The Crisis of the Churches

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Preface

I AH indebted to my friends, the Rev. Frederic Palmer, D.D., editor of the Harvard Theological Review^ and the Rev. Percy Gordon, my associate in St. Bartholomew's Church, for doing me the favor of reading this book in manuscript and making valuable suggestions of which I have availed myself. It is not, however, to be supposed that they are responsible for any part of this book or are necessarily in agreement with the opinions therein expressed. My thanks are also due to Miss Helen K. Fullarton for reading the proof.

St Paul exhorted his readers to ^^ speak the truth in love," and it is to be assumed that he endeavored to follow that rule in all his epistles, but evidently he did not always succeed in avoiding offense. It will not be strange then, if although I have tried in the following pages to speak the truth in love, I too shotdd give offense to some whom I wotdd not willingly wound. Moreover, I fear that some such may be foimd in that room of the Household of Faith in which it was my happy lot to be bom. But I wotdd ask them to consider that statements of facts to which attention is called can easily be verified by reference to the authorities which are open to all, and that for this reason I have not cumbered die pages with unnecessaiy foot-notes; and that the opinions herein expressed are honest convictions, the restdt of many years of study and thought These opinions may be, as I believe they are, right; in which case I b^ that they will be considered dispassionately and not condemned offhand because they lead to conclusions which may not be congenial with certain theories of the church which the reader may have accq>ted on authority without careftd examination.

▼u viii PREFACE

On the other hand, they may be erroneous; in which case I shall rejoice to be set right; but this should not be done by an appeal to authority, but by sound reasons.

Whether my readers agree with me or not, I am sure they will feel that the questions here raised are worthy of the serious consideration of Qiristian men. Not, then, in the spirit of controversy, but in the hope that we may find a way out of the difficulties which beset the church in this day of crisis, I submit this work to the judgment of religious men and women. t p

All Saints' Day, 1921.

Contents

CRAPTES I PAOS

iNTKODUCnON zi

I. The Crisis of Civilization i

Introduction

It will be generally admitted^ even by the most optimisticy that we have come to a crisis in the history of civilization. The word crisis is used in two different senses; sometimes it means no more than that a turning-point has been reached, as when, in speaking of a disease, it is said that the crisis has or has not been passed. But the original meaning of the word has a deeper significance than that; it means also a judgment. This is what not a few religious men believe the present crisis of the world to be. They believe that it is the revelation of God's estimate of our civilization — the condemnation of that materialistic conception of life which first poisoned our philosophy, then our theory of government, and, finally, affected all society, leading men and women to believe that a man's life does consist in the abimdance of the things which he possesses till there was nothing left but to cry: ^'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

That the crisis of the world should produce a repercussion on the church was inevitable, but that the church may fail even if Western civilization goes down in ruin will be said by some to be unthinkable. ''Have we not the promise of Christ that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail'? And does not that mean that the church shaU stand till the end of time?"

Whether those are the words of Christ himself, or the expression of that exuberant hope of immortal youth which filled the breast of the church in the early days, we need not now consider. Even though the words were spoken by Jesus, the inference may be quite different from what we have assumed it to be. The church may remain if the

• Zl xii INTRODUCTION

churches fail. And that means that the church of Christ will not be lost even if eveiy chiuxdi now known to us were to disappear. It is significant that in the vision of the ideal life, which he calls the city of God, the seer ''saw no temple there." But even if the words of the gospel be taken in the traditional sense, it should be remembered that this promise of Christ, like all the promises of God, is conditional. The promise to the Christian church is no more solemn than the promise to Israel. Israel failed. Why may not the Christian church — at least in any form with which we are familiar — also fail?

It might, then, be well before considering the present crisis of the churches to recall other crises through which the church has passed. The story of the first is embodied in the Book of Jonah, which, because it begins with the incredible story of the swallowing of a man by a great fish and his return to active life after a three days' entombment in its belly, has become the favorite subject of the scoffer, but a more intelligent study of that ancient parable might lead to the conclusion that it is not only one of the most precious books of the Old Testament but also has a meaning for the modem church.

Had the introduction to the Book of Jonah been written by a Greek it would appeal to the modem mind as the Hebrew story cannot do. One of the Greek myths is much like the Biblical story. When Arion incurred the wrath of Apollo he was cast into the sea by the frightened sailors, but instead of being swallowed by a great fish, he was saved by the grateful dolphin, which, charmed by the music of his lyre, hovered about the ship, and then joyfully carried the musician on his back to the safety of the land.

