The Christ of every road; a study in Pentecost

Contents

I. ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKEN-

II. THE CHURCH BEHIND CLOSED DOORS...... 24

BELO THE LOST) CHORD Hobe cerry or ui aihenae 39

Preface

AFTER the publication of my last book, Christ at the Round Table, I determined that I would not write another for a number of years. The decision seemed wise.

On a recent evangelistic trip to South America, in the quiet hours of meditation on shipboard, this book in outline, if not in essence, came to me. When I returned’ to the United States the very first request I received was from the publishers asking me, in view of the forthcoming celebration of the nineteen hundredth anniversary of Pentecost throughout Christendom, to write a book on Pentecost. Ordinarily, it would have been the last thing to which I would or could have acceded. One cannot produce such a book by request. But when the gift of the quiet hours and the request of the publishers spoke the same thing the combination seemed a compulsion. This book is the result.

EK. STANLEY JONES.

Mission House, Sitapur, U. P. India.

Chapter I On The Verge Of A Spiritual Awakening?

THE world-ground is being prepared, I am persuaded, for a spiritual awakening on a very extensive scale. I do not say this lightly—it is a growing conviction, forced upon me by the facts. The factors that compose the preparing of this world-ground seem to me to be these:

First, the scientific attitude toward life, which seemed in the beginning to be inimical to the gospel, is creating a soil upon which that gospel can come to its own. The scientific attitude is a frank, open demand for facts. Its sphere seemed at first to be in the realm of physical fact. Now it is penetrating into all realms and is sifting all facts—physical, mental, and spiritual. Some have attempted to reconcile science and religion by saying that science has as its sphere the province of physical facts and religion the province of values. This division seems to me to be artificial. The method of science will go over, is going over, into all realms. Can our gospel stand up under this search for fact? Notif itis a system dogmatically and arbitrarily imposed on life which we must obey or be lost. It can, if it turns out to be, not something imposed on life, but something coming up out of life, necessary to life, completing life. Someone has said that the gospel found congenial soil among the Greeks in their cry of “a return to nature.” The gospel was something that fitted into human nature and completed human nature. It broke the shackles that made a man less than a man and restored him to normal, symmetrical, harmonious human living.

On this soil of a return to the facts the gospel will come into its own. It is founded on fact, the Fact of Christ. I am not afraid that men will be too scientific, I am afraid they will not be scientific enough. I am persuaded that if we go far enough with the facts, they will lead us to the central fact of our moral and spiritual universe—Christ.

His gospel is not a theory spun out of the brain of a philosopher apart from life, unchecked by the facts of life. It came out of life and it speaks to life. A great English schoolmaster once cried, “My creed is life blessed be life, the King!” Under the searching scrutiny of the moral facts and under the testing of the ways of human living, I am persuaded that it is turning out that Christ, our gospel, is “not a mere way of life, nor even the medicine of life, but Life itself,’ so that we can ery, “My creed is Life . . . blessed be Life, the King!”

The Hebrew word was Goodness, the Greek word was Light, the Hindu word is Devotion,

ON THY VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

the Christian word is Life. The Christian word is Life because our gospel is founded on life and it imparts life. Blessed be Life, the King!

In the train one day I was talking with a famous Orientalist. He was going fifteen hundred miles across the burning plains of India to fill up a single gap in his knowledge of Buddhism. Three thousand miles to verify a single point of knowledge! I was reverent in the face of such demand for truth. He said to me in very earnest tones, “We in Europe are looking for a new religion.” I asked him what he wanted in the new religion. He replied, “First of all we want religion to take the open, frank attitude toward life; in other words, the scientific attitude; and, second, we want it to take the human attitude toward people, really to care for and love people. If we could get these two things in the new religion, we would be satisfied.”

How the gospel had been overlaid and obscured by ecclesiasticism! So overlaid that even this discerning professor could not see it. I asked him to go back beyond the obscuring centuries and stand face to face with Christ and then make his two demands and see if they are answered. Out of the heart of the account come these decisive words of the Master, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” ‘Those words could be written over

SEED-O-CRSRES-O-EESD 0 C40) DOG OSE.

the portals of any Hall of Science and exactly express the scientific attitude and spirit. I pointed this out to him. Very thoughtfully he replied, “If that expresses the attitude and mind of Christ, then no statement could more adequately and beautifully express our spirit.” As to the second demand I said that to ask the question of Christ’s real interest in and care for people was to answer it. He loved people—not merely their souls—he loved them. Then we traced out together this human strain in the gospel. At the close we were face to face with the inescapable fact of Christ and of his mind and saw that what we needed was not a new religion, but a new discovery of Christ, who is Religion.

