruler, and we are His subjects, and consequently, through the Acts of the Apostles, we find clear and significant reference to the King- dom of God. This Kingdom is at once present and future. Our Lord's conversations before His Ascension were concerned with it. Philip preached it in Samaria^ St. Paul at Ephesus did likewise, and the last words of the book show St. Paul at Rome '^preaching the kingdom of God." These men were not afraid of the logic of their belief, the outcome of their fundamental doctrines. "Is Christ God.f* Then I am His subject." They realised and preached Christ, Who because He is God claims men as His own, claims to rule over their lives, not only bestowing upon them the privileges, but calling for the performance of the duties of their heavenly citizenship. The Gospel of the Kingdom is the second part of that "something" which Christianity has to say.

The Gospel of Pardon. This, as verse 18 shows, was also an integral part of the Apostolic preaching. Men are rebels against God by reason of sin; and rebels cannot possibly become subjects of His Kingdom until they are pardoned — until they have submitted and surrendered their lives to Him. Unless the rebellion of sin is quelled in man, there can be no entrance into God's King- dom, no acceptance of Christ as God. And so the Apostle Paul preached everywhere the forgiveness of sins. The burden of his message was, "Through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." He preached a full, free, present, assured, everlasting pardon: and this is the third part of that "something" which Chris- tianity has to say.

CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY FOR ITSELF

"Thou art permitted to speak for thyself/' This is what the Gospel desires, and for three reasons:

Hearsay Evidence is often erroneous. In this very book of the Acts we find glaring instances of the danger of hearsay. The Church was regarded as an obscure Jewish sect, with some peculiar ideas of "one Jesus." There was a smattering, a second-hand smattering of knowledge; and, unfortunately, we find the same only too prevalent to-day. There is sadly too much second- hand religion, religion gathered only from common report, ordinary conversation, and literary

tradition. Very frequently the Bible is condemned without having been read, very often St. Paul's Epistles are criticised without having been studied. It is simply astounding to find error about the Gospel, and even about simple Bible facts, in many whose position and education warrant something vastly different. There is error, because there is no real knowledge; error, because hearsay evidence is so often erroneous. But we may go further and say that

Christian Testimony is only partial. Paul here gives his own testimony, and there can be no possible doubt that the well-known change in his life had a great effect on his hearers^ and was a fact they could not get over. His conversion and subsequent life counted for something, and it was as though he said, "I experienced this; deny it, and you say that I lie." St. Paul's character was questioned by any who dared to deny the change. Yet when we have said all that we can for the power of this, it remains true that Christian testimony is only partial and incomplete. While Chris- tians are what they are, with the old Adam still within them, there will always be slips and fail- ures and sins, and I pity the man who takes his Christianity from Christians only. There is no doubt that we Christians ought to show much more of the Christ-life than we do, and may God pardon us for so often being stumbling-blocks instead of stepping-stones. Yet such testimony, however real, can only be partial, and this leads us to say that

Personal Experience is always sure. This was the goal of the Apostle; to this he was trying to lead his hearers; for this purpose he gave his own testimony. He desired Agrippa to test Chris- tianity for himself; not only to hear of Paul's Christ, but to have his own Christ, confident that Agrippa would find Christ what he himself had found Him. The primal necessity is to get our religion direct from Christ, not to ask this man or that man, not to follow this book or that book, but to go direct to the Book of books and find Christ for ourselves. When Nathanael questioned whether any good thing could come out of Naz- areth, Philip did not preach, or argue, or de- nounce; he simply said, "Come and see." This is the only safe test — the test of personal experience. Read His Word for yourselves: see who He is, and what He asks, comply with His demands, surrender the life, and the result will soon be similar to that of the Samaritans: **Now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world."

CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY FOR ITSELF WORTH HEARING

"I beseech thee to hear me." This, too, is what the Gospel asks.

The Gospel of the Resurrection explains the enigmas of life. What the world needs is God; without Him all is confusion. Without God there is no real life, no true happiness, no permanent satisfaction. Without God the past has no assurance, the present no confidence, and the future no hope. Without God man is a creature in the darkness and filth of sin, with nothing but gloom and despair at the end of his days. But bring in the Resurrection of Christ, and all is changed. It reveals God as Saviour, Guide, Strength, All — it enables us to live the present, and to hope stead- fastly as to the future. There is light through the Resurrection for the whole life, the light of God's presence, the joy, the peace, the power and preciousness of His presence, and the enigmas of life are solved by the Gospel of the Resurrection.

The Gospel of the Kingdom meets all the difficulties of life. What is the root of all man s troubles.'* Turn to the Garden of Eden for the answer. It was man's desire to be independent. The setting-up of self against God and instead of God — this is the essence of all sin. It means that man will not have God to rule over him, will not acknowledge and obey the law of God; but will have a law of his own as the guide of his life. And so man attempts self-government, 'local self-government" in a very literal sense, and the result is abject, absolute failure. Man has had his opportunity of guiding his own life, and we know full well what has happened in the history of the world.

Take political life as an illustration. There have been several forms of government seen through the ages, but all incomplete and, in themselves alone, really useless. Once autocracy was tried, but found pernicious through tyranny. Then came aristocracy, but this alone was also found unsatisfactory. Now some who ridicule aristocracy are trying plutocracy, government by money, but this is proving itself infinitely more dangerous. And others are trying democracy, and we shall see how this fares. It matters not what may be the form, man was never intended to be independent. Democracy alone has in itself the elements of a terrible tyranny, and it is not preaching the politics of earth, but the politics of Heaven, to say that, though there are elements of good in autocracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and democracy, each and all of these must be guided, held, and

controlled by Theocracy, government by God. De Tocqueville well says that **men never so much need to be theocratic as when they are most demo- cratic." What the world needs, what each man needs, is the Absolute Monarchy of the Lord Jesus Christ. Man needs the laws, rules and sanctions of Christ's Kingdom, for these would permanently settle all the difficult problems of individual and social life. Just as the demonstrations in Trafal- gar Square, London, England, years ago were settled by an appeal to Crown rights, to the claim of the Crown over that area, so in like manner any difficulties through sin, the "demonstrations'* of sin, individual or corporate, can be quickly settled by claiming and acknowledging the Crovni rights of the Lord Jesus. Only let Christ reign supreme in heart and life, and the difficulties of life are met by the Gospel of the Kingdom.

The Gospel of Pardon satisfies the needs of life. The chief need of man is pardon, freedom from a troubled conscience. The old question, "Canst thou not minister to the mind diseased.'^*' again and again recurs. We have a sense of guilt and unrest, a sense of bondage and weakness, a sense of defilement and separation from God, which nothing can touch. And it is only in the Gospel of pardon that these needs can be satisfied. It is only when Christ says : "Peace, be still," "Come out," that the spirit of evil loses its power; it is only when He reveals Himself that the schism in our nature is healed, and the needs of life satisfied by the Gospel of pardon. These are the reasons why Christianity is worth hearing.

CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY FOR ITSELF WORTH HEARING PATIENTLY

"I beseech thee to hear me patiently," said Paul. So says the Gospel. Why.^

It concerns our Highest Interests, It has to do with life here and life hereafter. It claims to touch life at every part, to solve all its problems, to minister to its most important needs. It therefore deserves and demands our most careful attention^ for if it is all true^ it is terribly true, and no one can reject it without peril.

It speaks to our Whole Nature, Not to the mind only to interest it with mere speculation; not to the heart only to indulge it with mere sentiment; not to the conscience only to frighten and terrify it; not to the imagination only to entrance it with ephemeral visions ; not to the will only to make it headstrong and self-centred; but to the whole nature in every part^ to guarantee a real, complete, and balanced nature and character. And

may God help that man who is closing any part of his nature to the Gospel of Christ, who, like Felix, is allowing sin to keep him back, or who, like Festus or Agrippa, is cynically indifferent to it. No one can close mind and heart against Christ with impunity. It is a sad confession of Darwin that, through long usage of his faculties in the direction of physical science, he had lost all taste for music and the fine arts, and had become so far mentally atrophied. And it is terribly true that a man may suffer moral atrophy and spiritual deadness by misuse or disuse of any faculty in relation to the Gospel.

It calls for the use of All our Powers. It asks openness of mind, truthfulness of heart, and loyalty of life. It appeals to us to put away prejudice and preconception, and to listen carefully to what it has to say. It has an A B C first, and then, arising out of that^ higher and fuller knowledge. It asks that the truth may be received with that openness of mind and that willingness to learn which form the basis of all wisdom. Then it asks that the truths accepted by the mind should be yielded to in loving confidence by the hearty and lived out day by day in the conduct.

This Gospel message comes to us now as it came to Agrippa^ asking only a personal test. With courtesy it asks for candor^ patience^ and thoroughness^ and given these^ all the demands of our complex life will be satisfied.

"O, make but trial of His love. Experience will decide, How blest are they, and only they. Who in His truth confide."

Our defilement will be cleansed by the salvation of the Gospel; our weakness made strong by its grace; our roughness made smooth by its power; our anxiety assured by its reality; our doubt removed by its truth; our tempest calmed by its peace ; our darkness illuminated by its light ; our sorrow alleviated by its comfort; our misery relieved by its joy; our defencelessness surrounded by its protection; our coldness warmed by its love; and our emptiness filled by its fulness. The whole circumference of our need will be forever met and perfectly satisfied in the treas- ures of the Gospel of the living, present. Divine. glorious Christ. And, therefore, comes now to each one of us the simple message, the old familiar invitation, *'0 taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in Him."

2, WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? By Adolf Harnack

THE great English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, has somewhere observed that mankind cannot be too often reminded that there was once a man of the name of Socrates. That is true ; but still more important is it to remind mankind again and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ once stood in their midst. The fact, of course, has been brought home to us from our youth up ; but unhappily it cannot be said that public instruction in our time is calculated to keep the image of Jesus Christ before us in any impressive way, and make it an inalienable possession after our school-days are over and for our whole life. And although no one who has once absorbed a ray of Christ's light can ever again become as though he had never heard of him ; although at the bottom of every soul that has been once touched an impression remains, a confused recollection of this kind, which is often only a **superstitio,** is not enough to give strength and

2 What is Christianity ?

life. But where the demand for further and more trustworthy knpwledge about him arises, and a man wants positive information as to who Jesus Christ was, and as to the real purport of his message, he no sooner asks for it than he finds himself, if he consults the literature of the day, surrounded by a clatter of contradictory voices. He hears some people maintaining that primitive Christianity was closely akin to Buddhism, and he is accordingly told that it is in fleeing the world and in pessimism that the sublime character of this religion and its profound meaning are revealed. Others, on the contrary, assure him that Christianity is an optimistic religion, and that it must be thought of simply and solely as a higher phase of Judaism ; and these people also suppose that in saying this they have said something very profound. Others, again, maintain the opposite ; they assert that the Gospel did away with Judaism, but itself originated under Greek influences of mysterious operation ; and that it is to be understood as a blossom on the tree of Hellen- ism. Religious philosophers come forward and de- clare that the metaphysical system which, as they say, was developed out of the Gospel is its real kernel and the revelation of its secret ; but others reply that the Gospel has nothing to do with philosophy, that it was meant for feeling and suffering human-

ity, and that philosophy has only been forced upon

Preliminary 3

it. Finally, the latest critics that have come into the field assure us that the whole history of religion, morality, and philosophy, is nothing but wrapping and ornament; that what at all times underlies them, as the only real motive power, is the history of economics; that, accordingly, Christianity, too, was in its origin nothing more than a social movement and Christ a social deliverer, the deliverer of the oppressed lower classes.

There is something touching in the anxiety which everyone shows to rediscover himself, together with his own point of view and his own circle of interest, in this Jesus Christ, or at least to get a share in him. It is the perennial repetition of the spectacle which was seen in the *' Gnostic " movement even as early as the second century, and which takes the form of a struggle, on the part of every conceivable tendency of thought, for the possession of Jesus Christ. Why, quite recently, not only, I think, Tolstoi's ideas, but even Nietzsche's, have been exhibited in their special affinty with the Gospel ; and there is perhaps more to be said even upon this subject that is worth attention than upon the connexion between a good deal of ** theological " and ** philosophical " speculation and Christ's teaching.

But nevertheless, when taken together, the impression which these contradictory opinions convey is disheartening: the confusion seems hopeless.

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How can we take it amiss of anyone, if, after trying to find out how the question stands, he gives it up ? Perhaps he goes further, and declares that after all the question does not matter. How are we concerned with events that happened, or with a person who lived, nineteen hundred years ago ? We must ^ook for our ideals and our strength to the present; to evolve them laboriously out of old manuscripts is a fantastic proceeding that can lead nowhere. The man who so speaks is not wrong; but neither is he right. What we are and what we possess, in any high sense, we possess from the past and by the past — only so much of it, of course, as has had re-

sults and makes its influence felt up to the present day. To acquire a sound knowledge of the past is the business and the duty not only of the historian but also of everyone who wishes to make the wealth and the strength so gained his own. But that the Gospel is a part of this past which nothing else can replace has been affirmed again and again by the greatest minds. " Let intellectual and spiritual culture progress, and the human mind expand, as much as it will ; beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance."^ In these words Goethe, after making many experiments and labouring indefatigably at himself, summed up the result to which his moral and histori-

Preliminary 5

cal insight had led him. Even though we were to feel no desire on our own part, it would still be worth while, because of this man's testimony, to devote our serious attention to what he came to regard as so precious; and if, contrary to his declaration, louder and more confident voices are heard to-day, proclaiming that the Christian religion has outlived itself, let us accept that as an invitation to make a closer acquaintance with this religion whose certifi- cate of death people suppose that they can already exhibit.

But in truth this religion and the efforts which it evokes are more active to-day than they used to be. We may say to the credit of our age that it takes an eager interest in the problem of the nature and value of Christianity, and that there is more search and inquiry in regard to this subject now than was the case thirty years ago. Even in the experiments that are made in and about it, the strange and ab- struse replies that are given to questions, the way in which it is caricatured, the chaotic confusion which it exhibits, nay, even in the hatred that it excites, a real life and an earnest endeavour may be traced. Only do not let us suppose that there is anything exemplary in this endeavour, and that we are the first who, after shaking off an authoritative religion, are struggling after one that shall really make us free and be of independent growth — a struggle which


must of necessity give rise to much confusion and half-truth. Sixty-two years ago Carlyle wrote : —

In these distracted times, when the Religious Princi-

ple, driven out of most Churches, either lies unseen in the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently working there towards some new Revelation ; or else wanders homeless over the world, like a disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organisation, — into how many strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it not tentatively and errantly cast itself ! The higher Enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without Exponent ; yet does it continue indestructible, un- weariedly active, and work blindly in the great chaotic deep : thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis.

No one who understands the times in which we live can deny that these words sound as if they had been written to-day. But it is not with ** the religious principle" and the ways in which it has developed that we are going to concern ourselves in these lectures. We shall try to answer the more modest but not less pressing question, What is . Christianity ? What was it ? What has it become ?' *^ The answer to this question may, we hope, also throw light by the way on the more coniprehensive one, What is Religion, and what ought it to be to us ? In dealing with religion, is it not after all with the Christian religion alone that we have to do ? Other religions no longer stir the depths of our hearts.

What is Christianity ? It is solely in its historical > sense that we shall try to answer this question here ; that is to say, we shall employ the methods of historical science, and the experience of life gained by studying the actual course of history. This ex- cludes the view of the question taken by the apologist and the religious philosopher. On this point permit me to say a few words.

Apologetics hold a necessary place in religious knowledge, and to demonstrate the validity of the Christian religion and exhibit its importance for the moral and intellectual life is a great and a worthy undertaking. But this undertaking must be kept quite separate from the purely historical question as to the nature of that religion, or else historical research will be brought into complete discredit. Moreover, in the kind of apologetics that is now required no really high standard has yet been attained. Apart from a few steps that have been taken in the direction of improvement, apologetics as a subject of study is in a deplorable state : it is not clear as to the positions to be defended, and it is uncertain as to the means to be employed. It is also not infre- quently pursued in an undignified and obtrusive fashion. Apologists imagine that they are doing a

^ What is Christianity ?

great work by crying up religion as though it were a job-lot at a sale, or a universal remedy for all social ills. They are perpetually snatching, too, at all sorts of baubles, so as to deck out religion in fine clothes. In their endeavour toX^esent it as a glorious necessity, they deprive it of it3 earnest character, and at the best only prove that ^it is something which may be safely accepted because it can do no harm. Finally, they cannot refrain from slipping in some church programme of yesterday and ** de- monstrating" its claims as well. The structure of their ideas is so loose that an idea or two more makes no difference. The mischief that has been thereby done already and is still being done is indescribable. No ! the Christian religion is something simple and ^süKIJmjel it means one thing and one thing only :4lternal life in the midst of time,i^: by the strength and under the eyes of Gocf^ It is no ethical or social arcanum for the preservation or improvement of things generally. To make what it has done for civilisation and human progress the main question, and to determine its value by the answer, is to do it violence at the start. Goethe once said, *' Mankind is always advancing, and man always remains the same." It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes. Christian apologetics must recognise, then, that it is

Preliminary 9

with religion in its simple nature and its simple strength that it has to do. Religion, truly, does not exist for itself alone, but lives in an inner fellowship with all the activities of the mind and with moral and economical conditions as well. But it is em- phatically not a mere function or an exponent of them ; it is a mighty power that sets to work of itself, hindering or furthering, destroying or making fruitful. The main thing is to learn what religion • is and in what its essential character consists ; no matter what position the individual who examines it may take up in regard to it, or whether in his own life he values it or not.

But the point of view of the philosophical theo- rist, in the strict sense of the word, will also find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago, it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly

become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions, and that there is no general conception of religion to " which actual religions are related simply and solely-^' as species to genus. Nay, the question may even be asked whether there is any such generic concep- y tion as '* religion " at all. Is the common element

lo What is Christianity ?

in it anything more than a vague disposition ? Is it only an empty place in our innermost being that the word denotes, which everyone fills up in a different fashion and many do not perceive at all? I am not of this opinion; I am convinced, rather, that<^t bottom we have to do here with something which is common to us all, and which in the course -4^ ' of history has struggled up out of torpor and discord into unity and light^ I am convinced that August- ine is right when he says, " Thou, Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in Thee." But to prove that this is so; to exhibit the nature and the claims of religion by psychological analysis, including the psychology of peoples, is not the task that we shall undertake in what follows. We shall keep to the purely historical theme: What is the Christian religion ?

Where are we to look for our materials ? The answer seems to be sirpple and at the same time exhaustive : ^esus Christ and his Gospel^ But however little doubt there may be that this must form not only our point of departure but also the matter with which our investigations will mainly deal, it is equally certain that we must not be content to exhibit the mere image of Jesus Christ and the main features of his Gospel. We must not be content to stop there, because every great and powerful personality reveals a part of what it is only when seen

The Gospel n

in those whom it influences. Nay, it may be said that the more powerful the personality which a man possesses, and the more he takes hold of the inner life of others, the less can the sum -total of what he is be known only by what he himself says and does. We must look at the reflection and the effects which he produced in those whose leader and master he became. That is why a complete answer to the question, What is Christianity, is impossible so long as we are restricted to Jesus Christ's teaching alone. We must include the first generation of

his disciples as well — those who ate and drank with him — and we must listen to what they tell us of the effect which he had upon their lives.

But even this does not exhaust our materials. If Christianity is an example of a great power valid not for one particular epoch alone; if in and through it, not once only, but again and again, great forces have been disengaged, we must include all the later products of its spirit. It is not a question of a "doctrine" being handed down by uniform repetition or arbitrarily distorted ; it is a question of a lifCy again and again kindled afresh, and now burning with a flame of its own. We may also add that Christ himself and the apostles were convinced that the religion which they were planting would in the ages to come have a greater destiny and a deeper meaning than it possessed at the time of its

1 2 What is Christianity ?

institution ; they trusted to its spirit leading from one point of light to another and developing higher forces. Just as we cannot obtain a complete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and its stem but also its bark, its branches, and the way in which it blooms, so<we cannot form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we*^^ take our stand upon a comprehensive induction that shall cover all the facts of its historyx It is true that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay more, it had a founder who himself was what he taught — to steep ourselves in him is still the chief matter; but to restrict ourselves to him means to take a point of view too low for his significance. Individual religious life was what he wanted to kindle and what he did kindle ; it is, as we shall see, his peculiar greatness to have led men to God, so that they may thenceforth live their own life with Him. How, then, can we be silent about the history of the Gospel if we wish to know what he was ? It may be objected that put in this way the problem is too difficult, and that its solution threatens to be accompanied by many errors and defects. That is not to be denied; but to state a problem in easier terms, that is to say in this case inaccurately, because of the difficulties surrounding it, would be a very perverse expedient. Moreover, even though the difficulties increase, the work is, on the other

The Gospel 13

hand^ facilitated by the problem being stated in a larger manner ; for it helps us to grasp what is es-

sential in the phenomena, and to distinguish kernel /-f^ and husk.

Jesus Christ and his disciples were situated in , their day just as we are situated in ours; that is to say, their feelings, their thoughts, their judgments . and their efforts were bounded by the horizon and the framework in which their own nation was set and by its condition at the time. Had it been otherwise, they would not have been men of flesh and blood, but spectral beings. For seventeen hundred years, indeed, people thought, and many among us still think, that the *' humanity" of Jesus Christ, which is a part of their creed, is sufficiently provided for by the assumption that he had a human body and a human soul. As if it were possible to have that without having any definite character as an in- * dividual ! Cjo be a man means, in the first place, to possess a certain mental and spiritual disposition, determined in such and such a way, and thereby limited and circumscribed; and, in the second place, it means to be situated, with this disposition, in an historical environment which in its turn is also ■. limited and circumscribed. Outside this there are no such things as ** men. '* It at once follows, however, that a man can think, speak, and do absolutely nothing at all in which his peculiar disposition and

14 What is Christianity?

his own age are not coefficientij A single word may seem to be really classical and valid for all time, and yet the very language in which it is spoken gives it very palpable limitations. Much less is a spiritual personality, as a whole, susceptible of being represented in a way that will banish the feeling of its limitations, and with those limitations, the sense of something strange or conventional ; and this feeling must necessarily be enhanced the farther in point of time the spectator is removed.