This is so evidently a myth that the modem mind has no dij£culty in receiving it and finding in it a poetical illustration of the providence which is wider than the influence of any particular god. But no Hebrew could have

INTRODUCTION xiH

written such a stoiy. In the first place, the Hebrews were not a seafaring people like the Greeks. To them the sea was alwas^s a thing of terror. The last of all the Hebrew Biblical writers finds comfbrt in the thougiht that in the ideal life '^ there shall be no more sea." But there was a deeper reason than that: the Hebrew mind, if not devoid of humor, at least knew nothing of the playfulness of the Greek temperament. Humor took the form of irony. Life was as serious to the Hebrew as to his modem representative, the Puritan. The eternal God determined all things in heaven and earth and in the sea. Jonah, like Arion, is cast into the sea, but no playful dplphin may rescue the man who is fleeing from Jehovah. If he is to be saved, it must be by him whom he seeks to escape. The ''great fish'' which swallows the prophet had been prepared by God. To the Greek the myth was a joyful revelation; to the Hebrew it was a solemn warning.

The problem of religion in America is complicated by the fact that the American temperament has much 6f the Greek frivolity, and yet its religion is permeated by the solemn atmosphere of the Hebrew. The result of this is seen in the different ways in which men react to such a story as that of Jonah and the ''whale." Tb the irreverent it is a subject of mockery; to the deeply religious it is complicated by the fact that it seems to have received the sanction of the Divine Teacher, but to-day we should be in a position to study the book with a clearer understanding.

The book itself is easily understood if we turn to it with open mind and ask oiurselves what it was the writer wished to say. He had in mind to do what Bunyan did in "The Pilgrim's Progress." He was writing a great allegory. If the reader believes the story of Christian's fight with the dragon — ^and who does not? — then he will believe in the same way that Jonah was swallowed by the "whale."

If only we could read the story as a great allegory, as it was intended to be read, and vtas certainly so understood jiv INTRODUCTION

by the contemporaries of the writer, we should find that it has a much-n^ed lesson for the churches to-day.

To us the story of the prophet swallowed by the whale seems incongruous and absurd, but to the men who first read the book it was most apposite, for they knew that the experience of Jonah in the fictitious writing was a great parable of Israel's experience in the world-wide convulsion of the days when the Assyrian Empire conquered the world.

One of the resxdts of the unhappily named '^ higher criticism"* has been to show us when, and so why, this book of an unknown author was written. It was after the return from the captivity, perhaps about the year 350 B. C, when Greece was preparing for her great invasion of the East, which was destined to affect the whole course of history, that an unknown writer had such an inspiration of the needs of the world and such a vision of Israel's mission, that the book known to us as "The Prophecy of Jonah" was given to the world.

That Israel should have retxuned from its bitter experience filled with horror at the wickedness of the world is not strange; that men filled with the spirit of the Puritan, as were Ezra and Nehemiah, should feel that the safety of the chosen people depended upon their isolation, we can well imderstand. But it was not alone the people who had held them in captivity whose influence they dreaded; there were people near at hand whom they despised and hated. The Samaritans had played an imworthy part on

* Higher criticism is a name we owe to the Germans. It has aroused the resentment of the ignorant because it seems to imply a certain superiority on the part of the critic But it refers only to the subject of critical study. The study of the text was called the "lower" criticism» and the study of the book as a whole — its authorship, the time when it was written, and the object of the writer — was called the "higher" criticism. Certainly a harmless distinction ! But how much bitterness and ignorant zeal might have been spared if by chance the one had been called the "textual" and the other the "literary" examination of Scriptures!

INTRODUCTION xv

the return of their brethren and sown the seeds of that contempt which was all the more bitter because the rival religion aped the manners of the true worshippers of Jehovah.

