The basal beliefs of Christianity

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Preface

DoctriNE is the necessary foundation on which duty and deed are built, or the root out of which they spring as flower and fruit. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Every rational deed issues from a thought, thought when it becomes critical and constructive shapes itself into a doctrine, and doctrine builds a system of truth. Thus every one is a psychologist and theologian and philosopher, whether he knows it or not. All Christian preaching and practice must root itself in doctrine and cannot be clearer and stronger than the doctrine out of which it grows. Yet “doctrinal preaching”’ is not a popular program and is supposed to be somewhat repellent. There is no avoiding it, however; the very denial of doctrine is itself a doctrine, and the rankest sensationalist, denouncing doctrine, is yet himself preaching it, though it may be of a very poor kind.

One danger with our doctrines is that they may fall out of touch with our day, if not in substance and spirit, then in form and expression. They necessarily change with the changing intellectual, vii

Vili PREFACE social and spiritual climate of their age, a change that may be slow and unperceived in a short time, but is sure and plain in the long run. When one reads a sermon fifty or a hundred years old he is at once aware of a style and tone different from the preaching of to-day. Such change is evidence of the continuous adaptability of Christian truth to varying human needs; a sign, not of decay and death, but of vigorous and fruitful life. Truth is permanent in its essential nature, but its interpretation and application are progressive. We still wear clothes, but fashions change; we eat food, but the dishes differ. Yet this doctrinal expression may change too slowly and thus lag behind the times. If doctrines are preached to-day as they were in former days they will strike the present generation as strange and unattractive; whereas if they are set forth in the life and language of to-day they may find a welcome reception.

Doctrine should also be presented, not as a dry and rattling skeleton, but clothed in flesh and blood and pulsing warm with life. Bones are useful members of the anatomy, but the higher animals do not wear them on the outside. Doctrine should appeal directly to experience. It should be woven of the same threads as the general web of human life, and its illustrations should be concrete bits of

PREFACE ix daily happenings. This will relieve it of its foreign and uninteresting air and bring it home to every one’s business and bosom. The Gospel of Jesus Christ fills a deep and permanent want in the universal human heart, and when its doctrines are thus presented they prove themselves attractive and popular, satisfying and successful.

The present volume is an attempt to state the basal beliefs of Christianity in a form for popular readers. It touches lightly on deep and difficult matters and emphasizes the broad and practical aspects of Christian facts and faith. Its object is to present these doctrines so as to show their meaning, their ground in truth and reason, and their application in character and life. The book of course contains nothing new and only aims to give new expression to old truths. It is not intended for theologians or ministers, but mainly for lay readers, Sabbath school teachers and Christian workers. Pastors might use it as a basis of study with classes of young people, and thus take them over the principal points of Christian doctrine. If it helps its readers to gain a somewhat clearer view of Christian truth and to hold it more firmly and work it out more fruitfully in life and service, its aim will be accomplished.

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Contents

Tue Sources oF Our KNOWLEDGE OF GoD THE EXISTENCE OF GoD

THE PERSONALITY OF GoD

THE CHARACTER OF Gop

Chapter II The Existence Of God

THE name God denotes an infinite personal Spirit, the Creator and Governor of all things. Why do we believe in such a Being?

I. Our belief in God is older and deeper than any reasons we can give for it. We do not frame arguments for the existence of God and then believe in him, but we believe in him and then frame arguments to confirm our belief. All our fundamental beliefs spring out of our practical needs, and it is only long after we have developed and used them that we endeavor to prove them. It is in religion as in all things else: art precedes science, faith precedes logic. Men lived in the sunlight long before they studied the sun, and cultivated the soil ages before they understood its chemistry. We are born with a set of instincts, appetites and impulses which immediately push us into action before we can think about them or even become conscious of them. Psychology is one of the latest of the sciences. The soul usually has developed its

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 9 habits and the main body of its beliefs before it inquires into the processes of their growth. Men y worshiped God long ages before they ever thought of raising the question of his existence. The race started, as the individual starts, with unquestioning faith, and doubt is a late development.