From these circumstances it follows that the historian, whose business and highest duty it is to determine what is of permanent value, is of necessity required not to cleave to words but to find out what is essential. The "whole" Christ, the "whole" Gospel, if we mean by this motto the external image taken in all its details and set up for imitation, is just as bad and deceptive a shibboleth as the " whole ** Luther, and the like. It is bad because it enslaves us, and it is deceptive because the people who proclaim it do not think of taking it seriously, and could not do so if they tried. They cannot do so because they cannot cease to feel, understand and judge as children of their age.

There are only two possibilities here : either the. Gospe l is in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it rontains something

The Gospel 15

which, under differing his *'^rir^^^*'"^'î IS ^ ên fla- nf*nt vnli flitv. The latter is the true view. The history of the Church shows us in its very com- mencement that "primitive Christianity" had to disappear in order that '* Christianity" might remain; and in the same way in later ages one metamorphosis followed upon another. From the beginning it was a question of getting rid of formulas, correcting expectations, altering ways of feeling, and this is a process to which there is no end. But by the very fact that our survey embraces the whole course as well as the inception we enhance our standard of what is essential and of real value.

We enhance our standard, but we need not wait to take it from the history of those later ages. The thing itself reveals it. We shall see that the Gospel in the Gospel is something so simple, something that speaks to us with so much power, that it cannot easily be mistaken. No far-reaching directions as to method, no general introductions, are necessary to enable us to find the way to it. No one who possesses a fresh eye for what is alive, and a true feeling for what is really great, can fail to see it and distinguish it from its contemporary integu- ment. And even though there may be many individual aspects of it where the task of distinguishing what is permanent from what is fleeting, what is rudimentary from what is merely historical, is not quite easy, we must not be like the child who, wanting to get at the kernel of a bulb, went on picking off the leaves until there was nothing left, and then could not help seeing that it was just the leaves that made the bulb. Endeavours of this kind are not unknown in the history of the Christian religion, but they fade before those other endeavours which fseek to convince us that there is no such thing as either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that everything is of equal value and alike permanent.

In these lectures, then, we shall deal first of all Vith the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this theme will occupy the greater part of our attention. We shall then show what impression he himself and his Gos- ^ pel made upon the first generation of his disciples. Finally, we shall follow the leading changes which the Christian idea has undergone in the course of history, and try to recognise its chief types. What ijjT^mmon to all thf; foniTijivhHJT^^t-î^'^ takep^ cQr.

rected byjieference j^o the GospeL^nd, copversely^ the chief features of the Gospel, corrected bvjiÄffix-

^5Il£S--tS_!l^?^2I&J5^i^^^ nfiay be allowed to hope, bnngjL|s_tQ_t.he kernel of the matter. Within the limits of a short series of lectures it is, of course, only to what is important that attention can be called ; but perhaps there will be no disadvantage in fixing our attention, for once, only on the strong lines and prominent points of the relief, and, by

The Gospel 17

putting what is secondary into the background, in looking at the vast material in a concentrated form. We shall even refrain, and permissibly refrain, from enlarging, by way of introduction, on Judaism and its external and internal relations, and on the Graeco-Roman world. We must never, of course, wholly shut our eyes to them — nay, we must always keep them in mind ; but diffuse explanations in regard to these matters are unnecessary. Jesus Christ's teaching will at once bring us by steps which, if few, will be great, to a height where its \ connexion with Judaism is seen to be only a loose one, and most of the threads leading from it into ** contemporary history " become of no importance at all. This may seem a paradoxical thing to say ; for just now we are being earnestly assured, with an air as though it were some new discovery that was being imparted to us, that Jesus Christ's teaching cannot be understood, nay, cannot be accurately represented, except by having regard to its connexion with the Jewish doctrines prevalent at the time, and by first of all setting them out in full. There is much that is true in this statement, and yet, as we shall see, it is incorrect. It becomes absolutely false, however, when worked up into the dazzling thesis that the Gospel is intelligible only as the religion of a despairing section of the Jewish nation ; that it was the last effort of a decadent age,

1 8 What is Christianity ?

driven by distress into a renunciation of this earth, and then trying to storm heaven and demanding civic rights there — a religion of miserabilism ! It is rather remarkable that the really desperate were just those who did not welcome it, but fought against it ; remarkable that its leaders, so far as we know them, do not, in fact, bear any of the marks

of sickly despair ; most remarkable of all, that while indeed renouncing the world and its goods, they establish, in love and holiness, a brotherly union which declares war on the world's misery. The oftener I re-read and consider the Gospels, the more do I find that the contemporary discords, in the midst of which the Gospel stood, and out of which it arose, sink into the background. I entertain no doubt that the founder had his eye upon man in whatever external situation he might be found — upon man who, fundamentally, always remains the same, whether he be moving upwards or down- wards, whether he be in riches or poverty, whether he be of strong mind or of weak. It is the consciousness of all these oppositions being ultimately beneath it, and of its own place above them, that gives the Gospel its sovereignty; for in every man it looks to the point that is unaffected by all these differences. This is very clear in Paul's case; he dominates all earthly things and circumstances like a king, and desires to see them so dominated. The

The Gospel 19

thesis of the decadent age and the religion of the wretched may serve to lead us into the outer court ; it may even correctly point to that which originally gave the Gospel its form ; but if it is offered us as a key for the understanding of this religion in itself, we must reject it. Moreover, this thesis and the pretensions which it makes are only illustrations of a fashion which has become general in the writing of history, and which in that province will naturally have a longer reign than other fashions, because by its means much that was obscure has, as a matter of fact, been cleared up. But to the heart of the matter its devotees do not penetrate, as they silently assume that no such heart exists.

Let me conclude this lecture by touching briefly on one other important point. In history absolute judgments are impossible. This is a truth which in these days — I say advisedly, in these days — is clear and incontestable. History can only show how things have been; and even where we can throw light upon the past, and understand and criticise it, we must not presume to think that by any process of abstraction absolute judgments as to the value to be assigned to past events can be obtained from the results of a purely historical survey. Such judgments are the creation only of feeling and of will ; they are a subjective act. The false notion that the understanding can produce them is a heritage of


I that protracted epoch in which knowing and knowledge were expected to accomph'sh everything ; in which it was believed that they could be stretched so as to be capable of covering and satisfying all the needs of the mind and the heart. That they cannot do. This is a truth which, in many an hour of ardent work, falls heavily upon our soul, and yet — what a hopeless thing it would be for mankind if the higher peace to which it aspires, and the clearness, the certainty and the strength for which it strives, were dependent on the measure of its learning and its knowledge.

3. WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME BY LYMAN ABBOTT

PROLOGUE

TkE Christianity of the Twentieth Century is not the same as the Christianity of Jesus Christ; and it ought not to be. For Christianity is a life, and after nineteen centuries of growth it can no more be the same that it was in the First Century than an oak is the same as an acorn, or America in 1920 is the same as America in 1787. Jesus told his disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven was like a seed planted, which from the least of seeds would grow to be a great tree. This is what has happened. The Roman Catholic Mass is quite different from the Last Supper as taken by Jesus and his friends in that upper chamber; the West- minster Confession of Faith is quite different from the Sermon on the Mount; the highly organized churches of the present day are quite different from the Church in the house as described in the Book of Acts. During these nineteen centuries philosophers have been trying to interpret Christian life and

experience and so have developed a Christian

vii

viii PROLOGUE

theology; reformers have been trying to apply the principles inculcated by Jesus Christ to the varying and often complex conditions of society and so have developed a Christian social ethics ; men and women have been trying to express their experiences in methods adapted to their various temperaments and

so have developed Christian rituals; pagans coming into the Christian life have brought their paganism with them, so that while their paganism has been Christianized at the same time and by the same process Christianity has been paganized.

To-day throughout Christendom we are submit- ting this modern Christianity to a sifting process. We are trying to find out what in it is Christian and what pagan, what natural growth and what artificial addition, what we shall accept and what reject. The Protestants are rejoiced to see this sifting process going on in the Roman Catholic communion, the Liberals welcome it in the conservative churches; personally I welcome it wdierever it appears and whatever questions it asks. Unbelief is less dangerous than insincere beliefs. But in this book I do not take part in this sifting process. Without attempting to determine what of modern Chris-

PROLOGUE ix

tianlty is true and what false, I invite my reader to join me in an attempt to get back of all the product of centuries of life and thought, to inquire what was Christianity as it was taught by Jesus Christ in the First Century, to ascertain what is essential in his spirit and his teaching which makes Augustine and Luther, Calvin and Wesley, Lyman Beecher and W. E. Channing, in spite of their differences. Christian teachers, and the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity and the Social Settle- ment workers Christian despite their differences in temperament and method.

My critical studies have convinced me that we have in the New Testament a fair reflection of the teaching of Jesus Christ as it was understood by his immediate disciples in the First Century; that there is no inconsistency between his teaching and that of the Apostle Paul; that the Fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John, or by one or more of his disciples recording reports received from him; that it truly reflects the mystical aspects, as Matthew reflects the ethical aspects of the Master s teaching; and that, if we would understand the Master, we must realize that he was both practical

X PROLOGUE

and mystical, Oriental and Occidental. But I do not accept the conclusions of those scholars who have attempted to distinguish in the Gospels between the teachings of Jesus and those of his inter-

preters. Such a discrimination cannot be accomplished by grammatical and exegetical methods.

I began the systematic study of the New Testa- ment when I entered the ministry in i860. Since that time I have been a student of one book, a follower of one Master. My aim in life as teacher, pastor, administrator, editor and author, has been to understand the principles which Jesus Christ inculcated and to possess something of the spirit which animated him, that I might apply both his principles and his spirit to the solution of the various problems, individual and social, of our time. Other books I have studied, to other teachers I have lis- tened; but in the main either that I might better understand Christ's teaching or better understand the problems to which that teaching was to be applied. Many problems which theologians have attempted to solve I am content to leave unsolved. Like the Hebrew Psalmist I do not exercise myself in things too wonderful for me. After sixty years

PROLOGUE xi

of study I still say with Paul, " I know only In fragments and I teach only in fragments." After more than sixty years of Christian experience, — -for I cannot remember the time when I did not wish to be a Christian, — I still say with him, " I count not myself to have apprehended but I follow after that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.'^

This volume is an endeavor to state simply and clearly the results of these sixty years of Bible study, this more than sixty years of Christian experience. The grounds of my confidence in the truth of the statements made in this volume are the teachings of Jesus Christ and his apostles as reported in the New Testament, interpreted and confirmed by a study of life and by my own spiritual consciousness of Christ's gracious presence and life-giving love.

4. THE ESSENTIAL CREED OF THE CHRISTIAN BY GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS

The essential creed of the Christian is brief and simple, but it is personal and compelling. Let us think of it soberly. Let us not only believe it with our minds; let us accept it with our wills. Here it is.

Article 1. I believe that God is my Father

whom I must serve.

Article 2. I believe that man is my brother

whom I must save.

Article 3. I believe that I must serve my

Father and save my brother by the sacrifice

of love.

5. WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? BY GEORGE CROSS

INTRODUCTION

Christianity is the name commonly given to the religion that came into existence through the career of Jesus of Nazareth and professedly preserves his character to this day. Christianity is a religion; that is, the name stands for a way in which men seek unitedly to come into communion with the eternal and invisible, a way in which they attempt to enter into happy relations with the Supreme Being. It is a historical religion; that is, it had its beginnings at a definite period of human life in this world and the course of its progress from age to age is traceable. It is a religion whose votaries aim at honoring the worth of him from whom it sprang by calling themselves by a name that designates his supreme place among men — Christ, Anointed of God, Sent of Heaven, King of their Hearts — Christians, Christ-ones.

When the historian unfolds before our eyes the manner in which this mighty spiritual movement has spread throughout the world and continued through the centuries, our attention is transfixed and our thought is challenged. What is it? What does it mean? Its phenomena are so vast and so varied and its followers have differed so much among themselves that at times one is tempted to say that there is often little or nothing more than the name in common. Yet even the possession of a common name is significant. The name may supply the clue to the true interpretation of its character. At any rate, for the intelligent man the attempt to interpret it is inevitable.

2 What Is Christianity ?

The interpretation of Christianity is not exclusively the work of the scholar and philosopher. For the home of this religion has not been mainly in the high places of human life but more especially in the lives of the common people. They have given the most abundant interpretation. The conscious interpretation of it by the professional thinker is dependent on the popular, half- involuntary, half-conscious interpretation that is offered in the ways of the masses of believers — their spontaneous religious speech, acts of worship, songs, prayers, modes of conduct, customs of assembly, and methods of organization. The thinker must try to account for these things.

The interpretations of Christianity that have appeared are numerous. In our survey it will be necessary to pass by many that are of only minor interest and limit our study to the great outstanding types. We shall select six — Apocalypticism, Catholicism, Mysticism, Protestantism, Rationalism, and Evangelicism. These overlap and mingle, of course, but they are sufficiently distinct to stand apart in our study.

CHAPTER I APOCALYPTICISM

It is related in the Gospel of Mark that at a critical point in his career "Jesus asked his disciples, saying unto them, Who do men say that I am ? And they told him, saying, John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but others, One of the prophets. And he asked them, But who say ye that I am? Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Messiah" (Greek, Christ).

These are momentous words, for they record the first historic confession of the Christian faith. It seems to have risen spontaneously to the lips of the disciple when the Master's great question was asked and he spoke with the evident assurance that he was uttering the conviction that bound him and his companions together in a common allegiance and a common hope. Here, therefore, we date the beginning of the Christian religion. Here, for the first time, the followers of the Nazarene were consciously differentiated from the rest of men by their unanimous trust in his mission. Here, too, for the first time, Jesus was placed outside the category of common men, even of the highest and best of them, and assigned a unique place in the world. What, more precisely, that place should be was as yet vaguely conceived in the minds of his followers. The colloquy that follows Peter's confession reflects a clash of ideas on the subject among his disciples from the outset. The controversy about him that has continued for

4 What Is Christianity?

centuries was then at its beginning, and the end of it is not even yet in sight.

Among the many Christian confessions that rise up as way-marks along the road of Christian history, Peter's confession enjoys a pre-eminence, and that for a better reason than its priority in time. For it has always been and still remains the most popular of them all. In this stock confession of Christendom subject and predicate have become so closely united that the two words, Jesus and Christ, regularly stand together as a single personal name. Moreover, this confession is the parent of all the others. For they are all enlargements or modifications of it, and they indicate the manner in which faith in the messiahship of Jesus has infused a new meaning into beliefs that arose at first independently of it. We can say — for we see it now as it was impossible for those early disciples to see it — that the Petrine confession marked the rise of a new religion among men. It did not seem so, I say, at the time. For to say that Jesus was the Christ seemed at first simply to say that through him was to come the realization of the Jewish hope. But the actual outcome was vastly different from what anyone could have anticipated. For it was only a little while before the new faith found itself in violent conflict with the Judaism out of whose bosom it sprang. A dramatic account of that conflict appears in the early chapters of the Acts and is reflected by anticipation, as it were, upon the accounts of Jesus' career. The root of the controversy lay in the question whether the faith in Jesus did not represent the true Judaism. And now, after the lapse of all the intervening centuries, it is still an open question whether, after all, it was not mis-

Apocalypticism 5

leading to call Jesus the Christ. Did not Peter's confession introduce into the minds of Jesus' followers a misconception of the character and purpose of Jesus? In assigning to him the character and the purpose of the Jewish Messiah did it not pervert his true aim and theirs ? And has not the Christian faith been burdened with beliefs in consequence from which it still seeks relief? This is in part the subject of our present discussion.

The significance of the primitive confession that Jesus was the Messiah is to be perceived only by reference to the whole circle of ideas to which the term belongs. For the story of the origin and development of Jewish Messianism the reader must be referred to the works of specialists, to whom of late we owe a great increment of knowledge on the subject. It is not possible in the present connection to do more than indicate in a general manner the conditions and conceptions

out of which it sprang. Jewish Messianism is a prominent feature of a specifically Jewish philosophy which men have called Apocalypticism. Jewish Apocalyp- ticism is a modification, under the influence of the Jewish religious spirit, of a widespread, if not universal, oriental philosophy of the universe and of human life. The character of this philosophy we shall expound more fully presently. The thing we wish to point out just now is that the effect of the adoption by Jesus' followers of Peter's confession was to carry Jewish Messianism over into the new Christian community and thereby bring the minds of Christians so directly under the power of Jewish Apocalypticism that it became naturalized in their interpretation of their new faith. That is to say, Christians found, first of all, in the formulas of Jewish


Apocalypticism a body of ideas by which they were enabled to express to themselves and to others the significance and worth of the personality and career of Jesus. Christian Apocalypticism is a Jewish heritage. The conceptions by which the religious Jew was wont to set forth his hopes for the future were transferred to the Christian mind and became the instruments of its self-expression. This was quite natural at a time when the great body of believers in Jesus came of Jewish stock. But the union of Christian faith and Jewish philosophy, which was so natural to men of the pharisaic type of mind, has continued to the present day when the naturalness of it is no longer clear. We shall see that, like so many other marriages, it has been both for better and for worse. Its fruit is mingled evil and good.

On the other hand, the fact that conceptions that were formerly distinctively Jewish have obtained a powerful hold on many other peoples and races and have maintained their hold on them for long centuries creates a presumption that these conceptions must have belonged originally to mankind at large or, at least, have borne such a likeness to prevailing conceptions among other peoples that the transition from one to the other must have been easy and natural. The comparative study of religions has confirmed the presumption. We were formerly trained so thoroughly in the belief that the Jews were most especially a people separate from all others that we forgot they were the natural heirs of ecumenical traditions. The Jews were but a single branch of the Israelitish people, the Israelites of the Hebrews, the Hebrews of the Semites, and the Semites of the stock of that ancient humanity whose story has

Apocalypticism 7

been mostly lost to us. The Jews were, therefore, the natural heirs of the traditions of many races, whatever traditions they may have had that were peculiarly their own. Their likeness to the common Semitic stock, at least, was much more marked than their unlikeness. Then, too, their geographical location in Palestine, that ancient battle-ground of many mighty peoples, brought them into close contact with the great complex of experiences and ideas that constituted the culture of the ancient world. Their acquisitiveness as a people, combined with their individuality, enabled them to stamp the traditions that had flowed down to them from many sources with their own distinctive characteristics. This inheritance of theirs became woven through and through with their monotheism and their highly moral conceptions of the nature of the Deity and of man's relation to him and then, through the dispersion of the Jews, was given to the world. This position is thoroughly confirmed by the critical study of the Jewish Scriptures and the recovery of the knowledge of ancient mythology. It may not be possible to disentangle completely the different strands that have been woven into the Jewish Scriptures, yet it is perfectly plain to the discriminating student that much of the folklore and mythology that belonged to other nations recurs in the Old Testament, but has been transformed there by the higher spirit that was given to the Jews.

Now the striking thing about the traditions of primitive culture is the similarity of the main strands of their folklore and their myths even when the various peoples concerned were far separated in time and distance and without apparent contact with one another. The peoples


that were able to establish stable governments over large territories and to secure the safety essential to the growth of the higher forms of culture wrought up these primitive stories into literary and philosophic forms, but did not obliterate their original features, so that the link of connection between the cruder and the finer culture of antiquity has been preserved. Their underlying unity is discernible. The general themes of these ancient constructive efforts of the human mind are the same everywhere. They all reflect in highly dramatic and realistic form the effect produced upon the spirits of men by the constant struggle with the powers of material existence. They tell the story of the destructive fury of malignant forces that assail men and also the story of deliverance from these foes. Their interest was not so very different from the interest with which we today pursue our study of the world and of man, namely, the aim to realize the highest well-being. But the place which is taken by abstract ideas in our present philoso- phies was occupied by realistic, semi-personal creations

of the ancient mind. In what we are pleased to call — in less marked anthropomorphic form — the impersonal forces of nature, men of old saw the operations of living beings. What we figuratively describe as the battle of the elements they regarded as the actual encounters of real animate existences possessed of passions like ours. Whether we turn to the mythology of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Iranians, Indians, or Greeks, the interest is the same, namely, the framing of an account of the origin of the woes and the blessings of men through the operations of what we call, somewhat blankly, "nature," but what they, in part, personalized.

Apocalypticism g

These mythologies present three outstanding features in common: First of all, prominence is given to the material forces against which men seem to have struggled so often in vain — stormy seas, raging floods, torrential rains, earthquakes, and fires. These forces working harm to hapless men are viewed as great monsters of transcendent might, say, a great dragon or a serpent in the deep or in the sky. Sometimes by a fusion of traditions these monsters were multiplied. Secondly, human experiences of deliverance from these baneful forces are pictured as the beneficent deeds of some great hero, generally more distinctly human in form than were these dangerous beings, but still superhuman. These saviors of men throttle and subdue the evil powers and rescue men from sufferings and calamities by a higher control of cosmic forces. Thirdly, there was a repre- sentation of a Golden Age in the distant past when men were without their present trials, and for the return of that age they fondly hoped. Perhaps we should say that this was not so much a memory of the past as an anticipation of the future reflected upon the past and held as a ground of encouragement for the future.

Here is a pictorial philosophy so widespread among the ancients that it seems to be native to men. It consti- tutes a view of things that is both a cosmic philosophy and a philosophy of salvation. It sets forth the three main forms of experience in which men become aware of their universal kinship. First, their sufferings and misfortunes are due to forces too mighty for them to master or control unaided. Secondly, there is deliverance from these trials through intervention from on high, and with this goes the sense of dependence on a Savior-friend.

io What Is Christianity?

Finally, there is the hope of an ideal state to come, but founded from the beginning of human life — a heaven, a paradise. These three features are found, indeed, in all

religions, and they remind us that there never has been, as there never can be, a religion that does not embrace in the end a philosophy of all being.