But there was one servant of God who saw that this q)irit must lead to the destruction of Israel, and that the true meaning of the experience of the exile was to be f oimd by those who had learned that in ''every nation he that reverences and serves God is accepted by him/' Our writer was not the only one to learn this great truth. The unknown prophet, whom we call Isaiah, had had a vision of a God of the whole earth. Malachi was about to say — ^not as we read it in the authorized version, but — "From the rising of the sim even unto the going down of the same, my name is great among the heathen, and in every place incense is being offered imto my name, even a pure offering, for my name is now great among the heatJien, saith the Lord of Hosts." How was Israel, hard and bitter and self-satisfied, to be made to feel that its true mission was to make known the way of the Lord among all people? How was the religion of Israel to be changed from a racial to a universal religion? How was the world to be evangelized ? The writer, like a still Greater Prophet, turned from the language of the schools, and used the parable. He wrote an allegory which has endured through all these centuries and will again influence the world when men learn that it is a parable and not a history.

If Israel rested content with the revelation to the fathers and felt no responsibility for the world, it would surely perish. This was his message, and the Book of Jonah was the form it took. The writer took for his hero the prophet Jonah« Why he chose this little-known figure will be evident to all who take the trouble to make themselves familiar with not alone the history of Israel as it is recorded in the Scriptures but also with the traditions which have lingered to our day. Jonah was a great national hero. Traxvi INTRODUCTION

dition* said that he was the ^'chfld" whom the prophet Elijah, at the time of the great famine, raised to life. He, said the popular stoiy, was the umiamed '^ servant" who fled with Elijah as far as Beersheba, when the wrath of Jezebel sought the prophet's life. He was the ^' messenger" whom Elisha sent to anoint Jehu king, which led to the revolution and the downfall of the dynasty of Ahab. He, thought our author, was a fitting hero for the parable which he hoped might change the course of Hebrew history.

But there was a deeper reason still why Jonah should have been the hero of the tale; it was necessary for the dramatic construction of the story that the hero should represent a theology which Israel had long outgrown. Every student of the Bible knows that Israel at the beginning conceived of God as a tribal God, whose name was Jehovah. This God dwelt on Moxmt Sinai. Thither Moses went to receive the Tables of Stone. To this same moimtain Elijah went to renew his faith in the God of Israel. Great as was the power of Jehovah, it was confined to the Promised Land. His writs did not run in Moab or in Philistia, It was not until the days of the great prophets that God began to be thought of as the God of the whole earth.

The primitive theology had been outgrown through the influence of the great prophets and the experiences in the captivity. Yet, if the story was to have verisimilitude, it required for its hero one who still held to the old theology. For — and here lies the irony of the writer — ^it was not to be supposed that one who believed that he who is the God of the whole earth could be content to have his true worshippers indifferent to that larger world in which he dwelt ! If (jk)d be the God of the whole earth, and Israel acts as il it had no duty outside the Promised Land, what would be the fate of Israel? This is what the story of Jonah sets out to tell. It was because Jonah did not believe that God

* See Stanley's "History of the Jewish Church," lecture XXXIII.

INTRODUCnON xvu

was the God of the whole earth, but only of the sacred land of Israel, that when the unwelcome word of the Lord came to him, saying, ^^ Arise, go to Nineveh," ''he rose up to flee imto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.''

Thus far there is nothing in the allegory which seems inconsbtait with human experience. But now follows the story which is not only incredible but, to the modem mind, grotesque, lliereforey many a reader closes the story at this point and will resd no more, and so one of the most instructive and dramatic books of the Old Testament is closed to him. Yet, I venture to think, the great lesson of the allegoiy was never more needed than to-day.

Why did the prophet insert such a grotesque incident into Ids stoiy? Why could not the Greek dolphin have served his purpose? Of course the first answer is that he never dreamed that his parable would be read by any save his contemporaries I He could not foresee that a day would come when the reverence of a people for his writing would be so great that they would suppose that he was writing history and would expect them to accept his fantastic tale as if it were the truth of a veritable voyage on the Mediterranean Sea! Yet that is what has come to pass.

But the story was not written for Christians, nor for Greeks nor for Americans — full of imagination, indeed, yet singularly lacking in the poetic sense. We are essentially prosaic in oiur most religious moods. The book was written for the contemporaries of the prophet, as we have said, for men whose fathers had known what it meant for a whole nation to be engulfed in the tidal wave of the Babylonian invasicm. The hero of the story had not shared this experience, for he lived before the rise of Babylon as a world-power. He belonged to the Northern kingdom on which the Assyrian ''had come down like a wolf on the fold." It was I<^eveh which had destroyed the people of God, because they had failed to preach to it the righteousxviii INTRODUCTION

ness of God which had been revealed to them. What figure should he use to represent the awful fate of the Northem kingdom? The prophet Jeremiah had spoken of Nebuchadnezzar as a dragon; he had said, speaking of the fall of Judea: ''The king of Babylon hath devoured me ... he hath swallowed me up like a dragon ... he hath cast me out."