We have certain instinctive feelings and practical needs that immediately issue in belief in God. The feeling of dependence is one of our primary in-: stincts. The babe clings to its mother, and we never grow out of this practical need. As we grow up we find ourselves environed in a Power that stretches away into the infinite, and we feel ourselves in its clutch as a mote is in the grip of gravitation. Our hearts are made to respond to this Power and to fall upon it as upon the bosom of a Father and there find peace and rest. In a similar way the world appeals to our minds to believe that it is not a blind chaos, but the expres-* sion of a personal Being who made the world and cares for us. We find that we simply cannot live a worthy life in this world without believing it is the product and expression of a personal God. Such a belief fits into and satisfies our nature, it gives order and significance to all our experiences, and every other belief throws the world into confusion and leaves us bewildered and blind. It is true

IO THE BASAL BELIEFS OF CHRISTIANITY that this is the beginning of reasoning on the problem of the world, but such reason is largely latent and has not emerged into conscious processes. So we start with a practical belief in God which is - deeper and stronger than all our reasoning.

Reasoning did not create it, therefore reasoning )\\ can seldom destroy it. There is no danger that skeptical science and philosophy will drive religious faith out of the world, because such faith is rooted in the heart, and the heart is older and deeper than the brain.

II. Yet this instinctive practical faith soon comes into contact with our reasoning powers and must stand this test. Here as elsewhere we must prove all things and hold fast that which is true. There are great arguments which, while they do not originate our belief in God, yet do show us that our faith is well grounded and thereby clarify and confirm it. One of these is known as the cosmological argument, or the argument from the principle of causation. We derive this principle from our Own experience in the exercise of our wills. When we will a certain action we are immediately aware that our will is the cause and that the action follows as its effect. We soon learn to discern effects and to trace them back to their causes. Now the world is full of changes that bear the

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THE EXISTENCE OF GOD cag marks of being effects, and the world itself appears to us in this light. It is not an unchanging thing, but at every moment it springs out of a prior condition. It is therefore an effect which must have had a cause. As we know that a manufactured fabric must have had a sufficient cause in a maker, so we are forced to believe that the world itself must have a Cause that is sufficient to ac- _count for it. It has been objected to this argument that it does not prove an infinite Cause, but only a cause sufficient to produce a finite world. . But any finite cause is itself dependent and caused, and we do not reach a true First Cause until we leap back of the succession or chain of events to a Cause that is itself uncaused; and thus our sense of causation as regards the world is not satisfied until we reach God.

III. Another principal argument for the existence of God is the well-known argument from design, which is really a special application of the argument from cause. The world bears the marks of mind as well as the marks of dependence. It is an intelligible fabric throughout, a tissue of intellectual relations. All its forms and forces are letters that spell words of law and order, wisdom and purpose. The astronomer reads the vast volume of the heavens and transcribes what he reads into the little volume of his science. Every other science is doing the same thing, and thus science is slowly but surely deciphering the book of nature. Nowhere does the scientist ever find any irregular or irrational fact or event, but everywhere he finds exact and beautiful order and purpose. And he has absolute confidence that the same order and purpose everywhere pervade the universe, and that there is in it no secret corner or hidden depth that conceals one atom of irrationality. Now we never fail to connect a book that can be read with a a mind that wrote it. Such a book is a mirror in which we see reflected another mind like our own. Nature itself is just such a book in which we see mirrored the mind of its Author. Unless, then,. it takes more intelligence to construe the book of nature than to construct it, to read it than to write it, we must look through it into the mind of its Author and see a personal God.

IV. A chief argument for the existence of God is man himself. Everything that comes out in the effect must have been in the cause. The stream can rise no higher than its source, and the maker cannot be lower and less than what he has made. Man is a product, and as such throws light upon God. Man is an intelligent person, and therefore’ God cannot fall below this plane. His person-

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 13 ality may be infinitely higher than that of man, but it cannot be less. Every faculty in man must be a tiny shadow of a corresponding power in God. Not only so, but God must match and satisfy the nature of man at every point, otherwise he has produced an irrational creature with a falsehood inwrought into its very constitution. The instinctive needs and yearnings of man, his spiritual faculties of faith and aspiration and worship, must all find their home and satisfaction in God. Man “is a child who calls for a Father, and he trusts his own cry asa sure ground of faith in him.