What has all this to do with Peter's confession that Jesus was the Messiah ? Much in every way, but prin- cipally because in effect the confession connected the career of Jesus hopefully with those universal human feelings of need and longing for deliverance of which we have spoken, and because it made him personally the bearer of that deliverance. It placed Jesus, in effect, at the very heart of all the distracting problems that press for human solution and declared that he could supply the answer to them. To be sure, Peter could scarcely have been even dimly aware of this at that time. The confession was purely Jewish in its conscious purport. It pronounced Jesus a purely Jewish deliverer, and the disciples were very slow to perceive afterward a larger meaning in their faith, but none the less it pre- pared the way for the universalization of the Christian faith, because the Jewish messianic hope was the universal human hope intensified, purified, and exalted through the peculiar experiences of the Jewish people. A few words must now be said in further explanation and justification of this statement.

I. THE ORIGIN OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM

It was suggested above that in earlier stages of their life as a people the Israelites were so much like to the surrounding peoples in character that it would be

A pocalypticism 1 1

difficult to distinguish the qualities that made them excel. But in course of time, under the leadership of those men of deep moral insight and moral vision we call the prophets, they grew to be a nation enjoying as their distinctive dignity the consciousness of a relation to their God fundamentally different from that relation which other peoples conceived they bore to their gods. For while the popular view of the relation between the peoples and their gods was that of consanguinity or physical kinship, and while this inevitably involved the god in each case in the fate of his people, in the view of the prophets the national existence of Israel was based upon a mutual covenant between him and them to which, in the end, every individual Israelite was a partner. Thus the basis of their national life was moral rather than physical, because the covenant-relation is established by an act of choice rather than by physical necessity. This also made the continuance of their God Jahwe's protection of them dependent on their obedience to the terms of that covenant. Out of this relation arises the idea of law. It is quite in keeping with this whole conception that the prophets should constantly insist that the test

of all action, both national and personal, was found in the law of their God, and that their well-being depended on their obedience to it. To attempt to trace the effects of this belief upon the spiritual life of the whole nation would carry us too far afield for our present purposes, but it is easy to understand how from this point of view there grew up in the minds of the people the conviction of the superiority of their God to all other gods and at the same time the sense of their own superiority to other peoples. The corollary of such a conviction is the


persuasion of their own indestructibility as a people. Other peoples might perish, but they could not because their God was above all gods. It was this belief that bore them up in their times of fearful struggle with nations or empires of far greater material power than they, and that gave them confidence that they should survive all defeats and be more than conquerors in the end. It was in support of this confidence that the prophets reinterpreted the popular lore of the race from the earliest ages with a view to showing that the course of all the peoples and of the material world from the beginning was directed in conformity with the purpose of God to select Israel as a people for himself and to give them ultimate supremacy over all others. With this object in mind they continually offered forecasts of a day of deliverance and triumph to come.

The eyes of the prophets were therefore upon the future. For them the true Golden Age, even if at times they did idealize the past, was yet to come. It seems that the people were fond of speaking of the coming " Day of Jahwe" when he should triumph for them over their enemies and his. The prophets were able to impart a profoundly moral character to this prospect. Their predictions of blessing for Israel in that day were interspersed with warnings; for while, as the people thought, it was to be a day of judgment on all nations, it was not less to be a day of judgment for Israel as well. It would bring retribution for the wicked as well as reward for the righteous. And that meant that there was to be a distinction made within Israel as truly as a distinction between Israel and other peoples. Indeed, in some prophetic utterances

A pocalypticism 1 3

the principle of righteous judgment seems to be applied indiscriminately as respects the different nations. Thus there rose up in the prophetic mind the overpowering conception of a great Judgment Day for the vindication of righteousness among all men — one of the great spirit-

ual gifts of Israel to the world.

It might be expected that the successive overthrow of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of the Israelitish people, their captivity in foreign lands, their pitiable weakness on the economic side, and their political hopelessness would strain this fundamental conviction to the breaking-point. That they survived their downfall, that in the minds of many of the people of Judah their sense of moral superiority remained unimpaired, and their confidence in the ultimate salvation of the righteous stood firm, is one of the miracles of history. The effect of their bitter experiences was to intensify the confidence of the pious Jew in the power of his God. The darker their material and political outlook, the more fervent became their religious faith and hope. The Day of Jahwe would most surely come, but the deliverance it would bring should not be accomplished by the sword of Judah, but by the irresistible intervention of their God from on high. The day of judgment upon mankind should be a day of salvation for the suffering righteous.

It is evident that the misfortunes of these people occasioned a vast revolution in their religion. The destruction of the monarchy upon which the prophets had devoted so much of their energy in an attempt to keep the kings true to the higher faith, the obliteration of the political state, the exile from the land that they


called the land of Jahwe, the ruination of their sanctu- aries and of the worship there, led to a spiritualization of their religious belief; the contact with Babylonian and Persian civilization broadened their horizon. A new world on high was opened to the eye of their imagination, and a vaster world on the earth spread before them. And consequently a new destiny lay beyond. Their God no longer dwelt in the temple made with hands or even in the land of Palestine but in the high heaven above them. They learned from Babylon and Persia to people that heaven with exalted beings whose nature was suited to the invisible better world, and whose business it was to act as the messengers of the unseen God and carry out his decrees on earth. All the so-called gods were no gods at all. The evident hopelessness of a struggle with the mighty empires whose power was made manifest to them every day, and the fading character of all material prosperity, turned their minds to the heaven. There the pious Jew fixed his gaze, and while the hope of a restoration of the earthly kingdom of Israel still lingered, the progress of events tended to give to this earthly kingdom more and more a miraculous character while it should last; but it came to be conceived by many a Jew as having only a limited duration and as destined to

give place to a kingdom in the heaven that should last forever.

A new interest was henceforth taken in the present and future state of the dead. The old view that all men went to one place and met the same fate and that the present life was the scene of all punishment and reward passed with the passing of confidence in the perpetuity and worth of a political kingdom on earth and the rise

Apocalypticism 15

into prominence of the distinction of righteous and unrighteous within the nation. The righteous must have a place in the new kingdom. If that kingdom was to be ushered in by a judgment, then there must be a judgment for the 'dead as well as for the living. The idea of a resurrection of the dead came as a consolation to those who contended for the supremacy of righteousness; and with this the old idea of Sheol, as the final abode of all indiscriminately, gave way. Sheol could no longer be a place of hopelessness for all, or if Sheol was the place of the wicked there must be another abode for the righteous, though it was difficult to say where it should be before the resurrection. With this new interest in the dead arose many speculations and guesses about the unseen regions. There was no unanimity of opinion. But new regions began to appear — Heaven, Paradise, Sheol, Gehenna, were distinguished, but their relations were obscure. Whether there was to be a resurrection of all the dead for judgment or a resurrection of the righteous only was uncertain. With the incoming of Greek influence came a doubt of the reality or value of any resurrection or of any material kingdom. There was a tendency to spiritualize everything and to fix attention upon the hope of a life eternal in a purely spiritual world; but this view was probably that of the few. Yet amid all the differences of speculation there stood out clearly the firm belief in a coming universal judgment and end of the world. The latter was usually conceived as ushered in by a fire which should destroy the present order of things and the wicked with it.

There is one feature in this development of the Jewish religious spirit that claims our special interest, namely,

1 6 What Is Christianity?

the expectation of the coming of a King-Messiah. In the earlier prophetic delineation of the glory of the coming kingdom there appeared from time to time pictures of an ideal king through whom their God would establish the power and prosperity of his people. The destruction of the two kingdoms and the subsequent exile rendered

the fulfilment of the prophetic hope a physical impos- sibility. The nationalism of which the prophets were the spokesmen gradually faded away with the experiences of the captivity. It became to a large extent unnecessary. For the nationalism of the prophets was too narrow for those who gained the universalistic outlook upon the world and the spiritual interpretation of things that came through contact with the larger gentile views of existence. A great modification of the messianic expectation became necessary if it was to survive and minister to the religious life of men. The Messiah must take on a character in keeping with the new views of the world and of salvation. A mere son of David could never fulfil the functions of a Judge of all mankind and of the Ruler of a kingdom that came from heaven. He must be a heavenly being and, like the kingdom, must also descend from heaven to earth. Would he not live and reign forever ? But here again there was much confusion. The old and the new mingled as the new seers sought to connect their new views with the old prophetic declarations. Sometimes the temporal kingdom receives no recognition whatever, but all is heavenly. The Messiah of such a kingdom would be a heavenly and eternal being. At one time (in Second Enoch) it is said that the kingdom will last a thousand years, or again (in Fourth Esdras) that it will last four hundred

Apocalypticism 17

years — corresponding to the four hundred years in Egypt — but the Messiah was to die at the close. Some- times the expectation of a Messiah is entirely wanting, and Jahwe himself is the immediate deliverer of his people and Judge of the world. The Messiah is at one time a mighty monarch ruling all nations in righteousness, and again he is a co-sufferer with his people. Thus nationalism and universalism, materialism and spiritual- ism, were mingled in the post-exilian life of the Jews, and the minds of the people were divided.

In this rude survey of the spiritual development of the Jewish people we have covered many centuries and reached the times of Jesus himself. The advent of Jesus and his message to the world, directly or through his disciples, were contemporary with the later phases of this evolution. While, therefore, Peter's confession that Jesus was Messiah connects Jesus with the ideas outlined above, it does not determine which of these various and conflicting views of the character of the coming kingdom, of the manner of its establishment, and of the end of the world were uppermost or even present in the minds of his followers. This much, however, is plain — that the new faith obtained the formulas of its expression through the conceptions whose development we have sought to outline. We shall now attempt to state why we have described this view of things by the term

Apocalypticism.

2. PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM

The contact with Babylonian and Persian culture in the earlier period following upon the destruction of the Jewish state and the contact with Greek culture in the

x 8 What Is Christianity ?

later period — to mention only the most important foreign influences — gave a powerful stimulus to the Jewish intellect and vastly widened its horizon. Babylonian astrology and Persian dualism gave to the Jews a new knowledge of the world, and Grecian thought gave them a new view of its meaning. This intellectual expansion was accompanied by a deepening of their moral and religious life. This came to them as a consolation for their terrible losses. Two real worlds, the heaven and the earth, besides the shadowy realm of Sheol, or the underworld, now came into view. Man is of the earth, and his days are few. But Jahwe God is in the high heaven above all earthly things and free from all earthly contingencies. There he lives and reigns eternally. Superhuman beings serve him there. He rules also on the earth, and the angels of his power go forth from his presence bearing his decrees and effecting his purposes on the earth. All events that occur on the earth are determined in advance in heaven. So to say, that which took place on earth was first enacted in heaven and must inevitably come to pass. If men could but enter heaven, or if the veil that separates heaven from earth could be withdrawn for a time, men would be able to see beforehand the things which are to come to pass. What is true of the earth is also true of the underworld, for Jahwe is lord there also and predetermines the fate of its denizens. Thus there lies before men the possibility of obtaining a knowledge of the distant future.

The possibility becomes an actuality. The new world becomes the basis of a new view of human knowledge. Men have actually witnessed the lifting of the

Apocalypticism 19

veil between heaven and earth. There have been apocalypses, revelations, of those things that happen in heaven. Men have had visions of that realm and they have heard voices speaking to them from it. The disclosures that came to men in this way are not to be classed with things that they learn in the ordinary manner. The sight and the hearing they enjoyed were special gifts bestowed upon the few. They were the seers, the prophets of

their God. This knowledge was not merely natural but, as we are accustomed to say, supernatural, miraculous. It was certain that they who obeyed the heavenly vision should infallibly be blessed. The word that came from heaven could not fail.

Moreover, the apocalypses disclosed the secret causes of the events for whose coming believers were to look so hopefully. They belonged to the same order as the knowledge concerning them. They were not brought about through the normal working of those things we see about us, but by the special act, the determining will, of God. Apart from this they could not happen. If God thus intervened by his mighty power to bring to pass things that would be otherwise impossible, then the tremendous events which the seers were now foretelling and which seemed so contrary to expectation — the descent of the Messiah from heaven, the resurrection from the dead, the assembling of all mankind for judgment, the burning of the world and the wicked with it, and the creation of a new world for the righteous or the taking of them up into heaven — would surely occur. Here, then, their religious faith found its firm support. With such a basis of confidence an oppressed and impov- erished people could bid defiance to all the powers of this


world or the world beneath. These are the themes of the Jewish apocalyptic.

It is a very striking feature of those Jewish apocalypses which have been committed to writing that they are all pseudonymous. The writers conceal their personal authorship under the name of some accredited prophet or worthy of the past. Such names as Enoch, the Twelve Patriarchs, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezra, are attached to the apocalypses. What is the secret of this self-effacement? It could not have been simply a means of avoiding the danger of identifica- tion which is often so real to the writers among an oppressed people. It must have been mainly for the sake of securing for their messages the credence that attached to the utterances of men who were commonly regarded as special messengers of their God — men who had seen the heavenly things and spoke by the spirit of Jahwe. That is to say, the authors of the Jewish apocalyptic firmly believed that their own utterances were revelations from heaven, visions given by God, and they sought to persuade their readers of the same by attribut- ing their works to men in whom the people already believed. This brings out another very interesting fact related to the production of Jewish apocalyptic. We shall indicate it.

The apocalyptic writings cover, roughly speaking,

a period of time stretching from the second century before Christ to the end of the first Christian century. The events of the times before the captivity were now far back in the past. The common tendency among men to idealize the past was accentuated among the Jews of these later days through the contrast with their former

A pocalypticism 2 1

condition. Those patriotic statesmen of the former days who gave a moral interpretation of Israel's history and attempted to direct the policy of the state by their forecasts of coming changes were now among the national heroes. They had foretold the things that had come to pass. They were inspired of Jahwe. They had had visions of the heavenly things. The things which eye saw not and ear heard not and which entered not into the heart of the common man had been revealed to them. If the prophets had foretold the things which had already come to pass, why should they not also have foretold the things which were even yet to come ? And so the new seers, believing that they too had visions given them by God, disclaimed all honor for themselves and ascribed their experiences to the acknowledged sages of the past in order to establish the hearts of the people in the confidence that the things which they had seen in vision were really about to occur. This use of the works of the ancient prophets was possible through the collection of their writings by the learned and devout scribes of the people. They had not hesitated to attach the names of known prophets to writings whose authorship was unknown in order to preserve those works and secure for the whole body of the collected writings the veneration that would insure the loyal obedience of the people. That is to say, the scribes had already made a virtual canon of scripture, a collection of the utterances of men whose word was the word of God, the words of men who were given a knowledge inaccessible to others. Jewish Apocalypticism leans for support upon a canon of inspired scripture.

We may now briefly summarize the results of our study to this point. First, Jewish Apocalypticism is an


outcome of the doctrine of a dual world, the earth and the heaven above the earth. There was also a shadowy underworld obscurely related to the heaven, but like it in that it was ordinarily invisible. Secondly, it was a doctrine of the predetermination of all events by the irresistible decretive will of God, a doctrine of divine predestination. Thirdly, it was a doctrine of human knowledge of future events by means of supernatural vision, a theory of the knowledge of the invisible.

Fourthly, it was a universalistic interpretation of human history in contrast with the narrower nationalism of the ancient prophets, and it thereby carried with it the enfranchisement of the individual. Finally, Apoca- lypticism offered a moral interpretation of all human history. Everything was viewed from the standpoint of a universal and final day of judgment (the idea of a canon of inspired scripture is intimately associated with Apocalypticism, but is not essential to it). If these things are so, Apocalypticism, so far from being a degen- erate offspring of prophetism, was the very flower of prophetism and brings the era of Jewish prophecy to a close.

3. APOCALYPTICISM IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

We turn once more to the Pe trine confession. The pronouncement that Jesus was the Messiah, while it did not determine which of the many different views that were current in Jewish apocalyptic was to become the Christian view, did finally interpret the mission of Jesus through the general apocalyptical view of the world and of human life. Apocalyptic became the native air in which early Christianity lived and breathed. It pro-

Apocalypticism 23

vided for the new age the answer to the question of the meaning of the career of Jesus, his relation to the all- determining will of God, and his relation to the destiny of mankind universally. Apocalyptic became for Jewish believers, and to a large extent for generations of gentile believers after them, the determinate mode of expressing the Christian faith. So closely do the cast of thought in the Jewish apocalyptic and the prevailing thought in the New Testament coincide that to the reader who is unacquainted with the Jewish Apocrypha, and whose knowledge of these ancient people is drawn wholly from the Old and the New Testament, it must have seemed, as he read the foregoing account of the character of Jewish Apocalypticism, that it was derived directly from the New Testament.

The books of our New Testament came almost entirely, if not altogether, from the hands of Jewish believers in the messiahship of Jesus, and they are addressed to readers most of whom are presupposed to be familiar with Jewish thought. So far as the general type of thought is concerned, nothing stands out more prominently than the fact of our having before us there a Christian recast of the Jewish apocalyptic. This is a matter that claims our attention somewhat in detail.

First of all, the New Testament is thoroughly charged with the consciousness of the contrast between two worlds, heaven and earth (with also a vague recognition

of a real lower world different from both) . The contrast turns in favor of the heaven. The interest and hope of believers are concentrated there. The presence and activity of God on earth and among men do not alter the fact that he is pre-eminently in heaven. The words


of the invocation so dear to all Christendom make it indisputable: "Our father which art in heaven, hal- lowed be thy name." From thence came the Christ to earth and thither he has returned, to come a second time. Whether it be Matthew or Paul or John who speaks, it is the same. The conception is more or less realistic in all, and the very foundation of the Christian hope seems at times to lie there. Believers' expectations of future blessedness are made to depend on the reality of that heaven, for they hope to be raised from their graves or to ascend from the surface of the earth at the coming of Christ to be with him— though this is not the invariable way of putting it, and sometimes the language seems to be symbolic rather than literally descriptive.

The denizens of these worlds are clearly distinguished, and for the most part easily recognized. Angels of God from heaven frequently appeared to the sight of believing men, speaking to them, assisting them in their tasks or ministering to their comfort and well-being. Demons from the lower world were also banefully active everywhere, afflicting men with ills or deceiving and beguiling them into sin — though there are no references to their visibility. Life is sometimes represented as a constant battle with these hidden foes, for while their home was in the underworld their operations were on the earth or even in the heights above where the good angels are. Hence the moral conflicts in which men were engaged might appear as pitched battles with monstrous spiritual forces in the higher regions. As Paul puts it— "Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world- rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of

A pocalypticism 2 5

wickedness in the heavenly places." What a dignity and grandeur was thereby attached to our human, moral struggles ! Jesus had the angels of God at his command, and to him and his followers they rendered service. It will not do to call this mere religious rhetoric, for in those times it all seemed very real.

So profoundly impressed were these first-century believers with the reality of their heritage in that higher world that the hope of the messianic kingdom, which

they had inherited from the Jews, was conceived no longer, after the manner of the prophets, as growing up out of better moral conditions on the earth, but as the expectation of a city-state that should descend to earth out of the skies after the evil world had been destroyed. The imagery of the New Testament, when these themes are discussed, is most impressive. For vividness and magnificence these portrayals have never been excelled. And no wonder, because the stake was the most momentous possible. No effort was spared to excite and sustain the expectation of a speedy apocalypse of the Redeemer from on high. Striking references to this hope are found almost everywhere. We quote a single passage from one of the letters of Paul: "For our citizenship is in heaven: from whence also we look for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things to himself."

When we turn to the accounts of the manner in which the gospel was proclaimed from the first the apocalyptical cast of thought is equally manifest. Visions, dreams, voices, and visitants from the heavenly realm are

26 What Is Christianity ?

frequent accompaniments of the early preaching. These were the seals of the divine authority of the message. Thus it is no cause of surprise if the conceptions, convictions, and reasonings of the speakers and writers were often viewed by them as direct impartations from heaven and incomparably higher in worth than the natural thoughts of men. In what other way was it open to them to affirm that they believed that the new life they were living was itself the life divine? The question which would trouble us today — how such things were psychologically possible — seems never to have occurred to them. The nearest they came to it was by referring their higher thoughts to the inner working of the Spirit of God on their minds. Many pages might be filled with quotations illustrative of the Apocalypticism of the New Testament writers. A few references must suffice.

If we turn to the accounts of the birth of Jesus, we find the occurrences connected with it represented as the outcome of action from a higher divine world and not from the human will itself. For example, Matthew says : "Now the birth of Jesus was on this wise: when his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit." Then passing to Joseph's situation he adds: "But when he thought on these things, behold an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, . . . ." And so the account continues. Magi from the East are guided to the young child by a moving star, and they

return to their country by a different route because of a warning from God by a dream. By a dream Joseph is directed to take the child to Egypt, by a dream he is told by an angel to return, and by a dream he is warned to go

A pocalypticism 2 7

to Galilee. This is the manner in which the early Chris- tians expressed their confidence that Jesus had come to the world by the predetermining will of God, and that the earthly events pertaining thereto had been similarly ordered by God. In Luke's account the representations of heavenly intervention are even more vivid. Angelic messengers, divine inspirations, voices from the sky, signalize the advent of the expected Messiah. Or if we turn to the accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are equally impressed with the vigor of the apocalypses. Earthquakes, appearings of the dead to the living, the deeds and words of heavenly angels, startling appearings of Jesus himself, attest the truth of the faith in him and prove the supernatural character of his mission. Or, again, if we take the accounts of his ministry, they are studded with occurrences of intervention from another world. A notable instance' is the transfigura- tion. We quote from Mark:

And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter and James and John and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his gar- ments became glistering, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth can whiten them. And there appeared unto them Elijah and Moses; and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answereth

and saith unto Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here

And there came a cloud overshadowing them; and there came a voice out of the cloud: This is my beloved Son: hear ye him. And suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more, save Jesus only with themselves.