It is remarkable that Jesus used two names

Cd toethe Spirit, which would imply that he meets and more than meets the two demands of the professor: “The Paraclete, . . . even the Spirit of Truth.” The Spirit of Truth—could any name more perfectly designate that which Science is dimly groping after in its search for truth? Here is the very Spirit of Truth. And the Paraclete (para, “beside,” and ‘kaleo, “I call” )—the One who stands alongside of men, counseling, consoling, inspiring, giving power by which to live—could anything more adequately express the passionate human interest of the Divine? The passion of science for truth and

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

the human interest are more than met in the gospel.

“Our civilization is passing into a new phase, the scientific,” says Dean Inge, “and the whole framework of our Christianity belongs to the old phase, the classic. It is no wonder that the results just at present are so discouraging.” Note that he says “the framework of our Christianity belongs to the old phase’—the framework, but not the facts. The facts of our gospel belong to Life itself. Any return to the facts will only bring us nearer to that gospel.

We therefore welcome this frank facing of life and its facts and believe that it is helping to prepare the world-ground for a spiritual awakening.

The second factor that is preparing the world-ground is the trend toward experience. It is part of the above but sufficiently definite to be noted separately. The trend is away from abstract ideas to ideas that life will back. How does it work in experience? is the searching test.

it can be seen at a glance that this is an atmosphere in which the gospel is at home. For, as Matthew Arnold says, “Jesus based himself always on experience, never on theory.” If there is one note that sounds through the whole of the gospel, it is the note of experience: “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.”

In the pages of the New Testament men did

THE CHRIST OF EVERY ROAD /QUE-0-CRERD-CED-0-0ED--E-0-CRED- O-CEED-O LEP O- SEDO EO IO OSE ERIYOnot speculate about God—they shared him. They said little about the Beyond of salvation, they were so sure of its immediacy. They were sure of heaven because they had it—had it in immediate experience. Their souls sang to the music of things.

It is often said that only those elements in Christianity which are expressible in and through human experience are likely to influence an age which openly revolts against dogma. True, but there is little in the New Testament that these Christians were not finding in experience. God? They knew him! Miracles? They themselves were miracles! Resurrection? They had gone through it! Heaven? They were living in it! Hell? They had escaped it! Reconciliation? They rejoiced in it! Eternal life? They possessed it!

The demand of this age for experience leads straight toward Christ, for the whole of his gospel is founded upon experience.

The third factor in the world-ground is an undertone of deep spiritual craving. No one can get close to the soul of this age without feeling that in spite of its materialism and its lack of discipline there is an honest wistfulness running through it. Touch it in Latin America and you will find that the intelligentsia are standing between two worlds—one, the world of dogmatic authority, dead; the other, the world of spiritual

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

GEee-0 ae-0- experience, not yet born. Into that vacuum is rushing every cult of ancient and modern times, from the worship of Psyche and Cupid to Theosophy and Vedantism. It all witnesses to the vast thirst that is upon their spirits. “I can go to my work in the law courts at any time,” said one of the outstanding lawyers of Latin America after he had been four hours in our Round Table Conference during the middle of a busy day, “but I cannot get this every day.” A leading editor expressed his feeling in even more forceful language: “That was the happiest day of my life. I had lost my faith through wide reading and had been trying to regain it, but there I opened my life to Christ and he came into it. I have been living in a new world ever since. This is what Latin America needs.” “Had I known this was the gospel, I should never have gone to these cults,” said another brilliant, but thirsty mind. Their agnosticism is ‘not irreligion, so much as it is a protest against hollow, unthinking dogmatism.

Get in touch with the students of the United States and under blasé or cynical attitudes you will find a heart-hunger that is appalling. It is there if you can get to it. When speaking to them it is a question as to whether they will mentally kick you out or fall at your feet. They are terribly hard on cant, on unreality, on words, but they rise like a trout to a fly when con-

ED OAD O CLES CATED-) ALI O- EDO <SEY- 0-OED-OAE)- ERED CRD) LIEED-)- ERLE) ETRY) 0 BID-{ 9 AL TENDONS OLED ORE fronted with sincerity and a gospel that challenges the depths. A young thing of the flapper type marched up to me at the close of a meeting and said: “Gee, but you walked all over my needs this morning. Say, you got me, boy!” Slangy? Yes, but sincere. In her slangy words there was running the same sort of sincerity and spiritual craving as that voiced by a modern philosopher in these strong and stately words: “The fact of religious vision and its history of persistent expansion is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.’? Or when Bradley says: “There is nothing more real than that which comes in religion. To compare facts such as these with what is given to us in outward existence would be to trifle with the subject. The man who demands a reality more solid than that of the religious consciousness seeks he knows not what” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 449). It seems that, as Dr. Wheeler Robinson says, “philosophers are now prepared in greater measure than formerly to consider religious experience as among the most significant of their data.”