This, I guess, is the seed from which our writer's story grew. Indeed, it would be more appropriate as applied to Nineveh than to Babylon, for the word Nineveh comes from the root Nish^ which means fish. This was the great fish that swallowed Israel. The people who first read this story had the key to the parable whidi we have lost. They knew that the experience of Jonah was a parable of the experience of both Israel and Judea. The great monster empires of the ancient world had swallowed the people of God because they had fled from his presence. And now, by the mercy of God, the monster had cast them forth and they were given a new opportunity to serve God by preaching his righteousness to the world. Would they obey the voice of God, or would they refuse? This was the question the writer had in mind to bring before his people.

It is an old story, but it is one which has a meaning for the churches to-day. Indeed, I believe that it is the one question to which an answer must be found if the chiurch is not to meet the fate of Judaism. We have had a solemn warning. Men are saying: "Why did not the church save the world from the desolating war which threatened to destroy the civilization of the world?" It is a question to which an answer must be given, and it ought not to be difficult to find the answer. The chiuxdies were impotent because they had not used their influence to convert the world. They were content to rest in such a modification of the individual and family life as they had accomplished. But that the spiritualization of the industrial and political

INTRODUCTION

life of the nations and the relation of the nations to one another were also the task of the church was far from their thought. The churches allied to the state were bound to speak the things which the state demanded. The American churches, free from the control of the state, might have had a message to the world, but they were satisfied with influencing the individual and were exhausting their energies in sectarian propaganda, and would long ago have perished had it not been that the Christian spirit was kept alive by missions to the heathen. Who can doubt that had the Christian world shown to Japan an example of Christian brotherhood, the whole course of the world might have been changed ? If all the Christian men and women in the world could have united their energies, there can be no doubt that the war could have been prevented. I do not mean by some sudden effort in the year 1914. That was too late. But if after the Reformation all the Reformed churches had determined that they would no longer be dominated by the spirit of the world, as they determined they would no longer be dominated by the papacy, there can be no doubt that the world would be a different place from what it is to-day.

But the chiuxdi has been impotent because it lost the meaning of the kingdom of God and identified salvation with individual escape from the torture of a hell which is to be experienced after death, and supposed that the important work for each church was to propagate its own peculiar doctrines. Because of this the Protestant churches have been impotent to influence the world except to a small degree.

The churches have been like the hero of our story. They have fled from the presence of the Lord. That is, ihey have not acted as if they believed that the Lord is present in the affairs of the world but is confined to the sacred soil of the ecclesiastical life. As a result of this heresy the churches have been swallowed by the world.

xxii INTRODUCTION

were evident"? Possibly. But they would have been sorry to have repentance precede suflFering! The man who wrote the Book of Jonah knew the human heart better than many a man who knows much of which the ancient writer was ignorant When he depicted Jonah sitting in sullen expectation for the destruction of the dty, grieving at the soxmd of repentance, he was doing what many a man who calls himself a Christian is doing to-day. Each is interested, not in the salvation of life, but in the fulfilment of his own prophecy !

Again, I would call attention to the artistry of the stoiy. The writer has followed the path of hmnan experience as faithfully as the broad feet of Bimyan trod the well-known paths of England. Jonah is a modem figure — ^because he is the revelation of the human heart.

Waiting for destruction to fall on those we hate is a wearisome business. Jonah foxmd it so. He knew the evil the great Assyrian Empire had brought upon the world, the blood it had shed, the tears it had caused to flow, the homes it had broken up, and so the cries that went up from the king on his throne and the peasant in the field were as music in his ears. Yet the destruction tarried. At last it is borne in upon him that his prophecy has failed. God is to be merciful to those who deserved no mercy. Meanwhile the hot Assyrian sxm beats down upon his improtected head and he is full of misery.