This manner of narration is quite generally characteristic of the whole of the accounts of Jesus' career. They are cast in the mold of a belief in heavenly apocalypses. Everything is conceived miraculously. Now, to remove


the miraculous elements from the story is to rob it of its peculiar power. It is not for us to seek to modernize these narratives by excising the overt interventions. That would be an act of violence destructive of the peculiar merits of the gospel records. While these accounts would sound very artificial if produced in our times, they were entirely natural to the minds of religious

men in those times.

It is, therefore, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of those times that Jesus should commonly express his mind in the forms of apocalyptic. There is scarcely an utterance of his of any length which does not embrace apocalyptical elements, and it is just what we might expect when we find him offering his disciples startling and impressive apocalyptical discourses before he suffered. As elsewhere, wars, pestilences, cleaving heavens, falling stars, visible descent of the Son of Man from heaven, and the judgment of the world are outstanding features. The great Apocalypse of John which stands at the end of our canon is, in its general spirit and mode of utterance, quite in harmony with the remainder of the Jewish material in our New Testament. It is a paean of coming triumph for Christians over their oppressive foes and the unseen forces of the regions of Evil. This concatena- tion of visions demonstrates the unconquerableness of the primitive faith. Taking for granted the dualistic cosmology, the belief that happenings on earth were pre- determined by heavenly enactments, the belief that disclosures of the future outworking of the divine will are made to men through supernatural means, and the assurance that Jesus was the appointed King of the ages bound to overthrow the power of evil in the world, it is difficult

Apocalypticism 29

to conceive a more effective vindication of the early Christian faith than this book offers.

It would not be well to pass to later periods of Chris- tian history without pointing out that the New Testa- ment contains many elements of a different character from the Jewish apocalyptic. As the Christian gospel was carried into distant portions of the Roman Empire and beyond, it met types of spirituality very different from the Jewish. The spirit of the Graeco-Roman philosophy of religion, especially in Gnosticism, and the Roman conception of world-government were mighty forces to be reckoned with by any propaganda that sought to become world-wide. The Christian gospel had to adjust itself to the new demands these made upon it and proved its world-dominating power by so doing. We shall speak later of the manner in which this was accomplished. It is sufficient at this point simply to state that already with New Testament times this work of assimilating ethnic spirituality had begun. The writings of Paul and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews are evidences. But it should be noted that even in those portions where the ethnic spirit is manifest the spirit of the apocalyptic survives and mingles with the other. We see it in the Pauline letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians. The writer, with all his ideas of the imma- nence of the divine and with his readiness to make use of

the Gnostic cosmology, still thinks very largely in the terms of the Jewish apocalyptic. We see it in the Gospel of John, where the high mysticism and spirituality of the writer have not yet led him to abandon Apocalypticism. We see it also in Hebrews, where Alexandrian philosophy with all its allegorism has not succeeded in doing away


with a literal heaven above the earth, the actual ascent of Jesus into it, and his future real descent. We conclude, therefore, our study of the early Christain interpretation of Christianity by saying that, so far as the books of the New Testament disclose it to us, that interpretation is throughout prevailingly apocalyptical.

4. APOCALYPTICISM IN CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT CREEDS

An account of the influence of this interpretation of Christianity upon the life and thought of the ancient Greek church, the mediaeval Roman church, and modern Protestant churches, together with the controversies and divisions connected with the struggle between it and successive modernizations of it, would fill a volume. We must content ourselves with little more than a bare mention of those features of it which have persisted among the majority of Christians.

It was not possible that the peoples of the Near East with their native spirit of piety of the metaphysical or mystical sort should, on becoming Christians, immediately abandon that which had been sewn into their natures for centuries so as to become the warp and woof of their inner life and that Jewish Apocalypticism should be substituted for it. That would be an act of violence. Neither was it possible for the great church which was growing up and seeking to justify its claim to be the true and sole heir to the Christian tradition either to repudiate the early apocalyptic or rewrite it. The only thing that was possible if the church was to maintain its claims and retain all classes of believers within its bosom was that the traditional apocalyptic and the new philosophy should be written down together without an attempt to

A pocalypticism 3 1

reconcile them or an acknowledgment that a reconciliation was needed. The retention of the primitive apocalyptic was all the more imperative since there was a growing belief that the writings of apostolic men were new "scriptures" and therefore an authoritative declaration of truth, a law of faith for all time. Thus it came about that when the church drew up her creed the new philosophy and the old interpretation of the apocalyp-

ticists were placed side by side. In all the successive developments of the Nicene Creed of the ancient Catholic church there is reiterated the confession of the expectation that Jesus Christ who had " ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the Father" was to "come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." It is also affirmed: "I look for the resurrection of the dead," which is presently interpreted to mean, "the resurrection of the body," so as to set aside positively all spiritualiza- tions of that portion of the creed.

When the Western church became Roman it was still farther from possibility that the apocalyptical interpretation should suffice. For the church had now consciously assumed the burden of responsibility for the task of renovating by normal means the very world of whose future Apocalypticism had despaired. Yet the Roman church was compelled, equally with the Greek church, to retain the ancient apocalyptical confession. But this Apocalypticism was no dead letter of the law of faith in this instance. On the contrary, it became a powerful instrument for impressing the popular mind with the transcendent worth of the moral implications of the Christian faith. The approach of the day of universal


judgment, the resurrection of the dead in the body, the irrevocable sentence to heaven or hell, became the ground of those mighty appeals to the imagination and the conscience which have enabled the Roman church to hold its millions in leash. At the same time, also, the idea of a spiritual, miraculous, and exclusive communication of truth to chosen men became an instrument for fastening upon the people the claims of the church to obedience.

Protestantism, with its biblicism and its insistence upon the restoration of the primitive faith in its purity, opened the door to a fuller restoration of Apocalypticism than Romanism permitted. It is true that the Prot- estant insistence upon the sole authority of the Scrip- tures has prevented a recrudescence among Protestants, to any appreciable extent, of the visions and trances that were so deeply cherished by Catholic pietists, but it logically demanded the restoration of the whole primitive view of things. That it did not commonly go so far among Protestants was owing to the strength of their moral convictions and their practical good sense. Never- theless it did pave the way for a repeated recrudescence of millenarianism with its pessimistic view of the world. From this Protestantism still suffers in many quarters, but, on the whole, it is to be said that Protestants have been content to use only those portions of ancient apocalyptic which were the main basis of the Catholic appeal

to the minds of the people, namely, the factual represen- tation of the coming, the ascent, and the return of Jesus (in the distant future), the day of judgment, the resurrection, the end of the world, and a literal heaven and hell. In one other respect Apocalypticism persists among

Apocalypticism 33

Protestants. Their repudiation of an immanent authority in the church in favor of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures tended to establish in the Protestant churches the view that the saving truth of religion is communicated to men through supranatural channels of transmission which are not to be subjected to the canons of our ordinary thinking. It is only in recent times that this feature of Apocalypticism has been giving way.

5. VALUE OF APOCALYPTICISM

We shall conclude the discussion of our subject with an estimate. Apocalypticism as an interpretation of Christianity has a fourfold merit: First, it affirms the reality of an unseen world. In this it makes response to a profound longing of the human heart. For among all enlightened peoples who have reflected deeply on the meaning of life, the transitory nature of the goods of this present world and their failure to satisfy the deepest longings of the heart have become proverbial. The spirit of man longs for the eternal and unchangeable, the city which has foundations, the things that cannot be shaken, whose goods, once attained, are ours forever. Such a world, if destined to be ours, would not only secure for us release from the pangs of failure and dis- appointment here, but the expectation of it would impart a spirit of resignation in the midst of present distresses. The records of Christian piety abound in proofs of this ministry of Apocalypticism. The persecuted in all the Christian centuries have borne unequivocal testimony to the sustaining power of the confidence in the reality of that better world. The belief in the reality of the visions men have had of that world has aided the minds of the


unreflecting to reach an experience of peace, in striking contrast to the restlessness that springs from unaided speculation.

But this has not proved to be an unmixed good. The low estimate of this present world by contrast has often led to a disparagement of the common tasks of life, a lack of sympathy for those whose lot is inextricably bound to material things, and a generally pessimistic and censori- ous spirit. Earth is too often regarded only in its con-

trast with a heaven, and man only in his contrast with God. In its theory of the higher knowledge Apocalypti- cism exhibits another weakness. For by its depreciation of our ordinary thinking on religious subjects and its reference of all divine truth to supranatural means of communication open, as a matter of fact, to the favored few only, it has tended to the creation of a religious aristocracy and to a depreciation of scientific investiga- tion and philosophic inquiry. Where Apocalypticism has flourished there has been almost invariably a corresponding low estimate of the value of the native working of our minds and a shrinking from the severer tasks of learning. In short, by its predication of two separate worlds and its claims to a supranatural knowledge Apoc- alypticism tends to bisect our human life, to destroy its unity, and to make a free natural communion between God and man impossible.

Secondly, Apocalypticism has the merit of affirming a purposive, divine government of the world. It lifts the whole of human life above the realm of chance. It leaves no room for fatalism or the idea that the course of the world is a meaningless round of happenings. More- over, it attaches a dignity to human affairs by holding

Apocalypticism 35

that in the midst of all complexity and seeming confusion there is an end toward which all moves, and therefore there is order. Hence also the power of foresight and predetermination so characteristic of men is recognized as of like nature with the supreme power in the universe. There is therefore a dignity attached to human actions both good and bad.

But this merit of Apocalypticism is seriously com- promised by its conception of the manner in which this divine end is attained. The world is supposed to be controlled from without, and its history has too arbitrary a character to permit us a reasoned view of its course. If the natural course of things is to be subjected, without warning, to interference from without, and nature's laws either do not exist as laws or they may be set aside at any time by fiat from on high, then the mode of the divine government of the world is contrary to that which now commends itself to us in political circles as worthy of our allegiance today.

Thirdly, Apocalypticism by its picture of a great judgment day stands for the supremacy and finality of righteousness in the affairs of men. The expectation of such an event imparts a necessary sternness in the presence of crime. It tends to support the affirmations of the human conscience and to raise the moral powers of our nature to their rightful supremacy. It sets aside as frivolous every theory that tends to belittle the human

personality, and it stamps as damnable every attempt to rob men of their moral initiative and responsibility. It tends, therefore, to confirm and to purify the efforts of civic communities to establish methods of unswerving justice in the government of the people.


On the other hand, it may be doubted whether the postponement of the day of judgment to the distant future does not tend to a legalistic view of our relations to God and to an obscuration of the truth that the execu- tion of divine justice is immanent in human life, that the judgment day is now. It has thus indirectly sup- ported conceptions of salvation that represent it as an unnatural resort to special provisions for escaping at last the consequences of sins. Its views of life are serious, indeed, but not serious enough.

Fourthly, Christian Apocalypticism has the merit of standing for the supreme worth of the personality of Jesus Christ as interpretative of the worth of our human personality and as the divine ideal which is to conquer the world. But by regarding him as coming into our world in unnatural ways from without, as accepting our earthly condition only for an interval and as now occupy- ing a realm altogether different from ours, it is open to the charge of making him appear like an accident in human history, and in the end as having only a partial kinship with us. The outcome must be a loss of confidence in the value of the hope of being like him here.

It becomes a question for the modern Christian how far he may hold to those eternal realities set forth in Apocalypticism, how far he can be Christian and yet decline to be bound by the modes of thought and utterance so largely characteristic of the early Christian believers. Are we not more loyal to Jesus Christ and the faith he gave to men if we set aside as temporary the forms of that faith which cannot commend themselves to our best judgment and sincerest trust and at the same

Apocalypticism 37

time seek to retain and fulfil the spirit of his life than if we regard the spirit as bound to the letter ? Apocalyp- ticism was a natural mode of thought in early Christian days, but has it not become unnatural for our days? Do we not prove false to the inner spirit of Christianity if we continue to retain it ?

6. THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY BY W. H. P. Faunce.

TO define a little and obvious thing is often easy. To define a great and pervasive thing is often so hard as to be impossible. All of us could define, or at least describe, the house-key we carry in our pockets. We hold the shining metal in the hand, we are perfectly familiar with its size, shape, weight, and use. Because it is so small, so definite, so sharply limited, so useless for all purposes save one, we can define the key. So we could define the house to which the key admits us — possibly forty feet by thirty, and three stories high. But when we try to define the family that dwells within the house, to define the heredity which binds the children to their parents, to set forth the nature 13

14 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN?

of parental affection and filial obligation and the relation of the family to the conservation of the state — at once we are moving among magnitudes too big for our little formulas, forces so impalpable and spiritual that they " break through language and escape." A realization of this difficulty has led many writers in recent years to adopt an agnostic, or at least a " positive " point of view, in dealing with the deeper problems of life. Our modern literature is all centrifugal — it flees from any central reality, and is quite content to touch a few points on the outer rim of things. It has reacted from the bold syntheses of former generations, and on the really great problems it is significantly silent. Our historians modestly narrate events, but are loath to pronounce on causes and tendencies and destinies. Our geologists will tell us of the strata in any region and of the obvious work of erosion; but about the origin or purpose or meaning of the physical globe they are deliberately dumb. Our

THE. ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 15

students of international law tell us what the custom of modern nations has been and is, — as to what it ought to be, as to ideals of diplomacy, they have little to say.

Even our school books reflect the change. The tremendous inquiry that startled the childhood of Robert Louis Stevenson, " What is the whole duty of man?" has vanished from our education, in favor of questions about the number of pennyweights in an ounce or the pints in a gallon — that startle and summon nobody. The old-fash- ioned school geography began in de- ductive fashion with a definition of the globe on which we live, its shape and size, and later proceeded to discuss localities around the pupil's home. The new geographies have reacted from all that. They often start with a description of the child's door-yard; then they consider the village street, then the city, the state, the nation; but long before the pupil reaches any thought of the world as a whole, the end of the term has arrived and the

1 6 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN?

study is over. Modern knowledge has been so subdivided and partitioned off that no one worker can see the whole realm, and each is very shy about any opinion as to the meaning of the whole. Each of our many sciences shrinks from the central questions of life, clings to its little garden-plot, and conscien- tiously evades the thing the world most longs to know.

Now it is the peculiar gift and glory of religion that it deals with the meaning of life as a whole. It will not identify itself with any particular occupa- tion, or science, or art. It has a message for fishermen and for philosophers; for oriental rabbis and for " Caesar's household. " It can flourish under Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy, in the cornfields of Galilee or the

purlieus of imperial Rome. " This thing was not done in a corner," and it refuses to stay in any corner of human life. It declines to be modest — modesty belongs to the part and not to the whole of things — and deliberately intends to inherit the earth. It

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 17

is not an additional piece of furniture to be thrust into an already crowded room; it is the inflowing sunshine that shows us the use and value of all the furniture we have long possessed. It refuses to concern itself mainly with the characteristic question of science: What is the fact? and passes to the vastly deeper question: What is of abiding significance and value?

Hence to define so vast and vital a power as Christianity, so world-shaking an innovation, may be quite beyond our abilities. Happily for us we do not have to define Christianity before we can live by it — any more than we have to define the X-ray before we can use it. Yet a definition is always a help, both because it clears away wrong conceptions, and so wrong uses, of any power, and because it makes us feel at home with a power on which our lives may depend. What, then, is Christianity?

I. It is not ritual. All the early forms of religion current among sav- age or barbarous tribes, consist chiefly


of ceremonies, incantations, and mag- ical rites. A vast amount of natural magic everywhere preceded spiritual faith. Certain objects, stones fallen from the sky, poles graven with sacred symbols, certain ceremonies, such as bathing in a special place, or eating special food, certain forms of speech used by the forefathers in the crises of life — all these seemed to possess an intrinsic efficacy to ward off evil, or to win the favour of the deity. Of course

such beliefs were sheer superstition, since they are a clear denial of the law of cause and effect. Yet they still survive amid all the lights of civilization, and penetrate every stratum of society. The man who will not begin a journey on Friday, or will not occupy a room bearing the number thirteen, is denying that effects are really due to causes. He believes they are due to magic. The man who wears an amulet to ward off disease is denying all modern science and all Christian faith, and asserting his irrational belief in the magic power of a

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 1$

bit of stone or metal. Both rational and spiritual religion affirm that no material object carried in the pocket or worn next the skin can possibly affect the spiritual life of man for weal or woe. But superstition — belief without evidence — disregards both science and religion, and remains a bun- dle of foolish fears and futile hopes.

Religion has never entirely extri- cated itself from this belief in the magic power of material things or set forms of speech. Multitudes of excellent people still hold to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius or the healing power of the bones of St. Anne's wrist. Multitudes still believe that an infant dying before some ceremonial has been performed over it is a lost child, or that a dying man is somehow not sure of eternal bliss unless some anointing is performed by an authorized official. Many men have journeyed to the Jordan that they might bathe in its sacred waters. Others even in our own time treasure bits of olive-wood from Gethsemane or


stones from Calvary, with the childish hope that in some mysterious fashion " virtue " will come out of the wood or the stone that Christ once touched.

Of course the use of these things simply as symbols or memorials is fully justified. So a man may carry with him the photograph of a dead father, simply to refresh his memory and keep him in constant touch with happy days that are no more. So the wife wears her marriage ring, and the soldier carries aloft his banner, and the college uses its seal. So family heir- looms are handed down from father to son, and the old silver plate of a past generation is worth far more to us than its weight in sterling metal untouched by those whom we revered and loved.

So religion may and must have her symbolic objects, as the cross, the crown, the dove, the letters I.H.S. They rivet attention, they utter much in little, they are a kind of shorthand by means of which we can pack the story of two thousand years into a


little space. But if we imagine that the cross on the church spire will save the building from the lightning, or the making of the sign of the cross over a dying man will affect his spiritual status, we have perverted the symbols of religion into the tools of credulity and superstition. The marriage ring may and does help the wife to remember her vows, and remembering, to keep them. But the ring itself has no intrinsic efficacy in the soul of woman- hood; it cannot work apart from her consciousness and volition. The paint- ing of doves in the chancel of the church may help the devotion of the people, but cannot insure the presence of the eternal Spirit. No physical object is of any spiritual value save as by using it a man enters into new desire and will. Persons may use things, but things cannot save persons.

This principle holds in all symbolic action. The putting on of the uniform cannot create the soldier. The don- ning of cap and gown cannot make


the scholar. First there must be an inside, an experience, — then we can have an outside, a symbolic garb. Doubtless the academic garb does help scholarship. But the garb is primarily effect, and not cause.

The application of water to the body as the symbol of the cleansing and purification of the soul is as old as history. All oriental lands are filled with ceremonial washings. Moham- medan, Buddhist, Brahmin, living in hot climates, find the washing away of dust from the body the inevitable expression of the renunciation of sin. Christianity, originating in the Orient, laid hold of the same natural and beautiful symbolism. John the Baptist summoned all Judea to a physical rite as " meet for repentance," and Jesus found it natural to bow in the waters of the Jordan. While Jesus declined himself to baptize anyone (as Paul seems to have usually declined) yet his disciples went everywhere baptizing the nations. Obviously some of those disciples confused the outward act with

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 2$

the spiritual conversion. Such phrases as " Baptism doth now save us," or " Arise and wash away thy sins," are surely phrases Jesus himself would not have used. The only worship he required was worship in spirit and in truth. Controversies about the mode of baptism, however interesting historically, do not touch the central problem. The real question is this: Can the application of water in any form, to any person, by any person, in itself cleanse the soul from evil? Can baptism usher a man into heaven, or insure present acceptance with God? He who answers " yes " to that question thereby breaks with all the teachings of science and all the deeper meanings of religion. He is returning to paganism, with its naive trust in the offering of beast and bird, or in

the vain repetition of prescribed words. So primitive Christianity availed itself of the universal symbolism of a common meal. To eat together always has been, always will be, the outward and visible sign of the commun-


ion of spirits. It may greatly assist such communion. But to believe that without such an outward and visible sign the highest communion with our fellows and with God is impossible, to hold that grace is locked up in the bread and wine and is otherwise inaccessible — that is belief in magic, and thus is far removed from Christian faith. Ritual acts are natural, often beautiful, sometimes necessary; but they are never rigid, stereotyped, coercive. None of them can be of per- petual validity. In the presence of any form that would forever enchain the conscience we must say as St. Paul daringly said of the most sacred ceremony of his race: " Circumcision is nothing."

No ritual act, even the most appro- priate and venerable, can ever take rank with a moral and spiritual act. The obligation to love our enemies is eternal, written in the soul of man, though never fully realized till Jesus made it articulate in his teachings. But an obligation to use wine or bread


or water in a certain way is not dis- coverable in the soul of any man, is not eternal, and our only knowledge of such an obligation comes from a very few ancient passages about whose translation there is much dispute. The teaching of Jesus about God and prayer and forgiveness and the social order and eternal life is so abundant that no textual or historical criticism can ever weaken it in the slightest degree. The teaching of Jesus about ritual is confined to two occasions in his life, and the reports that have

reached us are so various as to con- fuse the most loyal followers and give rise to nineteen hundred years of controversy. Three facts regarding all Christian ceremonial stand out clear and sharp:

(1) No ritual act can change the soul of man, but it is the soul of man that alone gives value to the ritual act. (2) No command to perform a ritual act can ever rank with the command to maintain spiritual attitudes and relations, since one is written on


parchment, while the other is written in the conscience of all men. (3) No ritual can ever remain in its exact original form, since we can never be sure exactly what that form was. We may have changed the hour of cele- bration of the communion supper, may have changed the number of cups used, the posture of the communicants, the nature of the wine. But the exact form of any ceremony cannot be essential to him who believes that it is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profit- eth nothing.

Christianity has its ritual acts, sanc- tioned by its founder, made venerable by history, rich with memory and sug- gestion. We need them, for we are flesh as well as spirit. A religion of pure thought or pure feeling may be enough for angels, but not for us. We dwell in the realm of the visible, the natural, the symbolic, and for us the word must become flesh. But Chris- tianity is not ritual; and if through some failure of translation or transmission it should lose every shred of

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 2J

its original ceremonies, it would straightway create new forms and carve new physical channels for its spiritual and eternal message.