When we turn to the scientists they tell us that they are abandoning the idea of a universe

*Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 276. [ 16 ]

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

whose basic constituency is atoms, hard, like billiard balls, in favor of electrons, or organized force or energy centers. This new conception seems to be turning the scientific mind of the age from a materialistic conception and explanation of our universe to a spiritual interpretation. “Materialism as a philosophy is vanishing, for matter itself is vanishing.” It is easier to step up from force centers to an immanent God than it was to posit a Creator of a hard material world out of nothing. It is no wonder, then, that, as Doctor Milligan tells us, there is a definite turn of the tide of scientific thinking away from agnostic materialism to God.

When we look at the group supposed to be apostles of modern materialism, the modern men of big business, I find they are not. No groups of people impress me more with their simplicity, frankness, and longing for a spiritual basis for human living than the groups of wealthy business men. As one faces these groups one finds the spiritual hunger appalling. It is often covered up, but it is there if we can get to it. “Don’t talk to this crowd of business men about religion,” said the head of a large business men’s association. “They are hardboiled and will not take it.”’ I didn’t know how to talk about anything else, took for granted that they were folks just like myself, and wanted something, and so poured out my soul to them. At the close the

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chairman said: “I take it all back. I am glad you talked to us this way. We are men as well as business men.” Fundamentally, all men are men. When we get down to that fundamental manhood we find it has a fundamental need— God.

When I turn to the East I find it changing from center to circumference. The unchanging East? The most changing portion of the globe to-day. The tension is terrific and terrifying. In this state of tension comes the consciousness, sometimes only dimly realized, that the old sanctions of life are giving way, that they cannot stand up under the modern pressure. The brilliant editor of an Indian weekly, conscious that things are somehow going wrong, lashes out against what he calls “the dead-set against Hinduism.” Many have rushed into print to assure him that there is no dead-set against Hinduism, that new attitudes of sympathy and understanding have taken the place of the older attitude of iconoclasm. But the editor is right. There is a dead-set against Hinduism, though not in the way he thinks. He picks out certain writers as symptomatic of this dead-set against Hinduism. His diagnosis is wrong. It is far deeper than that. The dead-set against Hinduism comes from the whole pressure of the scientific attitude toward life. He calls it Westernism. It is deeper than Westernism and far more decisive.

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

The East can withstand Westernism, but this pressure is deep and all-inclusive. This facing of life frankly and openly and asking for the facts is undermining the religious sanctions of the East. The youth goes to his sacred books, which are nearly all based upon the a priori; he goes to the university, where all is based on the a posteriori. His soul becomes a seething mass of conflicting claims. Tradition and the scientific attitude struggle for mastery within him. Ten years ago I threw out the remark that the non-Christian systems are nestling up under the British Government, that the strain of modern conditions is not falling upon these systems as yet, but that when Self-Government begins, and the British Government is taken away, the pressure will rest directly on these systems. They will then be called upon to furnish a basis for modern living and to sustain the progressive reforms of modern life. When that pressure falls full upon them it will crack them to pieces. That is taking place before our very eyes. “All our customs are in the cooking pot,” said a Hindu to a friend of mine one day. He meant the melting pot, but it didn’t matter. “If we change all these customs, what happens to the authority of our sacred books wherein these customs are rooted and approved?” asked a discerning Hindu in Gandhiji’s paper, Young India. The whole thing is summed up in the words of

SD 4-0-0 <ECXESEL-O ERO SO the head of an orthodox Hindu college, spoken to me rather pathetically one day: “The intellectuals of South America are not the only ones who have found tradition losing its hold with nothing to take its place. Some of the rest of us would like to find new sanctions in the place of the decaying old.”

There seem to be four alternatives before the soul of the East: First, the old religions, reconstituted and modified, providing sanctions for a progressive future. Second, secular civilization, the method that Turkey is trying. Third, Bolshevism, anti-religious and iconoclastic of the whole present order. Fourth, Jesus Christ, furnishing a basis of human living adequate to stand up under the modern stress and providing a moral and spiritual dynamic for personal redemption and for human progress.