The reality that is closest and surest to us is first our own soul and next the world in which we live. The soul within us and the world without are irrational fragments and cruel disappointments and deceptions unless they are completed in an infinite Creator and Father. Without God all things are emptied of rationality and hope, and the world becomes a miserable muddle; with God on the throne, all things fall into order and harmony, wisdom and love. This comprehensive reason convinces and satisfies the mind and heart; and therefore we believe in God.

V. What would the world be without a God? Let Jean Paul Richter answer in his Dream of a World Without a God: “I dreamed.I was in a churchyard at midnight. Overhead I heard the thunder of distant avalanches and beneath my feet the first footfalls of a boundless earthquake. Lightning gleamed athwart the church windows and the lead and iron frames melted and rolled down. Christ appeared and all the dead cried out, ‘Is there no God?’ And Christ answered, ‘There is none. I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky: there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond and cried, “Father, where art thou?’ But answer came none, save the eternal storm which rages on. We are orphans all, both I and you. We have no Father.’ Then the universe sank and became a mine dug in the face of the black eternal night besprent with thousand suns. And Christ cried, “Oh, mad unreasoning Chance; Knowest thou—thou knowest not—where thou dost march, hurricane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun after sun on thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of constellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass by? How every soul in this great corpse-trench of a universe is utterly alone?’ And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD ue beheld the coils of the great Serpent of eternity twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and then again they tightened and contracted, folding around the universe twice as closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousand folds, and crashed the worlds together. And all grew narrow and dark and terrible. And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing and toll the last hour of time and shatter the fabric of the universe, when my sleep broke up and I awoke. And my soul wept for joy that I could still worship God—my gladness and my weeping and my faith, these were my prayer.”

Chapter III The Personality Of God

AFTER the existence of God has been proved or belief in him has been accepted the value of such belief depends on the kind of God who is thus” believed in. One of the fundamental questions as to the nature of God is his personality.

I, Pantheism denies the personality of God. While holding to an ultimate ground of all things, yet it views this as an Absolute in which there is no consciousness or will except such as emerges in human or other finite manifestations or aspects of this all-inclusive being. Such an Absolute may well up in us as consciousness, but in itself is an infinite abyss or womb out of which all finite things arise and into which they again fall back, as waves and bubbles emerge out of the sea, for a moment float on its surface and then sink into its formless depths. “An immense solitary specter—it hath no shape, it hath no sound, it hath no time, it hath no place. It is, it was, it will be, it is never more or less, nor sad nor glad. It is nothing—and the sands

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD by fall down in the hour-glass, and the hands sweep around the dial and men alone live and strive and hate and love and know it.” Pantheism saturates the thought and life of India and the Far East, and there it brings forth its fatalistic fruits. The doctrine is logically and practically destructive of all true religion and runs straight to fatalism and in -the end is equally destructive of the personality of man. In such a world all things are necessary ana equally good or evil, and man himself is only one of the myriad bubbles on the surface of the weltering ocean of being and his personality one of the countless illusions of the world.

II. Theism opposes to pantheism the doctrine of the personality of God. It affirms that the creative Cause of the world is a spirit endowed with intelligence, sensibility and will, fused into the unity of personality and living a free moral life. Its reasons for this affirmation are the same grounds that prove the existence of God. Our instinctive belief in God is that he is a personal being and no other kind of God would satisfy our practical Heeds. 7; All early views of God are intensely personalistic, and pantheism is a late development. The historic proofs of the existence of God that have stood the stress of the ages all arrive at a personal God. The cosmological or causal argument springs from a personal root in our own wills. We immediately know cause only as it is exercised in ourselves, and as every effect we thus know and cause is the product of a personal will, so we can view the world itself only as having been caused in the same way. Still more directly and conclusively does the argument from design lead to a personal Creator. The marks of order and purpose we see in the world are all mirrors that reflect a personal intelligence, the only kind of intelligence we can conceive. And as man himself is one of our chief~ arguments for God, so he is one of our chief proofs of God’s personality. To suppose that the Cause of the world is a blind abyss or womb that could eject streams of consciousness that rise higher than their source is to contradict all our principles of belief. Thus the world itself, especially in its highest forms or products, forbids our falling into the pit of pantheism and drives us up to the summit of theism.