2. Christianity is not a series of

propositions. It is not intellectual assent to a logical conclusion. Chris- tianity is not a philosophy of the unseen; it is not an articulated creed. Here we come against the oldest and most persistent of heresies, and in dealing with it we need clear discrimination.

Of course Christianity has a creed. Every great experience of humanity is capable of rational interpretation. It can be thought out, and must be thought out, if it is to be held as valid for all men everywhere. The repudiation of theology is the repudiation of intelligence, for theology is simply the religious experience analyzed, traced back to its causes, brought into relation to the historical and natural order of the world. The simple faith of the fishermen of Galilee was quite sufficient for Galileans. But it could never


have conquered Antioch and Rome and Alexandria, had it not been translated into Greek forms of thought by the Apostle Paul. To him it was not enough to see the blinding light on the road to Damascus and be convicted of sin. At once his intelligence demanded " Who art thou, Lord? " and soon in the silence of Arabia he was thinking out the logical implications and sequences of his great spiritual upheaval. A Christianity which is incapable of intellectual formulation and rational defence is surely an illusion. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind " as well as with all thy heart.

Yet it remains true in the life of the individual and the race, that religion comes before theology, as stars come before astronomy, as flowers before botany. Theology is the effect, religion the cause. We must have the religious experience before we can ex- plicate and vindicate it in proposi- tional form. And millions of men have had that mighty inner experience, that


opening of the soul to God, who are totally unable to translate it into a satisfactory creed.

If Christianity were creed, surely somewhere in the New Testament we should find a compact and convenient credal formula, the signing of which might give one admission to the King- dom of Heaven. But the New Testa- ment seems wholly indifferent to any such formula. It is definite and urg-- ent on questions of duty. It has explicit directions for slaves and their masters, for parents and children, for bishops and deacons. But as to the theological questions that form the backbone of the creeds of the church the New Testament is eloquently silent— either the writers have little knowledge or little interest.

If Christianity were creed, then orthodoxy would mean Christ-likeness, and those men and women who are most sound in the faith would be most unselfish and generous in character. But history shows no such constant relation of theology to life. The


heretics in every communion have often been the most lovable of men. Granted that their theory was wrong, their hearts were right, and pectus est quod facit theologum.

If Christianity were creed, we should be forced to believe that eternal bliss depends for every man on his possessing a logical mind, and so arriv- ing at a set of correct opinions. " Whosoever will be saved/' says the creed of Athanasius, " before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catho- lic faith. . . . And the Catholic faith is this, that we worship . . . neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. "

But such teaching is not only without support in Scripture or Christian

character, it is directly opposed to all Scripture and all experience. ' What doth the Lord thy God require of thee," cries the Hebrew prophet, " but to do justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?" "Come, ye blessed," says Christ in his picture of the last judgment, " for I was an


hungered and ye gave me meat." Opinions are the offspring of varying temperament, growing apprehension, changing environment. It is impossible that a believer in the Copernican system of astronomy should interpret the ascension of Christ, when " he went up into heaven and a cloud received him out of their sight," in the same way as a believer in the Ptolemaic idea that the earth is the centre of the sky. It is impossible that the idea of demoniacal possession should mean the same thing to Simon Peter on the one hand and to the devout Christian Louis Pasteur on the other. The " spirit of 1776 " was a vital reality long before it crystallized into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The spirit of Jesus controlling the hearts of men was a vital power long before Chalcedon or Nicaea, and will survive the disappearance of all the formulas of all the councils. Chris- tianity has a creed, but Christianity is not creed.


3. Christianity is not history. The Christian faith indeed entered the world at a definite time and place and took its position in the historic order. If the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, it must have had a birthday and a birthplace. If it is expressed through a crucifixion, a resurrection, a Pentecostal assembly, a series of mis- sionary journeys, a conquest of the Roman Empire, surely these things must historically condition it. No faith can remain forever in the clouds.

Its visions must become concrete in human action, and its spirit unfold in the institutions of society. The history of Christianity is the most important section of the history of the world.

But if the Christian faith be for each of us dependent on historical study, then for most of us Christian certainty has departed. Few men are competent to undertake such study, fewer still have the time, and none of us can postpone the Christian life until the results of our historical investigations are complete. Thirty years of


special study would hardly suffice to enable a man to give an expert opinion on the historicity and genuineness of the books of the New Testament. Meanwhile what becomes of a man's religious faith? Was the closing chapter of Mark's gospel a part of the original document, or did the Revised Version rightly question its right to hold its place? Was the great com- mission, with its fully developed trini- tarian formula, uttered by our Lord in exactly its present form? Was Paul ignorant of the story of the virgin birth, or did he designedly ignore it? These are questions of exceeding interest and importance, on which final truth may not be reached for many generations, and on which no demon- stration can ever be reached by any human mind. History deals with the contingent and the probable, never with the demonstrated and indubitable. The sure conclusions of mathematics are possible only when we retire from the real world of men and things and deal with imaginary quantities and


ideal relations. History knows no certainty, but only greater or less prob- ability.

But religion is a dream unless it can give the soul of man a joyous cer-

tainty that his deepest trust shall not be put to shame. A religious faith which depends absolutely on a doubt- ful reading in an ancient manuscript, a faith which is bound up with the question whether a fish could swallow a man, or whether dead men actually rose and walked about in Jerusalem at the time of our Lord's crucifixion — such a faith is necessarily contingent, uncertain, timorous. It is never sure of itself until it has heard of the latest discovery in Egypt or Assyria, never at peace until it has read the morning paper. It is made anxious by any new interpretation of the narratives in Genesis, becomes angry at the sugges- tion of documents to be found in the Pentateuch, and cannot tolerate any discussion of the going back of the sun's shadow on the dial of Ahaz. Such a faith is at the mercy of all his-


torical study — or else historical study is at the mercy of such faith.

The great victorious souls of the Christian centuries have not so learned Christ. Augustine's faith was not the result of any acceptance of historical facts, but of a following of the inner voice. Luther's faith was not based on the historicity of the book of Esther, which he condemned as without religious value. Bunyan's faith was not based on ancient or modern history, but on an experience wrought out in his own soul and quite independent of critics high or low. If the plain man is to depend absolutely on our professors of history for his Chris- tianity, he is indeed in evil case. If we revolt from the domination of priests, only to come under the domination of specialists, we have merely exchanged one tyranny for another, with no increase of certainty or joy. Deeper than all questions of ancient texts lies the inexpugnable reality of the life of God in the soul of man. " One thing I know, now I see " — that


is the starting point and foundation of all religion. Christianity has a history, both bright and dark; but Christianity is not history.

4. Christianity is not a series of good deeds to be done or bad deeds to be avoided. Christianity is not morality. Possibly the best example of honest endeavor to achieve character apart from religious impulse and enthusiasm is to be found in the auto- biography of Benjamin Franklin. His sincere laborious efforts at self-improvement by the daily practice of detached virtues are naYve and instructive. He conceived character as made up of certain common-sense virtues, which he desired to possess or to possess more fully. It never occurred to him, apparently, that the springs of action needed to be touched by any power coming from the unseen. That a human soul could be transformed by a great consecration, that it could be bathed in any tide of spiritual emotion, and energized by a divine impulsion — all that was outside the


purview of the " religion of common- sense " which flourished in the eight- eenth century. Rather to the men of that period religion was a highly rationalized system of ethics, and the way to inner peace was through raising oneself by sheer dead-lift into vir- tuous habits. Hence he devised that famous list of thirteen distinct virtues, each one to be practised for a week, and at the end of thirteen weeks the treadmill round to begin again. Thus in the fifty-two weeks that made up the year he could go four times over those thirteen cardinal virtues, giving to each separate virtue four separate weeks of assiduous practice within the year. The virtues were arranged by him in order of difficulty, and the last two in the list were chastity and humility. Certainly those two virtues were never attained by any human being through such a self-conscious

process. A little knowledge of either psychology or religion would show us that those virtues, like all the others, are attained not by self-polishing, but


by surrender of self to some higher vision or nobler inspiration. To get them we must forget them. But Franklin has benefited the world by his confessed failure. He has shown us that the complacency of the practised moralist is not the door to the Kingdom of Heaven, and that he that is least in the realm of self-dedication to a higher power is greater than all the advocates of self-improvement since the world began.

Religion has indeed its moral codes and its commanded virtues. The largest part of the teaching of Jesus is devoted to individual and social duty. The message of the Old Testament prophets is alive with the demand for personal and national righteousness. A large section of nearly every New Testament epistle is given to the establishment of the right relation of man to man. But behind all the scathing arraignments of Amos and Isaiah lies the vision of one " high and lifted up." Behind the Pauline exhor- tation to " steal no more " and to " re-


member the poor" is the declaration: " It is not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me." And behind every command of Jesus to " love one another " is the consciousness: " He that sent me is with me." To the greatest teachers of humanity duty comes not as a list of things to be done or avoided, but as an overwhelming passion for an ideal. The passion for rightness springs up in their souls " like the volcano's tongue of flame, up from the burning core below." Re- ligion has indeed its moral code, but religion is not morality.

What, then, is Christianity? Daring to express it in a single phrase, we may say : Christianity is purpose. It is the revelation of the persistent loving purpose of the eternal God, and the implanting of that same purpose in the life of man.

Again we must remember that no single phrase can hold all the aspects, or reach all the heights and depths of so great a power as Christianity. Any definition we can frame may be partial,


may need much explication and adjust- ment. We shall not catch the whole sunlight in the little mirror where we try to reflect its brightness. Yet the smallest mirror may give back a true image of the sun. And I believe that no truer language can be found to describe the Christian faith than that we have just used: Christianity is the revelation throttgh Jestis of Nazareth of the eternal unchanging purpose of God, and the developing of that same purpose in the lives and institutions of men.

Why do we say this? Simply because the entire life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth affirm it, and he knew what his religion was. The un- varying emphasis of Jesus in all his parables, proverbs, prayers, instruc- tions, is on the attitude, the settled desire, the persistent disposition, the purpose, of men; and the hope of Jesus, for himself and his Kingdom, is "according to the eternal purpose. "

If we would know anything about the essence of Christianity, we must surely go to Christ. The apostles after

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 4*

him could translate and expound and amplify in the languages and phi- losophies of Europe — they could not originate or create. Christ knows what Christianity is. If we are Christians we do not merely believe things about

him ; we believe him. That is, what he held to be right we have by instinctive sympathy adopted; what he repudiated as wrong we have felt to be worthy of repudiation. What he held to be real and vital has become vital and real to us. The great realities of his consciousness are through the Chris- tian experience made real to all his disciples. He is not an authority in astronomy, or archeology, or literature: he is by virtue of his character the supreme authority of the ages on the question what sort of life is worth while. What stood out for him as central, vital, supremely important, is surely the essential element in the Christian religion.

If ritual were central in Christianity, could Jesus have said: "Neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem


shall ye worship, — but in spirit and in truth "? Would he have found greater faith in the Roman centurion than in Israel? Would he have given so meagre directions regarding the sacraments of the church that Protestant and Catholic in their interpretations are still far asunder?

If correct credal statement and belief were central in Christianity, could Jesus have failed to leave behind him some compendium of essential truth?

If history, rightly narrated and believed, is central in Christianity, then Jesus did not himself teach or preach the Christian faith, since the history was not wrought out except through his life and death and the events which immediately followed.*

* One of the most dangerous of heresies is that recently avowed by an orthodox champion, Dr. T. P. Forsyth, in his pungent and paradoxical volume, " The Person and Place of Jesus Christ," where he makes an absolute separation between the faith which Christ held and that which he gave his disciples. He does

not hesitate to represent Christ as "practising one type [of religion] and prescribing another" (p. 51).


If the practice of desirable virtues is Christianity, then Christ's religion is simply an advance on Platonism or Confucianism, and Christ is the suc- cessor and rival of Socrates, not in any sense the " Son of God with power."

But in every fragment of his teaching that has survived Jesus emphasizes the attitude and purpose of men as decisive in character and destiny. He lays enormous stress on the will: " Whosoever willeth to do . . . shall know " — making volition the door into knowledge. He rouses the sluggish and unresolved: " What will ye that I should do unto you?" His only condemnation of the rejected, in the parable of the last judgment, is : " Ye did it not unto one of the least of these

Again he distinguishes sharply between "the religion Christ presented in his vocation, and that which he cherished in his most private soul" (p. 35), and con- cludes : " It is impossible to live the religion of Jesus " (p. 56). Here extreme orthodoxy goes over bodily into the camp of those it most fears and repudiates. If Christ did not teach the Christian faith and live the Christian life, the Christian world must shift its whole allegiance from Christ to Paul or Peter.


my brethren " — where the very variety of duties unperformed (" ye fed me not . . . visited me not," etc.) shows that the evil was the lack of an all- embracing purpose.

Most of his parables are parables inculcating purpose as essential to life. At the close of the story of the Good Samaritan comes the question: " Which was neighbour?" — and forever after neighbourhood became a matter, not of vicinity, but of intention. The Prod- igal Son appears as rescued the moment he sincerely resolves that he will

" arise and go."

Jesus repudiates not the ignorant or poor, not the harlot or the publican, but the malicious and selfish. He is very patient with the " brute-like sins " — those of fleshly appetite, — and scourges the " fiend-like sins " — hate and scorn and pride. He has no list of good deeds to be done or bad ones to be avoided, no manual of moral eti- quette with its series of " don'ts." He drives with immense energy at the centre of the soul. Almost regardless


of what the man has done or may do, he bears down with resistless force on the disposition, the attitude, the intention seated in the citadel of personality. He insists on the inwardness of character, as something far deeper than all its manifestations in posture and garb and gifts to the poor and forms of worship. When he finds the anti-social spirit masquerading behind religious ceremonial, the gentle Naza- rene lifts his " whip of small cords " high in the air. To hard-hearted wor- shippers he thunders: " Leave there thy gift before the altar! First be recon- ciled to thy brother," then talk about religion. All his beatitudes unfold the blessedness, not of conquering or possessing, but of being — of being patient, and merciful, and hungry and pure. What purity involves, when translated into schools of manners and codes of law — on that Jesus has little to say. He leaves the ages to work that out, as one who opens up an overflowing spring may leave others to bottle and label the water. What " merciful "


means, whether it permits the use of animals for food, or for experiment — on that Jesus of course is silent. He emphasizes the disposition, and leaves all details untouched. Who the " peace- makers " are, whether we shall find them now among the Quakers or the

military captains or the inventors — on that question Christ will not help us. He is nobly and instructively vague; or rather he is so persistently central that he will not be diverted to the margin of life.

Some men have imagined that virtue would be greatly advanced if we had in the New Testament a sort of dictionary of conduct, so that we could open at the word " charity " or " amusements " or " politics " and find our duties neatly listed and defined. But no man is inspired or uplifted by perusal of a dictionary. The Bible belongs not to the literature of knowledge, but to the literature of power. Jesus is silent regarding a thousand duties, that he may impart the sense of duty. He lets others catalogue our


sins, while he gives us the realization of sin. He launches his invective at the hardened disposition, he blasts with moral lightning the self-seeking attitude, resolutely commits to the outer darkness the unpitying and anti-social purpose. But he claims for his fellowship the cheating publican who has determined to " restore fourfold," and the sinful woman who will " go and sin no more," and the blundering apostle who can honestly say: "I am ready to go with thee to prison and to death." Not what the man has attained, but whither he is tending, is interesting to Jesus. Not how far a stumbling mortal has risen, but whether he is trying to rise; not what he can show of accomplishment, but what he is struggling to become — this is the test of Jesus.

" What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me."

Now this purposive life, which Jesus inculcates in humanity, is precisely what he reveals as existing in God.


What he wants of us is that we shall become what God forever is. It is a commonplace of our religious literature that Jesus emphasized the Father- hood of God. But fatherhood, as Jesus conceived it, is simply and essentially purpose. " If ye give good gifts unto your children " — in such giving lies the essence of fatherhood. " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth," and that pity creates the fatherhood. The phrase " offspring of God " would have been impossible to Jesus. Not what God did on creation's morning, but what he does and feels to-day makes him our Father. Jesus does not care to go back to the Garden of Eden and repeat the long genealogy: "which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." He says nothing about man's being " created in the image of God." His interest is not in any metaphysical or original relation of God to men, but in God's present, gracious, beneficent attitude. When we say: "I believe in God the Father Almighty," we


really say: "I believe that eternal beneficent purpose is at the heart of the world. " Fatherhood is established, not by the first chapter of Genesis, but by the Sermon on the Mount and the fourteenth chapter of St. John. It is not a philosophical theorem, but a religious insight.

It is against this eternal background of loving purpose in God that Jesus holds up before us a life of loving purpose as the thing supremely worth while for men. Everywhere Jesus insists that the purpose which he re- quires of his disciples, and which he cherishes in himself, is identical with the eternal purpose of the Father. In one breath Jesus demands that his disciples shall follow him, and in the next he declares that he is at one with God. " If ye love me keep my com- mandments " is followed by the declaration: "I do always those things that please him." The duty of the Chris-

tian to be Christ-like is thus founded on the declaration of the Christ-likeness of God. Men are to enter into


the secret of Christ just because Christ- likeness is central in God. If God sent forth Jesus, then God must be as good as Jesus is — that is the conviction that has revolutionized the moral world. When men looked at Jesus they began to say: "God is not Baal, or Moloch, or Zeus, or Mars, not a tyrant, or a government official, or a celestial ac- countant — he gave us Jesus and he must be as good as his gift." We may readily admit that there were things Jesus did not know, for his biographers affirm it. We may con- fess that a thousand problems that now puzzle us he never faced. Yet in the single short Galilean life we see the divine quality, and quality is all that counts. Looking at the daily attitudes of Jesus, we can say: "God must be like that!" and at the same instant we say: "That is what we must become! "

Beholding Jesus touching the eyes of the blind men, weeping at the grave of Lazarus, scourging the hypocrites, driving out the money-changers, bless-


ing little children, we see the characteristic quality of God; but we see also what should be characteristic in human life. What Jesus commanded, that he himself was. But what he was for thirty-three brief years in a single far-away province, that — as good as that — God must be throughout all ages. Those brief years are as a little rift in the clouds, through which we get a glimpse of the blue firmament beyond. The rift was small and soon was closed again. But we know the sky which overarches all is of the same color and quality as the little patch of blue that was visible. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." The

language may stumble in which we try to say it; the cumbrous nomenclature of the historic creeds we may utterly reject, as Saul's heavy armour was rejected by the stripling David. But somehow — say it in whatever phrases you will — the great all-conquering assurance of Christianity is that in quality and temper, in undying sympathy and purpose, what Christ was God


is. And then follows that great illumi- nation of life, that vision which, once seen, never departs: the religion of Jesus is nothing more and nothing less than the revealing of the purpose which is eternally in the life of God, and the implanting of that purpose in the minds and lives and laws, and institutions of men.

When once we accept this insight, a vast sense of relief may well come to a perplexed and burdened church. If this is the centre and core of Chris- tianity, a multitude of other things are relegated to a subordinate position on the circumference. A score of problems regarding the Christian documents are at once seen to be less than central. The documentary theory of the Pentateuch or of the prophecy of Isaiah is indeed interesting and important, but must never be so exalted as to obscure questions lying at the centre of faith and life. Questions of date and place and method of com- position of the New Testament books are all of interest. But no vagaries of


criticism — and its vagaries at times have been fantastic and astonishing — can hide from us the central quality in the life of Jesus. Even if we were to follow the extremest criticism of the four gospels, and resign all but the nine " pillar-passages " of Schmiedel, those passages would leave our faith untouched and clear. That faith does not depend on any single passage, not on

any manuscript discovered or yet to be discovered, not on any critical theory old or new. It is a faith which is written in all manuscripts, which shines out of every parable, sermon, saying of our Lord, which is woven as a scar- let thread into all the texture of Christ's conviction and utterance. It is a faith in the present Christ-likeness of God, and the future Christ-likeness of perfected human society. Criticism can no more rob us of that than it can render uncertain the light of Arcturus and Orion.

So there are a multitude of other questions regarding ceremonial obser- vance, regarding the organization of


the church and its function in the world, regarding the accounts of the birth of Jesus, the method of the resurrection and the ascension, the reality and mode of the life beyond, — matters of intense interest to the church, matters to which no Christian can remain indifferent. Some of them may be of great importance in apologetics, in theology, in history. But never for a moment must we allow them to become central in our conception of the Christian faith. The moment they do become central, our faith begins to waver and share in all the fluctuations of literary and historical research. We are then as one who steps off the rock and stands on a raft moored to the rock but rising and falling with the waves of the sea. Then the air is at once filled with cries of alarm. " If the sun did not stand still in Ajalon, my Bible is gone," cries one distressed literalist. " If the fourth gospel is not the work of the apostle," cries another, " your faith is vain." But another voice is heard across our con-


troversial storm : " O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" It is the man of little faith who stakes

it all on one precarious text, one historical theory, one philosophical formula. It is the man of broad deep faith who makes central in his thinking what was central to Jesus and holds to that, while the theories of literary and historical criticism are " as dust that riseth up and is lightly laid

again."

When a great storm descended on our New England coast a few years ago, scores of vessels were wrecked and the list of casualties was carefully studied. What ships were safest at the height of the hurricane? Not those that were moored at their docks on the shore — many of them were pounded to pieces. Not those ships, surely, that were without any anchor- age, drifting on the high seas, — some of them vanished and were never heard from. But those ships were safest that were anchored at one point by one stout cable, and then left free to sway


and swing with the changing winds and tides of the ocean. The men that are most secure amid the religious fluctuations of our age are not those who are stoutly fastened at every point to the laborious creeds of the past, not those who drift unattached and aim- less, but those who are anchored by one great loyalty to our Lord, and then are free to adapt themselves to the changing needs of their generation. Tenacious loyalty to the purpose of Christ — that is stability and strength. Constant readjustment to the needs of humanity — that is efficiency and service.

7. THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY BY WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN, Ph.D., D.D.

