The Christian view of the world. Nathaniel William Taylor lectures for 1910-1911, delivered before the Divinity School of Yale University

Preface

The oecumenical theology is old; and from the beginning was inevitable. The greatest of the Apostles could not be blind to the significance of the new life that was in them; in their Lord they read the eternal constitution of the world. And when Christianity became the world's religion, it was inevitable that theology should become a secular labour of mankind. Christian experience, maintaining its reality as the religion of a Hellenised world to which reason and the demand for rational insight were also realities, could not do other than set itself to interpret the Person of Christ; and in the interpretation it found, as had the Apostles, a view of God and man. It is the conviction of these lectures that the significance of that view, so far from being exhausted or outlived in the long movement of human history, is continuously unfolding itself; both for the science of man, seeking the intelligible unity of the strangely diverse facts of our life; and for the practice of man, seeking to bring itself deliberately, and from its own centres of affection and volition, into accord with that eternal truth and unity of the world.

But a significance continually unfolding means that an eternal life is in its own order manifesting itself ; primarily in religion, secondarily in theology the intellectual reflex of religion. And if that be true, no viii PREFACE

secular step in the development of theology can be altogether final. The Greek has made himself indeed, in theology as in other things, the schoolmaster of all time. Yet the ultimate word cannot be that of the Greek. Behind Greek and Roman, behind man of thought and lawyer and priest, behind all the theologies, metaphysical or ethical, political or legal — behind the Apostles themselves — is an eternal life; our Lord, with His own consciousness of God, His own consciousness of the world. To make that consciousness determinative of our life and of civilisation is the business of Christianity; to bring Christianity to the intellectual apprehension of its own significance is the task of theology. It is a task fulfilled only there, where all human efforts after knowledge and all human beginnings of science are fulfilled ; in the absolute intuition in which every fact is seen in the completeness of its relations — every fact in the completeness of its relations, and God as all in all. Such intuition is not the form of our understanding; but it is at once the real basis and the moving ideal of all our understanding; and toward it we must work as we can.

A significance continually unfolding means, however, a further thing. Such a progressive manifestation of an eternal life means also a principle of perpetual life in those to whom and in whom the manifestation is made. Hence it is that the task of theology cannot be confined to scholars, or to men of thought, or to races whose genius is thought. Directly or indi-

PREFACE ix

rectly all men who have in them any breath of life are at work upon it; directly or indirectly every human affection and action touches it ; and light at any point is light for theology. They contribute most to the development of theology who most have given their hearts to the enrichment of the perpetual and infinite movement of the spirit of man; and whose minds are by that devotion made open to all dawning of light that has been or now is upon the earth.

Theology, once more, is old; older far than Christianity; and bears onward a most manifold ethnic inheritance. But to make theology Christian; and to se2 Christianity in its essential greatness — capable on the one hand of taking into itself all that seems most revolutionary in the penetrating insight of modern science into the continuity of man's life with all the life of the earth — capable on the other hand of giving to our unsettled and fatefully changing civilisation that guidance and deep impulse of social ideals which it needs; such is the never-finished task that confronts the theologian. It is only in a narrow sense that such a work is the work of individuals ; it is rather a work of collective mankind, and of the spiritual principle which is seeking to realise itself in that life of mankind in which action is with contemplation, and love is with thought, continually involved.

To Professor Curtis, Acting Dean of the Divinity School, and to other members of the Divinity School and of the University, I am indebted for generous and

X PREFACE

thoughtful kindness. It was a happiness to be allowed to discharge at Yale an office of piety and of remembrance; the happiness was doubled by all that considerate hospitality.

Victoria College in the University of Toronto. January^ 1912.

Contents

I

The Christian Consciousness and the Task of Theology

Religion as the practical unity of life . . . 1-4 The task of the theologian is, (1) to bring to clear consciousness the view of the world implicit in religion, (2) to relate that view to our rational consciousness of the world 4—6 The view of the world implicit in the Christian consciousness 6-43

II Human Experience and the Absolute Spirit

Introductory 70-74

The form of our experience that of development . . . .' 74-77

What is involved in development; a priority

of actuality to potentiality 78-79

The actuality implied as prius in the development which is our experience : the Absolute Spirit 80-88

CONTENTS xiii

To ask whether there may not be some other absolute than the absolute implied in our experience is to make imaginary difficulties [83-88]

What is the relation of that Spirit to our

individuality? 88-89

The way to an answer lies (for reflective reason) in considering more fully the nature of the development which is the growth of our experience. That development is (1) of the implicit to the explicit, (2) a self-organising process 89-109

Such being the nature of our experience, the relation of the Absolute Spirit to it must be one of self-communication. Such a view makes intelligible to us the possibility of our experience, alike as the common life of man (pp. 109-131) and as the science, the morality, the religion, in which that common life fulfils itself (pp. 131-140) . 109-144

The historical development of this view . . 144-149

The unity of religion and reason in this view of the relation of our life to an Absolute Spirit, who seeks in us a fulfilment of Himself 149-165