I dismiss the first three as unworkable. I do not dismiss them lightly, but I am compelled to do .so after looking into the soul of the Hast in our Round Table Conferences. Nowhere, except in Jesus Christ, did life seem to catch its rhythm, its harmony, its way to live. Outside of him there were left only the weird and the wistful: the weird was unthinkable, the wistful was unsatisfied. The future of religion is bound up with this Man. If we cannot be religious after the mind and Spirit of Christ, we cannot be religious at all. The lines in the East are converg-

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

ing upon this alternative: Christ or secular civilization. But the soul of the East is too spiritually inclined to be utterly secular, and we have reason to hope that the ultimate issue will be Christ. “We are now face to face with Him,” said a thoughtful Hindu doctor to me one day.

That leads me to the last reason for thinking that we are on the verge of a spiritual awakening —religion is now becoming Christ-centric. As long as religion was denominational-eentric God could not trust us with power. Had he done so, it would have run into a denominational megalomania. Nor could he trust us with power so long as religion was bound up with Westernism and its supremacies. Had he done that, it would have run into religious imperialism. But if religion is Christ-centric, if to be a Christian is to be Christlike, to catch his mind and Spirit, then I think God can back that with power to the utmost. We do not “step on the gas” if the car is turned toward the ditch. We apply power only when the road is open before us. Religion has an open road in Christ, and power applied will issue in good will, in self-abandoning service, in human brotherhood, in making individuals and society Christlike. God can trust us with power here.

To sum up:

My reasons for believing that the world-ground is being prepared for a spiritual awakening on a widespread scale are these:

The scientific attitude, with its demand for fact, is a soil upon which our gospel can come to its own, for it is founded upon fact and appeals to and produces fact;

The trend toward experience leads us straight toward the heart of the gospel, for the genesis and genius of that gospel is experience;

Underneath the agnosticism and materialism of our day runs a note of wistfulness that will burst into a seeking for God if we can bring to it a gospel that is adequate;

Every other way of life is breaking down, except Christ’s way; this is seen especially in the East, where the entire foundations of life are giving way under modern pressure;

The issues are now being cleared, religion is becoming more and more Christ-centric and God can trust us with power to the utmost if it is to be used to make us Christlike.

If this is anywhere near a correct statement, we can see at a glance that the center of that situation is a demand for experience. If that be true, then it heads us straight toward Pentecost, Where experience becomes immediate, living, morally and spiritually transforming, Godfilled, aflame and adequate to meet life. At Pentecost Jesus’ announcement of the central purpose of his coming was fulfilled: “I am come

ON THE VERGE OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

0D 0 CER O-GRELD OEP 04? 0-0-0 that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” They had life and they had it abundantly. And life is the one thing a seemingly living world needs.

“Tis life of which my nerves are scant, More life and fuller that I want.”

The first Hindu youth I talked to after my return to India said, very thoughtfully: “India has everything but life. You Christians have it.”

But have we? Potentially, yes. Actually? I question.

At Pentecost potential life and actual life were fused into a living whole. As I believe that to be the dominant need of our age the theme and purpose of this book will be: Pentecost, the meeting and fusing of potential and actual life.

Chapter II The Church Behind Closed Doors

THERE is nothing new in saying that we live in an age of transition. Someone has facetiously Said that when Adam and Eve were going out of the garden of Eden Adam turned to Eve and said, “My dear, this is an age of transition.” The oldest known bit of writing in the world is a piece of papyrus in a Constantinople Museum. On it is written: “Alas, times are not what they used to be. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book.” “We are suffering from transition,” said a Bengali youth. He felt that we were suffering from it

’ as one does from measles. Transition does seem to be as recurring as measles, and every age suffers.

Nevertheless, no one can get down amid the eurrents of this age without feeling that the thoughts and ideas and tendencies flowing there are not ripples on the surface, but something that is changing the whole fundamental outlook on life. We are in the throes of a passing from traditionalism to life based upon the authority of facts, of truth, of experience. This whole tendency sends life straight to the doors of the Christian Church, and there it stands waiting

-O-ETD - O- TR for some clear word of guidance, some note of certain experience of God, of the way to live, of power over evil and self, of victorious human living, of a human brotherhood.

Can the church speak that word out of the depths of its own radiant sense of God, out of its own experience of victory in life, out of its deep sense of sureness amid a world of clashing change?