In the chapters that follow, it is proposed to study the history of the attempt to define Christianity, and to record the more important definitions to which this attempt has given rise. The theme is historical. But history is a broad field, and the traveller who enters it without compass or guide may easily go astray. There are many senses in which the question, What is Chris- tianity? may he asked, and our study will be profitable in proportion to the definiteness with which we conceive the problem with whose answers we shall have to do. It is such clearness of thought that this opening chapter is designed to promote.

1. The Importance of a Scientific Definition of Christianity.

If it be asked what is the object of a definition of Christianity, the answer can be given in. a word. It is a scientific conception of the Christian religion. The goal of all science is definition. With the recognition

2 THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

of this need, and the effort to satisfy it, the scientific spirit is born. As the ability to think clearly, accurately, and exhaustively marks the difference between knowledge which is merely general and popular and that which is strictly scientific, so the ability to gather the results of such clear thinking into phrases which are concise and luminous is the measure of the useful- ness and permanence of the conclusions which have been reached. To refuse to define, whatever the cause — whether the attempt be deemed needless because of the familiarity of the object, or regarded as impossible because of its complexity ■ — ■ is to renounce the possibility of knowledge as science conceives it. In the case of any object, therefore, to record its successive definitions is to write the history of its science.

This being the case, the subject proposed for the following essay has much more than an antiquarian interest. In studying the historic definitions of Chris- tianity, we are really retracing the rise and progress of the effort to conceive Christianity scientifically. What- ever may be one's attitude to the Christian religion, this is a topic of unusual interest. No one who desires to understand the drama of human life in its completeness can ignore an influence of such far-reaching importance. But the difiiculty of the theme matches its interest. When one considers the antiquity of Chris- tianity; the length and variety of its history; the many-sidedness of its relations; the widely different forms which it has assumed, and is still assuming ; the

great influence which it has exerted, and still exerts,

THE PROBLEM 3

upon the lives and fortunes of individuals, and upon the progress of civilization as a whole; its close contact vfith and constant reaction upon the allied fields of literature, philosophy, ethics, and art; the tender and intimate associations with which it is interwoven — it becomes apparent that the eif ort to define so complex and many-sided a phenomenon must be as difficult as it is fascinating. How much shall we include in our survey? Where change is so constant, how shall we distinguish between what is transient and temporary, and what is permanent and abiding? Out of the thousand characteristics forcing themselves upon our attention, how pick out the few which are essential and determining? The familiarity of the subject adds to its difficulty. It is not easy to judge impartially that which is so much a part of one's life as is the case of Christianity with many of its students. Often we find men ignoring the question altogether, as too simple to need answer. What is Christianity? Why, every one knows that. What you and I and the next man have been brought up to believe and practise about God and religion. Under the circumstances it is instructive to discover the causes which, after many centuries of neglect, have brought this problem once more into the forefront of human thought, and to follow the steps by which our students of religious philosophy and of comparative religion have sought to bring order out of the chaos of confused ideas which they found serving as an apology for definition.

But the interest which gathers about the definition of Christianity is not merely intellectual. Religious


interests also are at stake. To the conviction of many of its adherents, the Christian religion occupies a wholly exceptional position. It is not merely one among other religions, like Buddhism or Mohammedanism. It is the absolute religion. It rests upon a divine revelation of unique character, and claims an authority which men dispute at their peril. The truths which it proclaims, the life which it imparts, have more than passing significance. They have to do with eternal realities, and bear directly upon the highest welfare of man. If ever clear thinking is important, it is important here. Practical interests turn upon our ability to give a correct definition. Not merely the scholar but the man on the street needs to know what Christianity is, that he may be able to order his conduct accordingly.

It is the combination of this extraordinary claim with a changing history which renders the problem of the definition of Christianity at once so fascinating and so perplexing. Here we have a religion which claims absoluteness, which offers itself in the midst of a world abounding in half truths and inadequacies as the perfect and final solution of the problem of life, and which yet, when closely studied, proves itself to be the subject of a historic development in which it has successively assumed the most various forms. Study these forms, and you find that they differ one from another so widely that it seems almost impossible to discover any common principle. The representatives of each reproach the others with serious departure from the truth, and find in the adherents of Mohammed or of Gautama positions scarcely more repugnant to their

THE PROBLEM 5

religious sense than those held by men who are in name at least their fellow-Christians. For the man who is content to take his stand within one of these smaller bodies, and adopt without question whatever it may- regard as essential, the definition of Christianity will have no difficulties. But when one tries to gain an impartial view of the whole, and seeks a definition which shall be really scientific, the matter is by no means so simple. It becomes important, therefore, to consider with some care what such a definition involves.

2. What is Involved in the Scientific Definition of Christianity.

The difficulty of defining may be well illustrated in the case of the word " definition " itself. What do we mean by a scientific definition? Suppose we say that it is the effort to express as clearly and concisely as possible what are the essential qualities of any object of knowledge as distinct from those that are accidental. This seems simple enough, but as soon as it is closely examined it is seen to plunge us into a very mare's-nest of metaphysical puzzles. Essence,- quality, accident, object are words which have been the battle-grounds of the philosophers ever since philosophy began. What do we mean by the essence of a thing as distinct from its accidents? How shall we distinguish among the different qualities some as being more important than others ? How penetrate back of our subjective apprehension to the nature of the thing at all ?

Out of these perplexities we may find a way of escape


sufficiently broad for our present necessities by calling attention to the essentially subjective character of all definition. Without raising any of the vexed questions as to the difference between substance and attribute, or the real existence of things as distinct from our subjective apprehension of them, we may recognize clearly that everything which presents itself as an object of knowledge at all presents itself as the possessor of countless qualities by which it is at once linked to and separated from other objects of knowledge. A strictly exhaustive definition — ^that is to say, a definition which should include all about the object which could con- ceivably be known — would have to take in all these qualities from the most abstract to the most concrete. But it is evident that such an enumeration, even if possible, would be valueless. It would give us too much. All sense of proportion and of relative value would be lost. It would be impossible to see the forest because of the number of the trees. If we are to have a definition which shall be of any practical use we must distinguish between qualities and qualities, and, like the boy in the fable with the jar of plums, be willing to sacrifice some that we may be able to enjoy the others.

What, then, is the principle which determines the selection ? As Professor James ^ has well shown, it is essentially subjective; in other words, it is found in the interest and the need of the man who defines. In

1 Psychology, II. p. 35 sq. What Professor .James in this passage asserts of reasoning, applies a fortiori to the definition which is the basis of all reasoning.

THE PROBLEM 7

defining any object, we pick out those particular qualities for which at the time we happen to have use, and ignore the rest. This explains the difference in definitions with which we are so constantly confronted. Ask a schoolboy, an artist, and a scientist to define a peach, and you will get as many different answers. To the first the distinctive quality of the peach is its sweet- ness, to the second its beauty, to the third its place in the vegetable kingdom. And so on through indefinite variations. Each of these definitions will be true as far as it goes, but partial. It emphasizes that in the object in which the one who is defining happens to be interested at the time, and passes over everything else.

A scientific definition differs from the definitions of common life simply in the greater thoroughness with which it: sets about its task, and the wider point of view which determines its perspective. We may group the most important qualities in such a definition

under the three heads of exhaustiveness, accuracy, and universality. A scientific definition is exhaustive in the sense that it is based upon the widest possible induction of facts. It includes, not all the qualities (for that as we have seen is impossible), but all the distinctive qualities of its object; the qualities which set that particular thing apart from others as having a character of its own. It is further accurate. It is based upon a careful as well as a wide observation, and seeks as far as possible to avoid the errors which are the natural result of hasty or careless generalization. Again, it is universal, by which is meant that the point of view from which it is constructed is, so far as pes-


sible, that of man as man. However legitimate and precious may be the individual interests which gather about particular objects, the man of science must ignore them, that he may indicate the permanent qualities which abide in the midst of change, and which make their appeal to humanity as such.

But when all is said, it remains true that the interest which determines a scientific definition is as subjective as that of the schoolboy to whom an orange is simply a round yellow object good to eat. That which explains the choice of certain qualities rather than others in a scientific definition is the fact that they appeal to certain permanent human interests and answer questions which man as man cannot but ask. Back of the elaborate structure of modern science, often hidden under abstractions unintelligible to the ordinary man, yet never wholly absent, is this living human interest ■ — ■ the desire to know, to understand, that one may feel and act. Let the time come when this shall cease to be the case, and the entire edifice which has been erected with such painstaking labor will fall to the ground. 1

1 It is hardly necesssary to say that, in taking this position it is far from our intention to deny the objective basis of the qualities which we are constrained in so subjective a fashion to recognize. The question as to the real nature of the objects of knowledge lies entirely apart from the line of thought which we have been following, and may be differently answered by men who agree in the general position here set forth. As a matter of fact, so far from the subjective considerations to which we have called attention imperilling the objective foundation of our knowledge, they seem to require an ontological basis far richer and more many- sided than it has often been the fashion of philosophers to recognize. To say that I decide from subjective grounds to which of many impressions forcing themselves upon me I shall give attention is a very

THE PROBLEM 9

The bearing of all this upon the matter with which we are immediately concerned is obvious. In seeking a scientific definition of Christianity, we are not oblio-ed to ignore the subjective considerations which play so large a role in the history of religion, that we may transport ourselves into some objective world of purely disinterested knowledge. Such an attitude, even if possible, would defeat its own end. For it would disregard those qualities of Christianity, in which its distinctive character historically consists. Science does not create; it observes and reports; and a definition of Christianity which would be scientifically valid must make place for the feelings of hope and of fear, of awe and of mystery, of love and of loyalty which have been characteristic of the Christian religion from the first.

Nor in taking this position do we mean simply to assert that the student of Christianity should recognize the Christian experience as a factor to be reckoned with in his definition, without feeling any personal interest in its significance or validity. Sympathy is the key to knowledge in all departments of life. Even in the branches of science which we call natural, such as physios or chemistry, a keen sense of the possible value

different thing from saying that I am the creator of my own impressions. Here the facts of the social life interpose an emphatic veto. The agreement of many men in common judgments naturally points to an objective basis for knowledge quite independent of the individual apprehension. All that we are here concerned to maintain is the fact that subjective considerations do enter into the making of onr definitions — even our scientific definitions — and hence that there can bene adequate discussion of such a theme as now engages us which ignores the part they play.


and meaning of even the most unpromising phenomenon is the condition of insight. No branch of science can progress without the use of the constructive imagination, and the constructive imagination is only another name for a sense of universal values in individual things. The higher in the scale of values we go, and the more personal and individual become the interests at stake, the greater is the necessity for such sympa- thetic insight, based upon experience. Without the art sense, the effort to construct a definition of art would be ludicrous. No less certainly doomed to failure is the attempt at a scientific treatment of Chris- tianity by a man destitute of the religious experience. Only through this experience is it possible to gain an insight into the particular values and meanings which theological terms are meant to express. So far, then, from the Christian experience incapacitating a man for

making a scientific definition of Christianity, it is the indispensable condition of success in the attempt.

But if the religious experience does not necessarily disqualify a man for the scientific study of Christianity, it must be admitted that it has its peculiar temptations and dangers. There is a sacredness about the rehgious life which casts a halo about all that it touches. The individual tends necessarily to identify his own experience with the whole of the religious life, and to judge others by their agreement or disagreement with his subjective standard. Where this is the case, a scientific estimate is impossible. For science, as we have seen, deals with the universal, and tries to discover and to describe those insights and values which abide

THE PROBLEM 11

through the changing centuries and make their appeal to man as man. The success of a scientific definition of Christianity is therefore to be judged by its ability to meet such a universal test; to express, in terms recognized as valid by large bodies of men, that which successive generations of Christians have found distinctive in the religion of Christ.

It cannot be too often insisted that the Christianity of which alone science is able to take cognizance is a historic religion. It began at a definite time and place. It has passed through certain specific stages and undergone certain definite changes. It occupies to-day a distinctive place in the religious life and thought of man. It is this historic religion and no other which science recognizes, and which it seeks to define. If any one chooses to construct a religion of his own out of his individual feelings and imaginings, and baptize it Christianity, he is of course at liberty to do so. But by the fact of so doing he removes himself from the sphere of objective realities in which the present discussion moves. Science, we repeat, deals with universal judgments. The experience of the individual may help him to understand historic Chris- tianity ; it cannot serve as a substitute for it, or relieve him of the necessity of facing the difficulties and answering the questions which a study of historic Christianity presents.

If we survey the chief historic definitions of Chris- tianity, we find that it is at this point that they are most defective. Each individual or generation or church picks out that feature in historic Christianity

12 THE ESSENCE OF' CHRISTIANITY

which seems to him or to it the most important, and afQrms it as if it were the whole. When inconsistent or contradictory phenomena are pointed out, they are either ignored, or attributed to misunderstanding or to corruption. True Christianity, which is identified with the particular views of the individual or church in question, is represented as a constant, from which all departures are to be counted heretical variations. So far as such a position is defended by rational arguments, or by the appeal to considerations grounded in the nature of the religious experience, and so open to be tested by each man for himself, it may be regarded as scientifically legitimate, and the only question to be decided is whether the grounds adduced in any particular case are really valid. But when, as is often the case, appeal is made to the authority conceived to reside in Christianity as supernatural, to override intellectual opposition, the scientific standpoint is aban- doned, and the attempt to the history of which this essay is devoted is given up.

There can be no question that this unwillingness to submit the claim of Christianity to the tests recognized in other departments of life has greatly hindered the scientific understanding of it. It is easy to understand the causes of this unwillingness. The authority which belongs to the absolute religion has seemed incompat- ible with the openness of mind which is characteristic of the scientific point of view. The purpose of revelation has been assumed to be to supplement the weakness of human reason, and to furnish an infallible certainty not possible in any other way. Growth,

THE PROBLEM 13

progress, change of any kind has seemed inconsistent with the dignity of a revealed religion, and the Chris- tianity of any age — whether as expressed in church, Bible, or individual religious experience — has been uncritically identified with that of the past and of the future. Roma locuta est ; causa jinita est has been the mood in which our question has been too often ap- proached by Protestant as well as by Catholic.

In view of this fact, of which history gives abundant illustration, it becomes a fair question whether a scientific definition, such as that of which we are in search, is compatible with the Christian claim to be the absolute religion. The issue thus raised is so fundamental that it is necessary to face it frankly. It will make a great difference in our study if we are obliged to exclude from our category of scientific definitions all which proceed on the basis of the absoluteness of Christianity. In determining whether this be so or not we shall be greatly helped by knowing what history- has to tell us of the meaning of the word.

3. Historic Conceptions of the Absolute in Their Bearing upon the Definition of Christianity.

The word " Absolute " has had an eventful history. Few terms have been the centre of more long-continued and determined controversy. None has assumed in the course of the centuries more varying and even contradictory meanings. To some philosophers it has a purely negative significance. To others it is the most positive of conceptions. Mr. Spencer defines it as the


unrelated. To the philosopher of Hegelian sympathies, on the other hand, it is the home and the ground of all possible relations. Ritschl would banish it utterly from the vocabulary of religion. To Kaftan, it gives the formula for the knowledge of God in every spiritual faith. A little reflection, however, shows that beneath these divergent interpretations, there is a common element which gives them unity.

Common to the word in all its uses is the element of finality. When we reach the absolute, whether in thought or life, we come to the end. With the relative we may argue and adjust matters. By shifting our point of view we may gain new light and begin over again. With the absolute, this is impossible. Here we reach an ultimate fact which admits no question, allows no argument, and about whose colossal and inevitable bulk, no by-path offers a way of escape. This character of finality appears in our familiar speech. When I say my mind is absolutely made up, I mean that I have reached an irrevocable decision — one which it is useless to question and which no argument can shake. So when I speak of an absolute standard, I mean one which admits of no dispute, one whose authority no reasonable man can deny, and the appeal to which must therefore be final. In like manner, when the philosopher speaks of the Absolute, he indicates that point in the explanation of things where thought stops, because it can go no further. In the region of the finite and relative, we press back from one cause to another in an endless series. But when we reach the Absolute the series is broken. Here is

THE PROBLEM 15

the ultimate reality, the final principle, the bottom fact of the universe, back of which it is impossible to go.

Starting with this general idea of the Absolute as the ultimate reality, we pass on to consider more in

detail the different conceptions which men have formed of its nature. We may group these for convenience under three heads, which for want of better names we may call respectively, the ontological, the mathematical, and the psychological. The titles are not chosen as strictly accurate but as roughly descriptive. As a matter of fact, the first and the third are by no means exclusive, a view of the Absolute being possible which shall be at once ontological and psychological. ^

1. By ontological conceptions we mean such as are the outgrowth of the older uncritical realism which is characteristic of philosophy in its pre-Kantian stages. Here the Absolute is conceived as a reality independent of, and sharply contrasted with, all relative or finite existence ; a being supernatural in nature, and as such belonging to a different world from the realm of second causes which we call nature ; yet touching it at points many or few, and capable, under proper conditions, of becoming in a true sense an object of human knowledge. The view thus described differs from the mathematical view in that its conception of the Absolute is positive, not negative. Its ultimate is a reality which, however far removed from the world of ordinary experience, is yet in a true sense an object of knowledge, and a cause

1 In the larger sense, all views which gronnd knowledge in objectiye reality are ontological. The word is here used in a restricted sense to denote that form of realism which ignores the subjective conditions of knowledge.


of effects. It differs from the psychological view in that it finds the essence of the Absolute in its contrast to the finite, and, in its efforts to explain and defend it, looks with suspicion upon all considerations which are subjective in their nature.

2. By mathematical conceptions we mean such as conceive the Absolute negatively, after the analogy of the mathematical infinite; which see in it, not a definite reality which can be known and which may be felt as a cause of effects, but simply a concept of limitation — the mark of the boundary of our knowledge. Accord- ing to this view, however much we may learn, we can never attain to a knowledge of the Absolute. For the Absolute by definition is unrelated. It is that which lies beyond; the boundless, limitless, unfathomable somewhat lying outside experience, toward which we are forever pressing, but unto which we can never attain. It may call forth feelings of awe, or reverence, or longing, as things mysterious and unapproachable are apt to do, but it does not admit closer contact. The Absolute is in its very nature unknowable.

3. By psychological conceptions finally we mean such as seek to combine a positive conception of the Absolute with a critical foundation in the processes of human knowledge. To those who hold this point of view, the Absolute is not something which lies outside the world of human experience and reveals itself only at rare moments and by supernatural means. It is present as an element in all experience; the ultimate reality which is the basis of all life, and which gives unity and meaning to the world. As such it surpasses

THE PROBLEM 17

man's power perfectly to comprehend. The only way to attain a complete knowledge of it would be to compass within one's own soul all finite experience. But it does not follow, as advocates of the mathematical view claim, that it is strictly unknowable. Through our finite human experience, imperfect though it be, we may attain to a real, though limited, knowledge of the divine, and gain understanding of the nature and purposes of the being upon whom the universe depends. But this knowledge is not to be gained, as the adherents of the older ontological view maintain, by putting ourselves outside of experience, and trying to construct a being with qualities diametrically opposed to our own, but rather by seeking to understand experience, and to determine, in the midst of the infinite variety which it contains, what are the qualities and purposes which alone have permanent meaning and worth. When we have discovered these, we shall have attained a knowledge of the Absolute.

On this common basis, there is ample room for differences of construction. One may be distrustful of speculation, technically so called, and accepting the Kantian dualism of the theoretical and the practical reason, confine man's knowledge of the Absolute to the realm of the conscience or of the religious feeling. Or, one may favor a bolder procedure, claiming for the intellect the same rights which others grant to the conscience, and, on the basis of the needs and longings of the whole man, rising to a conception of the ultimate reality which shall include all sides of life, and show itself master of as broad a territory as that assigned

2


to the Absolute in the most daring flights of the old ontology. But, whether more or less sceptical in their speculative views, all thinkers who adopt the psychological view are at one in this, that they win their con-

ception of the Absolute from the facts of common experience, find God in the human soul, and rely for the proof of their propositions upon the success with which they satisfy the rational, the moral, and the emotional needs of man.

It is clear that when we speak of the absoluteness of Christianity, it makes a great difference in which of these three senses we use the term. The man who holds the ontological view will follow a very different method, and reach a very different conclusion from him whose viewpoint is psychological. While, if we adopt the mathematical view, the very idea of an absolute religion becomes a contradiction in terms. This fundamental diiference of viewpoint has a practical bearing upon the problem which now engages us. We may illustrate by considering the different ways in which the three parties approach the definition of Christianity.

To those who take the ontological view, the absoluteness of Christianity centres in its miraculous features. As the Absolute, by hypothesis, belongs to a higher world than that of ordinary finite existence, it can only manifest itself to man in extraordinary ways. From this point of view the supernatural character of Christianity must lie at the heart of any definition of it. Whether we call it the religion of revelation, to distinguish it from those whose truths have been gained without any supernatural aid, or the true religion, to

THE PROBLEM 19

distinguish it from such as are false or imperfect, or the absolute religion to separate it from those which, however lofty and admirable, are yet partial and temporary, is all one. In each case the characteristics which are emphasized by the ordinary student, and by which he seeks to classify it, if not ignored, fall into the background. The essence of Christianity is its absoluteness, and the essence of absoluteness lies in the fact that it lifts its subject above the standards which obtain in the ordinary walks of life. We find abundant illustrations of this view both in the theology of Cathol- icism and of Protestantism.

To begin with the former : according to traditional Catholic theology, true Christianity and the church Catholic are one and the same. God, who is the absolute reality, has set in the world an institution through which, and through which alone, men, otherwise ignorant and sinful, may have access to Himself. This institution is many-sided. It includes doctrines by which the truth of God is revealed, sacraments through which the grace of God is mediated, ministers in whom the authority of God is incarnate, and who are charged to watch over the flock committed to their

care, and to see to it that they do not stray from truth and duty. As a supernatural institution, the church belongs to a higher world than that of our common experience, and is not subject to the standards which govern the rest of human thought and life. This does not mean that her claims are irrational. For the God who gave the church is also the author of nature, and between His works there can be no contradiction.