III. Yet philosophy has raised a difficulty in the way of theism that has profoundly affected even our Occidental thinking and carried some of our greatest thinkers near if not into the pantheism of the Orient. This is the doctrine that personality. implies limitation, and therefore cannot apply to the Infinite and Absolute being. It involves, it is

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD IQ said, the necessary relation of self to others and, more definitely, of subject and object, and such relations would destroy the very constitution of the Infinite and the Absolute. This difficulty is more verbal than real and grows out of our definitions rather than out of our experience. The self is at “once subject and object in our own experience, and the same may be true of higher beings, even of God.

The answer to this difficulty is that personality is ,“ not a limitation but an added power. It is the ability to know and feel and act, and this is not a contraction but an enormous expansion of being. The absence of such ability would be a limitation and loss beyond any other possible loss. The fact is that our human personality is imperfect and germinal, only a faint shadow of what even we may conceive personality to be. In conception we can remove the barriers that contract and hinder our personality, and this process carried to its logical limit gives us an infinite Person, or God. As -Lotze shows in his great chapter on the personality of God, “Perfect Personality is in God only, to all finite minds there is alloted but a pale copy thereof; the finiteness of the finite is not a producing condition of this Personality but a limit and a hindrance to its development.” One of the great triumphs of ,.

modern philosophy, as we believe, is its demonstration that personality is not necessary limitation and that it arises to its logical perfection in God.

IV. Yet we are not to suppose that the personality of God is a mere copy or enlargement of our human personality. If God were the simple uni-. tary consciousness that we experience in ourselves, what kind of existence did he lead in the eternity before he put forth his creative power in worlds and in finite spirits? The question plunges us into profound difficulties, and is in danger of leading us back into pantheism. Philosophy has worked out a higher conception of God’s personality than a copy of our own. We are not without hints or germs of such higher personality in our own souls. Our consciousness breaks into the three different kinds of experience which we call intelligence, sen-

~ sibility and will. These are quite distinct in kind, and yet they fuse into one consciousness. Might not these be projected into higher states of development in which they would become still more distinct and begin to show in themselves some of the powers or aspects of personality? This would result in a complex consciousness in which there would be some of the interrelations of social life and love. It is such a conception that some philosophers denominate “hyperpersonality,’ which simply means a

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD 21 type of personality lying on a higher level and living a more exalted and perfect life than our own.

Here we have evidently arrived at the borders of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. While God in the Old Testament is emphatically a monotheistic ‘ God, yet in the New Testament and in Christian experience he unfolds into a trinitarian God in which three persons co-exist in a social life; and yet these three are not ‘hree Gods, but one God. We can hardly state the doctrine without involving ourselves in inconsistent language and logic, and yet it , is deeply rooted in philosophy, in Scripture and in Christian experience. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the three persons of the Godhead who dwelt in reciprocal life and love through all eternity, and who manifest their unitary life in creation, providence and redemption. This is indeed one of the “high mysteries” of our faith, but it lies at the root of our philosophical and theological thought and enters vitally into our Christian experience; and so it must be included among our basal beliefs.!

*For a fuller discussion of the subjects considered in paragraphs III and IV see the author’s The World a Spiritual System: an Outline of Metaphysics, pp. 183-194.

Chapter IV The Character Of God

EvEN more important than the question of the personality of God is the ques.ion of his character. Belief in a good God is the source of optimistic faith and life, but belief in an evil God would spread the blackest cloud that could be conceived over the sky of the universe.

I. God is a moral being. This results directly from his personality. <A free will acting in the light of intelligence under the pressure of feelings is the foundation of responsibility and moral character, and we have already seen that God possesses these powers. The moral character of man is also a proof of the moral character of God, on the principle that every essential element in the nature of man must have had its roots in God and is an outgrowth of his nature. Conscience is the imperial power in man, legislating on all matters of conduct, imposing its decrees and bestowing its rewards and retribution, and therefore we must believe that the same power exists in its highest perfection in God.