The Hebrew knew nothing of what we call secondary causes. Whatever happened was the direct action of God. As God had prepared the great wind and the great fish, so now it is God who causes a miraculous gourd to spring up and Jonah is comforted by its refreshing shade. In his secure retreat he again waits for the fulfilment of the prophecy which he had feared was to fail. But at last there can be no further groimd for hope. The soimds of mourning have turned into hymns of joy, and he is compelled to admit that the wicked dty is to escape the doom

INTRODUCTION xxiii

it merited. And in bitterness of heart he lies down to sleep. A!nd now God sends a worm which gnaws the root of the gourd and the hot wind of the desert blows upon it and it withers away. And Jonah is filled with anger against God. Then the voice of God comes to him, as it had come to his master Elijah on Horeb, saying: ''Dost thou well to be angry for the gourd?" And he answers in the bitterness of his soul: ''I do well to be angry even imto death.''

To some this seems an impotent conclusion. ^'What next?'' they say. But it is the proper ending of a great tragedy. As in Hamlet, "the rest is silence." But the meaning is clear. This is the end of the prophetic spirit which loves its own shelter more than the "six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle." "But who are such?" it may be asked. They are the religious sectarians, all who identify the goodness of God with the little system which they have found helpful and comforting. It may be a great diurch which niunbers its millions in many lands, or it may be a little sect of only a few score. But the important matter is not which particular body it seems to us is most to be condemned for this spirit; the important thing to remember is that it is a spirit from which none of the churches is entirely free. I do not intend to imply that there is conscious hatred on the part of one church to another, but only that the logic of their theory leads to a scepticism of God's goodness outside the company to which they belong.

No doubt the story has its lesson for the individual, but it is primarily a parable of the church. It was addressed to the Jewish Church, which had been swallowed up by the great dragons of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, but, by the mercy of God, had now been cast forth. A new opportunity had been given to do the will of God in making his way known among the Gentiles, but instead my INTRODUCTION

of that the Jews were filled with bitterness as they learned that God was interested in the heathen and that his mercy was "wider than the wideness of the sea." Their feding hardened into the Pharisaism which at last slew a Greater than Jonah, because he told them that the Good Samaritan, however faulty his thecdogy, was nearer to God than the orthodox [MJest and Levite.

Yet this tragedy of Israel mi^t have been averted had the priests listened to one who was more like Jesus in his Bfint than even the "greater" i»x)phets. His word needed no scribe to interpret it It was as plain as the word of Jesus. "You are looking/' Jesus said, "only to the past. You forget the present and have no eyes for the future. You are on the threshold of a great revdation— just as Jonah was--and if you fail to see the signs of the times and to do the woik to whidi God has called you, your church and nation, which have beai your joy and comiortf will be destroyed as was the gourd of Jonah, and your end, like his, will be full of bitterness." And it was so. The Book of Jonah is the prophecy of the fall of Israel — the foretelling of the fate of the church of GodI

If that be all the book has to tell us, it can have only an historical interest. And that, after all, has small value if it does not teach us how best to meet the problems of our own day. If, however, this same spirit against whidi our parable is a protest was carried over into the early Qiristian church, we may find that it has persisted longer than ¥re should at first sight be inclined to think. We have only to open the New Testament at random to find how persistent this spmt has been.

When the discq>les had learned what Jesus had done for them, it was inevitable that they should be tempted to look with sui^don, if not with contempt, on those who had failed to see his glory. Thus we are told that on one occasion they came to Jesus and complacently remarked that they had seen others "casting out devils in his name,

E^TRODUCnON

but because they followed not us, we foibade tfaem." They were evideiitly astonished that this exclusive spirit did not meet with Jesus' approval. Later still, when the disciples were left without the guidance ct the Master's presence, they followed the tradition of their fethers and looked with contempt on the Gentiles^ as ''common and unclean." If the account in the Acts is a true representation of history and not, as some have supposed, an attempt to hannonize the differences which came near disrupting the church, then it was to Peter the church was indebted for the first attempt to rise to a higher plane and recognize that God's mercy is as wide as humanity itself. However that may be, it is evident that early in the history of the churdi die same crisis as that which Jonah I»d failed to meet was presented to the disdples. It was Paul who finally won the victory — over Peter, the Prince of the C3uudi. Even if Peter had began well, he was unable to oontintte in his well-doing. Now the rock the apostolic churdi came near breaking upon, no age of the church has quite escaped. In every age there has been a crisis, and the diurch has heea called upon to decide whether its ''gourd" was more valiuible than hmnanity itself.