But it means that they lie beyond tlie realm to which unaided reason can attain. As the absolute authority, the demands of the church must be met with humble submission, quite irrespective of their appeal to the individual reason or conscience. Only after such complete surrender, including intellect and will alike, can one hope to attain a knowledge of the Christian mysteries. Credo ut intelligam. Faith must precede knowledge. And faith, to the Catholic, means an act of the will in which, at the bidding of an external authority, a man accepts truths and conforms to prac- tices, the reason for which he cannot understand.

Much the same view is taken by many Protestants of the Bible. According to traditional Protestant theology, the absoluteness of Christianity consists in the possession of a body of divine truth, supernaturally revealed and preserved in an inspired book, the Bible, whose infallible record is a guarantee against error, and the final court of appeal in the case of any dispute. By this it is not meant, of course, to affirm that Chris- tianity is merely a body of doctrines. To the most dogmatic of seventeenth century theologians, Chris- tianity is much more than this. It is a divine life as well as an inspired teaching, and it is embodied in an institution which, no less unqualifiedly than the church Catholic, claims for itself divine sanction. But it is meant that if we seek definitely to locate the absoluteness of Christianity; to discover what it is, which gives it its unique authority and justifies its extraordinary claims, it must be found in the possession of the supernatural revelation contained in the Bible.

THE PROBLEM 21

Divine as may be the Christian life (and to Protestant as well as to Catholic regeneration and sanctification are the supernatural work of the Holy Ghost), it is yet imperfect in the best of Christians. No believer, however far he may be advanced in the Christian graces, can turn to his fellow and say, " In me you behold true Christianity in its purity." Nor is the church as a whole in better case. Great as may be its authority,

the divines of Westminster admit that as an institution, human as well as divine, it contains in its purest representatives some admixture of error. ^ Its councils may err, and many of them have erred. To the decisions of none of them can we turn with confidence as giving us Christianity, pure and undefiled. The test by which we determine absolute truth lies back of these in the divine revelation we call the Bible. Here we have in its perfection the deposit of divine truth, the standard by which all that calls itself Christian must stand or fall. And to this standard, when any question arises, every Christian has the right, and it is his duty, to appeal for himself.

In spite of the great differences between these two answers their points of contact are obvious. Both rest upon the same philosophical foundation, and move in the same world of thought. This becomes apparent as soon as we glance at the arguments which are adduced in their support. In both cases internal evidence is ignored, and the truth or falsehood of the position taken, so far as the world at large is concerned, is made to rest upon grounds external to the nature of Christianity.

1 Cf. West. Conf. XXV. 2 ; xxx. 2, with xxt, 5.


The clearest statement of the official Catholic apologetic is given by the Vatican Council. ^ To the question whether there is any rational test by which the Catholic claim may be tested, and the absoluteness of Christianity rationally, that is, scientifically, established, the fathers of the Council answer in the affirma- tive. There is such a test, and it is to be found in prophecy and miracle. For the individual Christian, the supernatural witness of the Holy Ghost, which he experiences in his own soul, may suffice. But for men at large, other evidence is needed. Out of regard for the feebleness of human reason God has therefore added to the supernatural evidence of Christian experience the rational evidence of miracle and prophecy, that by this most manifest proof the authority of the church may be abundantly attested to the dullest intelligence.

According to this line of reasoning, the rational proof of the divine nature of Christianity is not to be found in its own intrinsic qualities, but in certain external marks added thereto, as a seal is added to a document to certify to the genuineness of a handwriting, of whose author we were else ignorant. In the apologetic of Christianity internal evidence plays no part. There is, to be sure, a witness of the Holy Spirit to the individual soul. But this, as a private and personal experience, is not open to men in general, and cannot be made — ^as indeed Catholic theologians do not make it — the

basis of a scientific argument. It belongs to the very conception of the Absolute which it is sought to prove

1 Dogmatic Decrees, chap. iii. quoted iu Schafi, Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II. p. 242 sq.

THE PROBLEM 23

that its rational evidence cannot be found within itself. What is needed is an authority which is independent of reason, and which, if need be, can override its demands. How, then, can reason sit as judge upon that before which it is its duty to bow? Clearly the only evidence which is here in place is external, and scientific proof, if possible at all, can only be by indirection.!

1 What we have just given is the official apologetic of Catholicism. In practice the procedure admits of indefinite variation, according to the special situation in which the apologist may find himself placed. Thus we find Catholics, like Father Hecker, freely using internal evidence in support of the claims of their church. Only one must he careful not to lean too hard on reason, and stumhle at those points in Catholic doctrine or practice which seem to the individual unfit. To do this is to violate the Catholic principle of submission, and may easily imperil one's own soul. Again, we find Catholics talking pleasantly of the harmony between religion and science, and using for their own purposes such of the results of modern scientific research as lend themselves to the support or illustration of the truths they wish to defend. Only, in case of a difference between science and tradition, it is the former which must yield. Among the functions of the church Catholic, none is more important than this, of setting bounds to human research and saying to the presumptuous prophets of an overbold science, " Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." Still again, we find frank recognition of the evils which show themselves so painfully in many who claim and exercise high authority in the chnrch Catholic. Catholic apologists are ready to grant you that a pope may sin. But that makes him no less vicar of Christ, and he who questions his authority does so at his peril. Or stiU again — to shift our point of illustration — to those who point out that the teachings of the church have altered with the centuries, so that that which was once allowed is now forbidden, or vice versa, it is frankly admitted that, though in itself unchanging and infallible, Catholic truth is but gradually revealed. The distinction is made between dogma which does not change, and the definition of it which is ever changing to meet the changing needs of men. The church possesses absolute truth, and has done so from the first. But she does not always make it known. There is many a question to which men crave an answer as to which, because it has not yet been defined, the pope is as ignorant as the humblest Christian of his flock.


Exactly the same line of reasoning is followed by many Protestants. Substitute the Bible for the church, and the statement of the Vatican Council will serve as

an excellent syllabus of the line of argument set forth in more than one text-book of Protestant apologetics. To the latter as to the former, the final test of the truth of Christianity for the individual is the appeal which it makes to his own soul. It is the inward work of the Holy Spirit, "bearing witness by and with the Word" in the heart of the believer, by which alone he receives "full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof. ^ But this experience, being of a strictly individual character, is not fitted in Protestantism any more than in Catholicism, to be made the basis of a scientific proof of universal validity. And so we find the Protestant apologist, in exactly the same fashion as his Catholic predecessor, seeking support for his position in the external arguments of prophecy and miracle. As the Catholic appeals for his sanction for the divine authority of the church to the extraordinary attestation which accompanies its entrance into the world, so the Protestant in the case of the Bible. In neither case is the evidence upon which the defence rests grounded in the nature of that which

What the future may have in store, in the way of new definition, is known only to God. Thus in various ways we find Catholic teachers shaping their arguments to meet the demands of the changing situation, so far as it can be done without giving np the fundamental principles upon which the structure of their faith is built. But whatever the variations of their position, they never abandon the contention that Christianity, as a supernatural institution, is raised above the standards which govern the rest of thought and life, and must be judged by canons of its own. 1 West. Conf. i. 5.

THE PROBLEM 25

it is designed to support. In both the proof is purely external.^

Without at this point raising the question whether the argument from miracle is really able to secure the

1 An excellent example of this view is fonnd in Dean Hansel's famons Bampton Lectures on the Limits of Religious Thought (5th ed. London, 1867). Here the rejection of the internal evidence for Christianity is carried to an extreme. Mansel admits that man may judge as to the evidences of revelation. But when it comes to the content of revelation, moral and intellectual considerations alike fail. Conscience is as little to be trusted as reason. When once God has spoken, however irrational, or even unethical his requirements may seem, the only duty for man is instant submission (cf. especially pp. 145-148 ; Preface, pp. xviii, xix).

As a matter of fact, few Protestant theologians have been content to abide by this restriction. Taking its history as a whole. Protestantism has made much larger use of the internal evidence than Catholicism. Where the Vatican Council confines the rational evidence of revelation to miracle and prophecy, the Westminster Confession insists upon the inherent qualities of Scripture as " arguments whereby it doth abundantly

evidence itself to be the word of God " (i. 5). The doctrine of the witness of the Holy Spirit, with its recognition of the supreme rights of Christian experience, easily opens the door to the admission of this evidence, and the Biblical principle points in the same direction. The qualifications by which Catholicism limits its appeal to human reason do not obtain in Protestantism. Hence we find theologians of many schools interpreting the principles of the Reformation in such a way as to admit of a truly scientific apologetic. The uniqueness of Christianity is found in its possession of qualities appealing to the highest in man, and the proof of its absoluteness is sought by showing the completeness with which, on all sides of man's nature, it answers his questions, meets his needs, and satisfies his longings. With this general line of reasoning we shall have to do in another connection. Here it is sufficient to remark that, whatever its merits, it involves an abandonment of the principles with which we are here alone concerned, and makes it necessary to class those who practise it among the adherents of a different method. That which interests ns here is not Protestant apologetic in general, but that particular type of it, which, starting from the older ontological conception of the Absolute inherited from Catholicism, agrees with the latter in basing its rational argument for Christianity upon the purely external evidences of prophecy and miracle.


universal assent which its advocates claim, it remains to inquire how far, granting its validity, it is able to give us the scientific definition of which we are in search. Here our answer must be an unfavorable one, and that on grounds very different from those which are commonly assigned.

In order to establish the scientific character of any definition, we have seen that two things are necessary. It must be universal, and it must be definite. That is to say, in the first place, the standard to which appeal is made must be one which is open to men in general, and not simply private or esoteric; and, in the second place, the qualities in which the distinctive character of the object is found must be stated with such clearness and precision as practically to admit the application of the test. If, then, it is a question of defining Chris- tianity we must be able to show, first, that the standard to which we appeal is really one which admits a universal application, and secondly, that our definition is suQiciently clear and unambiguous to enable the test to be made. Is this possible in the present case ?

Criticisms of what may be called the dogmatic conception of Christianity ^ are commonly based upon the first of these grounds. It is claimed that the supernatural evidence to which appeal is made is something of which science knows nothing, and which a large proportion of reasonable men reject. On the testimony of its own advocates religion is isolated from the

1 We use the phrase as a conrenient designation for all definitions,

whether Catholic or Protestant, which take their departure from the ontological view of the Absolute.

THE PROBLEM 27

rest of human life, and confined to a transcendent realm to which only the select company of the initiated possess the key. To talk of a scientific definition under such circumstances is to misuse words.

This argument, though plausible, fails to stand the test of serious examination. If universal assent at any particular time be the test of scientific truth, then science in every form is impossible. Not all men are in possession of the evidence, nor are all competent by habit and training to judge it even when presented. All that can reasonably be asked is that there should be no inherent obstacle in the way ; that the evidence be open to him who is willing to take the trouble to qualify himself to approach it, and that in the case of those best fitted to make the test, actual agreement should have been reached. In the case of a definition of Christianity, therefore, all that needs to be shown is that the evidence is open to all men who choose to fulfil the conditions.

This is, in fact, what the advocates of the dogmatic view claim. The Christian apologist, whether Catholic or Protestant, is well aware that all men do not recognize the force of his evidence. But he maintains that good reasons can be given for their failure. Many causes are responsible, some intellectual, some moral. When these are removed, as through the results of Christian instruction and contact is constantly being done, the expected recognition follows. With the steady growth of the Christian church and the conse- quent extension of the Christian experience, the number of men who are open to the Christian evidences is


continually increasing, and it is only a question of time when the universal assent which science demands shall be reached.

We are not now concerned to inquire whether this hope is well founded. That is a matter which can only be determined by experience. One may take as unfavorable a view as one pleases of what is likely to be the outcome of such an experiment. Our present contention is simply that, so far as universal consent is concerned, there is nothing in the dogmatic conception of Christianity to render a scientific definition a priori impossible. 1

The real difficulty with the dogmatic conception of Christianity lies elsewhere. The trouble is not with the court of appeal, but with the use to be made of it when it is found. Definitions based upon the ontological conception fail because they are unable to express their conception of Christianity in sufficiently clear and unambiguous terms to admit of a scientific test, even before judges of their own choosing. This may seem a curious charge to bring. Indefiniteness is not usually thought to be the besetting sin of the dogmatist. When he is criticized, it is commonly for over rather than for under definition. Yet the two points are not so inconsistent as a superficial judgment might conclude. Too

1 An exception mnst of course be made in the case of all theories which deny the possibility of a universal Christian experience. If, as in some forms of historic Calvinism, God be thought of as arbitrarily with- holding from a part of mankind the knowledge of those facts concerning Himself upon which right thinking depends, it is not possible to appeal to any universally accepted standard, and a scientific definition of Chris- tianity is therefore out of the question.

THE PROBLEM 29

great detail may be as confusing as too little. It is the disposition, common to Catholic and Protestant alike, to extend the absoluteness of Christianity over the widest possible territory which is the parent of the indefiniteness of which we complain. True Chris- tianity, we are told, is what the church teaches or what the Scriptures reveal. But what does the church teach? How far does the Biblical revelation extend? Here we find differences of opinion. The exegetes agree as little as the doctors. Nor is there anything either in the churchly or in the Biblical principle which of itself enables us to decide between them. That which in theory is claimed as the chief merit of each, its supernatural character, proves in practice its fatal weakness. The Absolute knows no diiference of value or of degree. Yet without the recognition of such differences, how is it possible to secure the definiteness which is essential to scientific definition ? ^

No doubt this indefiniteness is more apparent in the former case than in the latter. Here the vastness of the territory opens up a field for misunderstanding which is little less than appalling. It was not a Prot- estant controversialist, but her own great teacher, who said of the Catholic church that she was a corpus per- mixtum, containing within her capacious bosom both

1 The lack of proportion thus criticized is admirably described by Phillips Brooks in his Essay on Orthodoxy. "We quote a few sentences from the lengthy extract given by Dr. AUen in his Life (II. p. 491). "In the truths which it holds (orthodoxy) loses discrimination and

delicate sense of values, holding them not for their truth so much as for their use or their safety ; it gives them a rude and general identity, and misses the subtle difference which makes each truth separate from every


the good and the evil, the false and the tme.^ Strange bed-fellows have found themselves united hy the tradition principle. To harmonize all the material which has received Catholic sanction would be an impossible task. If we are bidden to look to the decisions of the church, it is only to be met by new perplexities, for the councils themselves do not agree; or, what comes to the same thing for our present purpose, honest men have not yet been able to discover their agreement. The official definitions themselves need defining. When this has been done, there remains the task of reconcil- ing the new dogma with the old; while still beyond crowds a circle of questions, more or less vital, upon which no decision has been reached. Thus we find that one who takes refuge from the strife of the schools in the bosom of the church Catholic, does not escape from uncertainties.^ If we wish a clear definition of

other. Orthodoxy deals iu coarse averages. It makes of the world of truth a sort of dollar store, wherein a few things are rated below their real value for the sake of making a host of other things pass for more than they are worth." What we are particularly interested in here is not 80 much the fact as the reason for it. It belongs to the very nature of the Absolute in which this temper of mind finds its ultimate reality that it should ignore those subjective and personal elements in which differences of value reside.

1 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, iii. 32.

'' An excellent illustration is to be found in the often-quoted passage from Cardinal Newman's Apologia (Loudon, 1890, p. 238 sq.), in which he describes the state of his mind since entering the Eomau church. The certainty in which he there represents himself as rejoicing is simply the clear perception that certainty is impossible. It is the peace which follows the abandonment of a hopeless quest. His answer to those who object to the doctrines of the church as unbelievable is their removal from the realm to which rational tests apply. Catholic doctrine, he tells us, deals not with phenomena but with substance. And substance is " what no one on earth knows anything about" (p. 240). Armed with this

THE PROBLEM 31

essential Christianity, we must seek our answer elsewhere.

Nor is it otherwise with the Biblical principle. No doubt Holy Scripture furnishes a standard at once more definite and more manageable than tradition. But

when it comes to defining essential Christianity, we find that its acceptance does not deliver us from uncer- tainty. The Bible is a large book. It extends over many centuries, and includes the most diverse matters. As to the meaning and relative importance of much that it contains interpreters are not agreed. The "Westminster Confession bids us distinguish, within the teaching of Scripture, between certain weighty matters essential to salvation, and others less important about which good men may differ without peril. ^ But when we try to carry out this distinction in practice we find that it is by no means easy. What is essential, and what is unessential ? This is the very point on which we find the widest difference of opinion. Here the

principle of " invincible ignorance," it is easy for him to accept the most mysterious dogmas, sure that no assault of human reason can penetrate to the inaccessible fortress within which they have withdrawn themselves for refuge. Does one object that trausubstantiation is not true, since he has seen the bread, and its qualities remain unchanged ? The Catholic doctrine " does not say that the phenomena go ; on the contrary, it says that they remain ; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what no one on earth knows anything about, the material substances themselves. And, in like manner, of that majestic article of the Anglican as well as of the Catholic creed, — the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the Essence of the Divine Being ? I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incom- patible with my idea of one ; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three can equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God." 1 i. 6, 7.


Biblical principle fails us. For this simply asserts the infallible authority of all that Scripture contains, leav- ing each man free to interpret his authority as best he may. Calvinist and Arminian, churchman and indi- vidualist, rationalist and mystic, each appeals to the book in support of his own peculiar view of Chris- tianity, and condemns those who differ from him as un- biblical. It would seem, then, that if we are to gain a satisfactory answer to our question some more definite test must be found.

Thus in both its great historic forms the dogmatic position proves itself unsatisfactory. The philosophical basis on which it rests is a realism which antedates the results of modern critical study. Its Absolute suggests problems rather than solves them. Judged on its own merits without prejudice, it is unable to give us a definition which, by reason of its clearness, conciseness, and general acceptance is worthy to be called scientific.^

With the other two methods of approaching our problem we may deal more briefly. However different

the conclusions to which they come, they move in the same general world of thought, and the question at

1 It is hardly necessary to state that in thns criticizing the ontological conception of Christianity, we are far from denying the scientific value of the work done by many of those who have shared this view. The great theologians, Catholic and Protestant alike, have not been content with such general conceptions of Christianity as we have indicated. They have sought to discover on the basis of reason, history, and experience what were the distinctive features of their religion, and have set them forth and defended them with a clearness worthy of all praise. Our present contention is simply that so far as they have been successful in accomplishing their aim, it has been by ignoring the indefinite standards which are all that their philosophy allows, and seeking the definition of Christianity along other and less ambiguous lines.

THE PROBLEM 33

issue between them admits of being very simply stated. Both the advocates of the mathematical and the psychological views are convinced that if the distinctive character of Christianity is to be found at all, it must be sought in the positive qualities which characterize it as a historic religion, and which are to be determined by the same methods of comparison which science employs in all other departments of research. The question is simply whether or no this inductive method is compatible with the recognition of the absoluteness of Christianity in any sense. Those who hold the mathematical view deny this; those who take the psychological view affirm it. The question, as we shall see, resolves itself into this: whether the conception of the Absolute is purely negative, or whether it has a positive significance which justifies its use in scientific discussion.

To those who take the former view, any attempt to conceive of the Absolute positively involves a contradiction in terms. As the ultimate reality, it lies back of experience, as the unapproachable goal, both of thought and of aspiration. It has its psychological foundation, as a necessary concept of the mind. And it may even be granted a certain objective reality, in that it is a fact that our finite and limited experience is set in the midst of the great ocean of the infinite. But

so far as we are concerned — the function of this

unknown reality is purely negative. It is, as we have already seen, a concept of limitation ; the mark of the boundary of our knowledge. So far as the latter ad- vances, it recedes. Nor can any conceivable increase

3


of experience bring man to a positive knowledge of the infinite. Even if, with Mr. Spencer, we conceive this unfathomed region as the home of some mysterious being upon whom our finite universe depends, we are no whit better off. For of the nature of this mysterious something we can form no conception. The Absolute in all its forms is by definition unknowable.

It is clear that from this point of view an absolute religion is out of the question. On all sides of life, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, religious, man is shut up to the sphere of the relative. From our limited subjective point of view, we may compare things as better or worse, more or less true, more or less beautiful ; but the distinctions have only relative validity, and are constantly being superseded and corrected by an enlarging experience. The several religions are natural phenomena in which, under the differing conditions in which he has found himself, and with more or less crudity and imperfection, man has endeavored at once to express and to deepen his sense of the mystery and the wonder of life. So far as they attempt positive interpretation they are all alike superstitious and inadequate ; yet this does not hinder them from performing a useful function in human life. They are necessary steps in the evolution of humanity, and form an outlet for natural instincts which cannot but seek expression. To pick out one from the number of these partial and inadequate religions in order to raise it to a position of absolute supremacy is to be guilty of the greatest inconsistency.

We find those who take this position differing widely

THE PROBLEM 35

in their positive estimate of Christianity. One regards it as a mere superstition, all the more dangerous because of its great age and many-sided associations; aji enemy against which all right-minded men ought to unite in making war, and which in time is destined to be utterly overthrown and destroyed, in order to make way for the irreligion which is to be the religion of the future. Another recognizes in it the highest flower of human genius, sees in its doctrines symbols of profound spiritual truth, and cheerfully admits the extraordinary part which it has played in the betterment of society and the elevation of the race. Some even go so far as to bow reverently before its founder as the best and purest of the sons of men, and gladly unite with those who frequent its churches in the worship of that mysterious being whose counsels are unsearchable and His ways past finding out. But whatever may be the par-

ticular attitude taken to Christianity, it can never include the element of finality which absoluteness involves. Beautiful and helpful though it may be, Christianity is only a stage in the religious history of humanity, destined in time to be superseded by another, more helpful and more beautiful.

The weakness of this position lies in its exaggeration. It seizes upon one meaning of the term Absolute, and emphasizes it to the exclusion of others equally legitimate. What the advocates of the mathematical view tell us of the part played by the sense of mystery in religion is entirely in place, and no one is more ready to recognize it than the Christian. It is true that God is greater than our thought, and that all our knowledge is


set in the midst of a vast ocean of ignorance. Against all dogmatic efforts to stretch our knowledge beyond its proper limits the agnostic protest is in place. We need to be called down from the transcendental realm where theology has often made its home, and to be set to the more fruitful task of studying experience that we may learn what it has to teach us.