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II. But the question still confronts us whether this moral nature of God is good, or evil, or a mixture of both. The fact that we find ourselves in a world of mixed good and evil throws doubt upon this question and has made it one of the great enigmas of the ages. The world of nature is sown with storm and strife, pain and death, and the human world is a scene of discord and hatred, disease and misery, sin and crime. Does not such a world throw its black shadow up against the character of God himself? Can a good God produce an evil world, and does not an evil world point to an evil God? The human mind and heart has wrestled with these questions through all ages, and they have ever been the world’s Gethsemane. Yet in spite of these evils men have generally believed in a good God, and nearly all the religions of the world, especially the higher and purer ones, have held to this faith. As to the evils in nature, they are seen to be in a large degree only apparent, imputed to nature by our Own imagination, and the planet is seen to be a world still in the making and in a state of evolution towards higher perfection. As to the evils in our human world, they are seen to be largely due to human responsibility and transgression. Man is a germinal being in his faculties and a fallen being by reason of his disobedience to moral law as known to his own conscience. The world is fitted up to suit such a being. It is a school in which his germinal powers are being developed, a hospital in which his physical and moral diseases are being healed, and a field of service in which he is working out the great problems and ends of his existence. In the light of these facts we believe that, in spite of the vast amount of evil in the world, God is not responsible for it, except in the sense that he has seen wise to permit it, and that he is good. Just how to reconcile his goodness with evil at particular points is often a problem that lies far beyond our power, and yet we believe that the skirts of his holiness are clear and that with suffcient knowledge we could pluck the heart out of this mystery.

Ill. The light of reason and nature must ever remain dim in the presence of this great problem and can never reach a full and final solution. It is at this point that revelation lets fall its fuller light. The Bible is a record of this revelation. In broad contrast with heathen gods that are more or less stained with human faults and vices and are only magnified sinful men, the God of the Bible is a God of righteousness. “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” is the central question of the Old Testament and all its teaching in precept and

THE CHARACTER OF GOD 25 example, doctrine and ordinance, reveals God in the light of holiness. The New Testament advances to a still higher view of the moral nature of God. Its central principle is that “God is love’ and it sets forth all his attributes and activities as manifestations of this element. The total teaching of the Bible on this point is that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

IV. The supreme revelation of the character of God is Jesus Christ. His white life grew up out of the hard soil of Judea as the one perfect thing this world has ever seen. After all these centuries of moral advancement and philosophical study of ethics his character is still the perfect pattern of goodness, the only flawless diamond that shines resplendent amidst all the imperfect jewels of character in the world. In him all virtues and graces combine in faultless proportion and harmony. Truth and trust, purity and patience and peace, meekness and manliness, gentleness and goodness and love, sympathy and service and sacrifice blend their various rays into the pure light of his white soul, and he shines as the Star of the ages, the Sun of Righteousness. That Character, no dream of a novelist or vision of a poet, was a living Fact in the world, and as such it bears witness to the nature of the First Cause out of which the world came;

it throws a powerful beam of light into the very heart of God. “He that hath seen me,” said Christ, “hath seen the Father,” and this is the true import of his life and character. In Jesus Christ God has come forth in visible form so that men could see his face and touch his hand and assuredly know what manner of God he is; and in the light of his Son we know that the Father is holiness and love.

V. Holiness and love are the two fundamental attributes of God. Holiness is God’s purity and righteousness. It is that element in his nature by which he is free from all wrong and by which he possesses all right. Holiness is primarily a selfregarding attribute in God, the self-affirmation of the integrity and worth of his character. It is therefore something that must be exercised and maintained in all conditions and at all cost. It is the standard of right for the universe, and is the law of character and conduct for all creatures. The love of God is his benevolence or good will or affection, first for himself in his trinitarian relations, and then for his creatures. It is his expansive nature by which he pours himself into other lives and shares with them his own blessedness. The love of God is thus his other-regarding attribute and is his self-impartation.

The relation of these fundamental attributes in

THE CHARACTER OF GOD 27 the character of God has been much discussed. Some hold that holiness is the more fundamental attribute and that love is an element or aspect of it, and others reverse this relation and make love the more fundamental attribute with holiness or justice as one of its elements. Thus Dr. W. N. Clarke says that “holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness”; and President Strong, reversing this relation, says that “love is central in God, but holiness is central in love.’ The perfection of either of these attributes involves the other. Perfect holiness will be loving, and perfect love will be holy, and both are central and all-pervasive in the character of God. Yet it must be admitted that there is a larger voluntary element in love than in holiness. God must be just, but he exercises his love according to his free will.