I wish I could answer that with a clear-ringing “Yes,” but my intimate contact with thousands of ministers in our Retreats, with the general church life in East and West, compels me to say that the church is largely unready for this hour. If the whole demand for experience heads us straight toward Pentecost, candor compels me to say that the church is not living in Pentecost.

It is living between Easter and Pentecost. Easter stands for life wrought out, offered; Pentecost stands for life appropriated, lived to ‘its full, unafraid and clearly and powerfully wit- \nessing to an adequate way of human living.

The church stands hesitant between the two. Hesitant, hence comparatively impotent. Something big has dawned on its thinking—Christ has lived, taught, died and risen again and has commissioned the church with the amazing Good News. But something big has yet to dawn in the very structure, make-up, and temper of the

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ES Olife of the church—Pentecost. Easter has dawned; Pentecost has not. If the church would move up from that between-state to Pentecost, nothing could stop it—nothing!!

Now it is stopping itself by its own ponderous machinery. Whenever we have been troubled in conscience about our spiritual impotence we have added a new wheel—a new committee or commission, a new plan or program, and in the end we have found that we have added one more wheel, but with little or no power to run the old or the new. We become busy—devastatingly busy—turning old and new wheels by hand-power, by sheer hand-power instead of lighting central fires. So much of this is forced, nervewearing, instead of spontaneous and healing. Pentecost is not a living fact with us.

Hence we worship machinery instead of winning men. I once came down from Almora over one of the worst winding roads of the world. The driver of the bus had never driven in the Himalayas before, and it happened that on his first trip the previous day he had almost gone over one of those terrifyingly precipitous cliffs. He was nervous, so before starting back he came around in front of the engine and stood with folded hands saying his prayers to the machine. That done, we started off, but had not gone far when the engine began to overheat. There was no water in the radiator! This was remedied.

But when we were still many miles from our destination the machine stopped while going up a hill. There was no petrol in the tank! There we stayed until rescued. The driver said his prayers to the machine, but put no water in the radiator, and no petrol in the tank. We ran on left-overs—and stopped. How often we worship the machinery of our ecclesiasticisms, depend on left-overs that have come down to us from the sacrifices of our fathers, neglect the sources of power, and then stop dead!

Imagine the early church with Pentecost eliminated! Imagine those men going out to interpret that wonderful message, but themselves not inwardly corresponding with that message! That hiatus would have been their paralysis. It is ours. Pentecost made the men and the message one, hence their power. We cannot imagine the church with Pentecost eliminated. I‘or there would have been no church. Here the church was born. True, there had been the period of gestation, for this holy thing lay within the womb of the purpose of God and was nourished by the life and teachings of Christ; the cross was the birth-pain; Easter heralded the coming birth, but Pentecost was the birthday. On that day was born the New Humanity. A’ new type of human being came into existence as different from ordinary humanity as ordinary humanity is different from the animal.

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But suppose for a moment there had been no Pentecost. The situation would have been impossible for them. Here were men commissioned to proclaim a crucified Jesus as Saviour and Master; they were to replace the present world-order with a new world-order, the kingdom of God, and all this in face of a deep hostility— with their pre-Pentecost resources an impossible task. Without this inner transformation and moral re-enforcement we would expect to find them just where we do find them: It was evening on that day, “the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews.” A church behind closed doors! A church living between Easter and Pentecost is always behind closed doors.

They had ringing in their ears the most gracious word that ever broke into human life— | the gospel; they had seen the most perfect exhibition of living that this planet has known— His life; they had witnessed earth’s most terrific and decisive moral struggle—his death; they had found their sadness turned into joy over the most transforming and astonishing fact in history—his resurrection; they had seen wounds that would heal wounds, a death that would banish death, a resurrection that would raise a world into new life; they had looked into that Face, so tender, so triumphant, and had heard him commission them to go share this with the world, and what had they done? With all of this back of them, what had they done? They had shut themselves up behind closed doors for fear. They had the message the world needed and awaited, the one message that would heal the sin-hurt of the world, and yet that message was shut up behind closed doors.

The only power that could and did get them out from behind those closed doors and loose them and their message upon the world was Pentecost. It was not enough for them to see Him and to hear him say, “Peace be unto you: As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” His presence and his commission were not enough, for a week later we find them still behind closed doors. His assurances and his commission did not get them out. Only Pentecost got them out. For up to Pentecost the whole thing was on the outside of them, objective, something spoken, acted before them. It wasn’t in them. At Pentecost this gospel came . within them, became identical with them—what they had heard and seen and what they were became one, hence they became irresistible apostles of a mighty passion.