But it is a mistake to think that in coming back to experience we take leave of the Absolute. This common opinion rests on a failure to understand the real meaning of the term. By the Absolute we mean the ultimate reality, that in which thought and aspiration rest. This may be a positive conception as well as a negative one. Experience is full of ultimates. Force, law, reason, beauty, duty, personality, love; all of these are general conceptions in which thought may rest, and which, therefore, it is open to man to conceive as absolute. This is the truth for which the psychological view stands.

When, therefore, the advocates of the mathematical view tell us that an absolute religion is a contradiction in terms, we answer that we are not speaking about the same thing. They are thinking of that side of God which by definition can never be known. We are thinking of God, so far as He manifests HimseK to human thought and experience. The Absolute which we seek to know is that which is absolute for us. We wish to discover, if possible, what that principle is which, so far as human experience goes, is final. To say that this is impossible is to prejudge a priori that which can only be determined as a result of experiment.

THE PROBLEM 37

It is to rule out of court with a single stroke of the pen the entire enterprise upon which philosophy has been embarked from the beginning of time.

For what is philosophy, if it be not the search for the Absolute? In all its forms, from Anaxagoras to Hegel, it is the effort to discover what is the ultimate reality in the universe, and to define its nature in the simplest and clearest terms. Prove to man that this attempt is foredoomed to fail, and you cut the nerve of philosophic thought. At the basis of all large speculative endeavor lies a faith in the rationality of the world; and this, when properly understood, is only a different form of stating the knowability of the Abso- lute. To say that this is a rational world is to say that the ultimate principles by which it is governed lie within the reach of human reason. Even philosophers theoretically the most sceptical show by their practice that they share this faith. Thus Mr. Spencer, in the very same breath in which he speaks of the Absolute as unknowable, declares that it is cause and force, ^ and proceeds to set it about all manner of indispensable work in his universe. Even to say that the Absolute is unknowable implies the previous possession of a final standard of knowledge, and, so far forth, a positive acquaintance with the ultimate reality. Let a man try to think at all, and he will find it simply impossible to avoid a conception, more or less positive, of the Absolute. As he studies the universe and is drawn more and more under the spell of its wondrous unity and order, man feels himself in the presence of a single

1 First Principles (New York, 1888) pp. 157, 171.


all-comprehending principle, and he cannot but believe that as he penetrates more deeply into the nature and meaning of life, he is at the same time coming to understand the nature of the supreme being who is its cause. Modern philosophy differs from ancient, not in the object of its search, but in its clearer perception of the difficulties in the way, and in its franker recognition of the subjective conditions through conformity to which alone success is possible.

What we have called the psychological conception of the Absolute is simply the new view of God which is the result of this conviction. It is the view which finds God in His world rather than outside of it; and seeks to gain an insight into the nature of the ultimate reality through the discovery of the permanent elements in the experience of man.

Approaching the problem in this spirit, we see at once that the Absolute may have two very different

meanings according to our point of view. In the narrower sense, it denotes that principle which is final for the individual man. Each of us has his own standard, more or less clear and definite, his own conception, more or less crude, of the ultimate reality; in a word, his own Absolute. These several standards differ among themselves, and the reconciliation and overcom- ing of their differences is the problem of philosophy. The philosophic standpoint differs from that of the individual in that it attempts to rise above the various petty and local considerations by which each man's opinion is more or less determined to a region of truly universal judgments. The Absolute of philosophy is

THE PROBLEM 39

won by abstracting from the several judgments of individuals all that is accidental and temporary. It is that principle or standard which is valid for man as man.

Applying these principles to our matter of the absolute religion, we see their bearing at once. By the absolute religion we mean a religion which is valid for man as man; one which meets every essential religious need, and satisfies every permanent religious instinct, and which, because it does this, does not need to be altered or superseded. Such a religion, if it could be found, would realize the idea of the absolute religion. The question of the absoluteness of Christianity in the philosophical sense is the question whether as a matter of fact Christianity can be shown to possess these characteristics.

In endeavoring to answer this question two points need to be considered ; first, that of the abstract possibility of such a religion, and secondly, that of the method of its proof.

The first admits of a very short answer. Whatever one may think of the likelihood or unlikelihood of such a religion as a matter of fact, no reasonable man can deny its possibility. Among the various alternatives which the future presents, it is at least conceivable that it may include a religion which, by the richness and many-sidedness with which it meets the religious needs of man in general, shall prove itself, from the human standpoint with which we have here alone to do, ultimate.

Granting the possibility of such a religion, how is its existence to be proved ? Here it is evident that the


appeal to lustory must be final. From the point of view of the individual man, his own religious experience may be sufScient. But so long as good men differ there is need of an appeal to some wider standard. Clearly in this case the only way in which the absolute religion could justify its claim would be for it to show itself absolute in fact. If its claim is a valid one, we should expect to find it drawing to itself the good and wise of all ages and races; to see them owning its supremacy, and winning out of its abundance unfailing supply for their deepest needs. Not until this victorious progress had reached its completion, and we beheld all men organized into a great brotherhood under the shelter of a single faith, would it be possible to speak of a proof of the absoluteness of any religion, which should be in the strict sense scientific.

But in the meantime, while the process is incomplete, what then? Are we shut up to uncertainties? Must we wait till the end of time before we make up our minds ? Or if, discouraged by the shortness of our life, compared with the vast stage upon which the mighty- drama is to be played out, we make a premature choice, must it be at the peril of our scientific standing ? This is not the attitude which men take in other departments of life. The student of physical science is not deterred by the fact that his induction is not complete, from making his theory as to the ultimate reality which we caU matter. Nor does the fact that his predecessors have made mistakes shake his faith that the problem may ultimately be solved, and that his work may have a share in bringing about the solution. Each new

THE PROBLEM 41

statement, if founded upon honest study of the facts, brings the goal nearer, and narrows the range of inquiry within which the final solution is to be sought. In like manner of the ultimate religious problems. If there be a God, more and more clearly revealing Himself in the religious life of man, the effort to understand His revelation, and to determine wherein its distinctive features consist, cannot be hopeless. Especially must this be the case with those men who have found in some particular historic faith the key to the world problem, and the solution of the mystery of the individual human life. Possessed of such convictions, they are constrained to express them with all the clearness of which they are master, to relate them to other forms of thought and life, and to discover, and so far as may be to remove, the difficulties which have thus far kept others of their fellow men from so inspiring and uplift- ing an insight. Surely, if the absolute religion is ever to win the universal recognition which is its right, it must be through some such process as this.

Upon this problem some of the finest minds of Chris- tendom have been at work for more than a century. Rejecting the dilemma presented to them both by the dogmatist and the agnostic, they have sought to show that on purely scientific grounds it is possible to maintain the finality of Christianity. Various influences have combined to lead them to this conviction. On the intellectual side, there is the belief that the idea of the Absolute is too deeply inwrought into human life and thought to be ignored, together with the resulting desire to gain a conception of it which shall avoid the


crass dualism of ordinary dogmatic theology, with its sharp antithesis between the natural and the supernatural. On the religious side, there is the conviction that Christianity stands for truths too lofty, and experiences too precious, to be put on a par with those of any other religion, however worthy, together with the resulting desire to find some way to express this uniqueness, which shall not do violence to the intellectual standards which govern the rest of life. But whatever the special interest which leads to the endeavor, they agree in striving to justify the claim of Christianity to a unique position by calling attention to certain definite characteristics which separate it from all other known religions. Or, to put the matter in another form, they attempt a scientific definition of Christianity which shall include its absoluteness.

8. WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN ? BY JOHN WALKER POWELL

The present generation is impatient of theological distinctions. It would like to abolish all the creeds and unite the churches in one great religious trust.

There is a good deal of common sense in this reaction against the theological hair- splitting of former times. We refuse to believe that a man's opinions on the minute details of history or metaphysics are sufficient either to admit or to exclude him from the kingdom of grace and glory.

Fifty years ago the orthodox Christian was quite convinced that no Unitarian could be saved. There are not wanting many to-

day who have some doubt regarding the Christian Scientist.

2 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

A sounder instinct gleams through the reply of Father Taylor, the Boston patriarch and friend of Emerson, to some of his Metho- dist brethren who inquired if he thought the gentle Concord philosopher had been saved. "All I know," was the tart response, "is that if he has gone to Hell, he'll change the climate."

John Wesley anticipated the modern point of view when he declared: "I am sick of opinions. I am weary to bear them; my soul loathes the frothy food. Give me solid, substantial religion; give me a humble, gentle lover of God and man, a man full of mercy and good fruits, a man laying himself out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, the labor of love. Let my soul be with those Christians wheresoever they be and whatso- ever opinions they are of."

He published the life of a Unitarian minister for the edification of the Methodist folk, and when taken to task therefor replied, "I have nothing to do with this man's opinions, but I dare not say he is not a Christian."

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 3

But while we acknowledge the justice of this, we all realize that there is a Christian way of thinking about things, as well as one that is not Christian. Robert Ingersoll may have been an excellent man, but his was not a Christian philosophy. Herbert Spencer was a man of the finest character, whose life bore many traits of the Christian ideal, but his thinking was diametrically opposed to that of Christianity, as he and every one else well understood.

We are also coming to see that philosophy bears fruit in life ; that in the long run a man's moral ideals will be determined by his answer to the fundamental questions regarding the nature of existence.

Details of doctrine, such as the questions raised in the fourth century about the pro-

cession of the Holy Spirit or in the sixteenth about the nature of the Eucharist, may not have an immediate bearing upon conduct; but the deeper and more far-reaching questions regarding the existence and character of God and His relation to humanity are


bound sooner or later to determine the moral ideal. The pragmatists have taught us that any idea which has proven fruitful in actual life must be regarded as essentially true; but the converse of this proposition is equally valid, namely, that a true idea will work good to humanity and a false one will work harm.

It is of the highest importance, therefore, that we shall know what is the essential Christian philosophy. What is Christian- ity's answer to the deepest questions of the human spirit concerning the nature of reality, the ground of human existence, the end and purpose of life?

Volumes have been written on this question, and it is difficult to sum the matter up within the limits of a single chapter in any way that shall be entirely satisfactory.

There are four elements, however, which may be regarded in some sort as constituting the essence of the Christian philosophy. They are the Fatherhood of God, the Brother- hood of Man, the Mastership of Jesus Christ,


and the Immortal Destiny of the Human Soul. Let us see briefly what these mean.

Christianity grounds its life on the conviction that the Universe is neither an accident nor the product of a blind Necessity, the mere interaction of matter and motion, of law and force. On the contrary it regards all Reality as the continual activity of One who knows what He is doing and where He is going.

This is what Christianity means by a

personal God. It believes that all existence has its root in a conscious and intelligent Purpose, and that this purpose is good.

I am not attempting now to defend this conviction, but merely to define it, being fully persuaded that when it is rightly understood it commends itself to intelligence, and stands in its own right, without need of further witness. It is simply the faith that life is not meaningless ; that the intelligibility of Nature which makes science possible is a


sufficient ground for confidence in the rationality of the whole process.

Christianity has nothing to do with questions of order and method in creation; but it stands ready to defend to the uttermost its conviction that life is real and earnest and worth while, and that it is grounded in no blind and barren mechanism but in an eternal and patient purpose for good not unlike that of a wise father for his children.

This of course implies the spiritual sonship of humanity. It suggests that man is capable of understanding in some degree the reason and purpose of his existence ; that there is in him a capacity for some measure of spiritual communion with the Being Who created him and to Whom he is morally responsible for the use he makes of the gift and opportunity of life.

No doubt when one undertakes to think these simple propositions through they in- volve a considerable amount of philosophical and theological reasoning. They raise many


perplexing questions. It is possible we shall never fully understand them or exhaust their significance.

But in the terms in which we have stated them they are broad and simple and fundamental. A Christian is a man who grounds his life upon these propositions ; and no man who denies them can be completely and fruitfully a Christian, no matter how nearly

he approximates the Christian ideal in his personal life.

This is not saying that a man will lose his soul for denying these principles; but there can be no doubt that in the long run the Christian ideal stands or falls with them; and the nineteenth-century philosophy which began by questioning them has issued in the twentieth-century doctrine — exemplified these last days — that might makes right, and that the Christian doctrine of brotherhood and mutual service must be cast as rubbish to the void.


II

Christianity likewise pins its faith to the dignity and worth of humanity, and lays the foundation for its ethical teaching in the doctrine of universal brotherhood. It insists on a measure of moral freedom in human nature. It refuses to interpret humanity by its brute origin ; it measures man rather by his spiritual kinship with his Creator.

There is nothing especially distinctive in this, as compared with other forms of religious faith. The stoic philosophy in particular was akin to the Christian ethics in the lofty dignity of its conception of human values. Christianity simply represents the completest development of the spiritual interpretation of humanity, finding the basis for its conception of human dignity in its doctrine of God.

The point, however, to be kept in mind in this connection is that Christianity has actually superseded all other forms of religion in the thought life of the modern world ; and


the question is not between Christianity's conception of humanity and that set forth by other faiths, but between Christianity and the scientific doctrine which regards mankind as nothing more than a by-product of evolution, being in reality nothing but an exceedingly intricate automaton, whose conscious processes are nothing more than chemi-

cal reactions — in Spencer's phrase, "motor excitations in the ganglia."

Christianity refuses to be bound by this doctrine of mechanism.

It insists that such a theory of existence leaves out all the most important elements of the problem and simply abandons all attempt to interpret reality.

Claiming the right to believe that the Uni- verse itself is personal rather than mechanical in its deepest ground, Christianity looks upon the human personality as akin to the divine, and hence vested with all the dignity and infinite value of sonship to God.

Finding this worth in man as man, it refuses to be bound by caste and class distinc-


tions; to regard any race, however back- ward or degraded, as alien or outcast.

It declares that the strong and the weak, the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured and the ignorant, are bound together by ties which cannot be broken and which it is per- ilous to ignore.

Thus it finds in the essential character of mankind the ground for its personal ethics and no less for its social theory. It bids the strong bear the burdens of the weak, and to use the advantages given them by their larger opportunities in the interest of the common good, that the whole level of humanity may be lifted and the path of spiritual attainment be opened to the weakest and most ignorant.

No way of looking at humanity less comprehensive than this or with a less resolute faith in the essential worth and dignity of human nature and the possibilities hidden beneath the most unpromising exterior can be regarded as Christian.


III

Christianity is more, however, than a system of metaphysics or of ethics.

It is an historical system of faith, of worship, and of practice, which traces its origin to the life and teachings of a single man whose character it regards as the embodiment of its loftiest ideals, and to whose personality it pays the utmost reverence, both offering to him and demanding in his name the highest allegiance.

No type of thought and life which ignores this history can consistently be called Chris- tian. We may not settle in advance the problems of historical research, nor insist that spiritual truth can be absolutely bound up with any happening in time or space ; but we have a right to insist that the history of Christianity shall receive adequate explanation.

Sober thought refuses to believe that a great and creative personality can be the product of imagination.


The greatest characters of fiction and mythology are when all is said the product of manufacture, of the synthesis of traits and characteristics found in the experience of humanity itself. Such products of the imagination always bear the mark of the tool. They share the weakness and limitation of their creators. No one imagines that Jupiter or Hercules, that Don Quixote or Jean Valjean, ever existed. We know plainly that the former were the product of the collective imagination of the Greeks, as the latter of the creative genius of their authors.

It is far otherwise with the characters of Confucius or Gautama or Socrates. Little as we know of the actual history of these men, whose images have come down to us colored by the imagination of their disciples, no serious student of history has the slightest doubt not only that they existed, but that they made upon the mind and heart of their time essentially the impression that is handed down to us.

If the character of Jesus Christ transcends


them all, so that by common consent it is impossible to sum him up under the cat- egories of ordinary humanity, it is the more unbelievable that he was the product of the crude imaginations and narrow prejudices of a group of Jewish peasants and rabbis. Christianity does not stand or fall with any particular attempt to understand or interpret the person of Christ; nevertheless in a real and abiding sense Christianity is Christ.

The only God it knows is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is to say, it believes in God as Jesus revealed Him by precept and example, and can think of God in no other terms. When it wants to know what God is like, it turns to Jesus Christ for the answer to this question.

It acknowledges Jesus as the ethical Master of mankind. It believes that he revealed the possibilities of manhood; that he embodied in his own character the loftiest ideals in a way that cannot be transcended; that every succeeding generation may understand him more perfectly, may more com-


pletely incarnate his ideal in its ethical life, but that it cannot outgrow him or leave him behind.

There is one element in the Christian interpretation of Jesus which is largely over- looked in the religious thinking of the present day, but which has nevertheless played an extremely important part in the history of the Christian faith. That is the conception of Jesus as in some sense the Redeemer and Savior of mankind.

Christian thought has from the beginning looked on Jesus as something more than a spiritual teacher, or even as the incarnation of the moral and spiritual ideal. It has found in him the supreme spiritual dynamic.

His death has been regarded as the central moral tragedy of history, in some strange fashion involving the character of God Him- self in a hand-to-hand conflict with the powers of evil; so that it holds a unique relation to

the spiritual history of the race, and is a fountain of healing power wherein the


ceaseless tragedy of human experience shall find its solution and the moral weakness of mankind be strengthened for ultimate vic- tory.

Once more we are not concerned to defend this doctrine, or even to define it in detail, but only to point out its central place in historic Christianity. If it is ever to be set aside as of no essential importance, the burden of proof is upon those who would reject it. It may have been subject to many grossly crude and imperfect interpretations, but that it has hitherto held the central place in the Christian philosophy of the spiritual life there can be no doubt.

In the Christian way of thinking about things Jesus Christ is more than an ideal. He is the unfailing fountain of spiritual power; and he holds that place in virtue of the totality of his human experience, whereby he can enter sympathetically into the struggles and passions of the weakest of his brethren and can enable them to be more than conquerors in life's battle.


It is evident that the essential thing in the Christian attitude toward Jesus is not intellectual interpretation but ethical loyalty. It does not ask of any man that he shall understand Jesus; it does insist that he shall obey him.

The modern world has grown weary of theological discussions, and it resents the attitude of orthodoxy in denying the name Christian to any who bear the spirit of the Master though they may not interpret him under the traditional forms. The attitude of Jesus himself to the men and women about him furnishes ample precedent for the broad- est spirit of tolerance. But no man in the first century or the twentieth is entitled to be called a Christian who does not offer to Jesus Christ the most heartfelt loyalty. Richard Watson Gilder expressed the heart of the

matter in his well-known lines :

"If Jesus Christ be man, (And only a man), I say That of all mankind I will cleave to him, And to him I will cleave alway.


" If Jesus Christ be God,

(And the only God), I swear I will follow him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air."

IV

The Christian faith concerning the Father- hood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Mastership of Jesus Christ does not, however, exhaust its thought about life; for these things find their completion in the conviction that human destiny is not limited to the brief years of earthly existence, but that to every soul is granted the opportunity and possibility of the immortal hope.

A man may be Christian in his spirit and purpose and be in doubt on this point, but there could be no Christianity without it. The Christian interpretation of life is one in which

" Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence : truths that wake,

To perish never ; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,

Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy Can utterly abolish or destroy !"


The Christian view of immortality is not some vague hope for the persistence of the race, for the treasuring up in some other form of existence of the net results of human experience, somehow detached from the persistence of the human consciousness. It is the simple and inextinguishable belief that death is only an incident in individual experience, and that the soul which begins here graduates from this kindergarten and

primary school into the larger experience of an exhaustless future.

Nor can we ignore the fact that Christianity regards this conception of life as involving grave moral risk. The crude notions of Hell which medieval Christianity inherited from paganism may have been outgrown. Our growing experience of the healing power of spiritual truth, our insight that punishment is in its essence remedial rather than retaliatory, may enlarge our hope

" That somehow good Will be the final goal of ill;"

but that must not blind us to the note of


solemn warning which has formed so essential a part of the message of every great spiritual teacher, and was so gravely and sternly enunciated by Jesus Christ.

Life from the Christian viewpoint is a matter of infinite possibilities, and for that very reason a thing not to be trifled with or lived idly or carelessly. The brighter the radiance of its spiritual light, the darker by contrast the shadow cast by moral failure and wrong.

The essential meaning of the whole system of Christian thought, from its belief in God and its loyalty to Jesus Christ to its fairest pictures of the immortal hope, is that life has a great and inexhaustible meaning, by reason of which it is also an achievement and task which is set before every human soul. To him that overcometh shall be given a crown of life, but those who through wil- fulness rebel against the high demands of the spirit, or through cowardice make the great refusal, can have no part in the glory of such a destiny.


The largest hope that the yearning sympathy of the greatest souls has been able to write over the shadow of such loss is that those who have made shipwreck of life may pass into

"That sad, obscure, sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain, which must not be."

This then is the Christian philosophy.

Men may differ in their understanding of any of the elements of this thought, but no philosophy of life which leaves out any of these things can be termed in any adequate sense a Christian philosophy. A man may follow the Christian ideal or manifest the Christian spirit without accepting this philosophy, but such moral and spiritual grace is none the less the fruit of the Christian teaching, the twilight glimmer of light after the sun has set. In the long run there can be no day without the sunshine.

The Christian ideal cannot long survive the decay of the Christian philosophy. If this way of thinking about things be sound,


we may more adequately understand it as the ages go by, but we cannot exhaust or transcend it.

If Christianity is in any sense the ultimate religious faith, it is this Christianity which we have however imperfectly outlined. This is what all the theologies have tried to say. These are the essential ideas which underlie the teaching of all the churches and which have been embodied in the Christian thought of all the ages since the days of the apostles, however the form and emphasis may have varied from generation to generation ; and this is the first part of our answer to the question, What is a Christian?

what is christianity

Spiritual

picture of paul

gospel of god

apostle paul

paul atrome

sonof paul

paul toagrippa

resurrection of christ

kingdom of god