Form and content in the Christian tradition; a friendly discussion between W. Sanday and N. P. Williams

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

II

All this that I have been saying seems to me to be no matter of speculation and theory, as to which there can be discussion to decide whether it is right or wrong, but plain statement of fact. It may of course be taken or left ; but in my belief it ought to be taken.

Applying it to the history of Christianity, the different phases of Christian doctrine are all so many attempts to express some broad idea in the forms that appealed most to the particular age to which they belonged. This tendency appears from the very first and within the New Testament itself. It could not be otherwise. There can be no doubt that St. Paul's presentation of the doctrine of the Atonement was determined largely by his Pharisaic training. Behind it there lies a deep and intense conviction ; but the forms in which that conviction is expressed came from his surroundings. In the age which immediately followed, the metaphor of ' ransom ' was most prominent. Anselm elaborated his views in connexion with mediaeval juristic ideas of ' satisfaction ' ; and so on. In other words, each of these phases in the history of the doctrine was relative to the age through which it was passing, and took its shape from the whole body of thought prevailing at the time. It is easy to prove this, and it has been abundantly proved — last, and not least, in Dr. Rashdall's recent Bampton Lectures. But, that does not the least mean, in my view of the matter, that the doctrine of the Atonement is reduced to nothing and finally disposed of. In all this working of the human mind on the subject of the Atonement, there were elements of permanence as well as elements that were transitory and ephemeral. If we would see what these are, I believe that our best course is to go back behind the Christian era altogether, to Isaiah liii. and the associated passages of the Old Testament. If I understood him rightly, in those of his Lectures which I was able to hear. Dr. Rashdall contented himself with referring to these, and did not expound or apply them. But, from my point of view, this is like putting on the stage the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet left out.

The doctrine of the Atonement is to my mind a very good example of the necessity for a balanced combination of the principle of continuity of thought with relativity of expression. And I would extend this principle all round. I believe that it holds good equally well in the more audacious departures of the present day.

Ill

I will take my courage in my hands and speak to you for a moment about one of these audacious departures. I am before you as a suspect, as one under a cloud, because of the opinion which I have expressed on the subject of the Virgin Birth. The opportunity seems to me suitable for saying exactly, or as exactly as I can, what I really think on this subject. I am in a position to do so now rather more maturely than when last I alluded to it.

I should be prepared, if I had the time, to enter into full detail and to examine the evidence on the subject as a whole. But that would be impossible on this occasion, and I do not know when I shall be able to attempt it.

I said some time ago — I do not at the moment remember where, but that does not matter — that I will not put, [or be a party to putting] ' nots ' into the Creeds. Some people may think that I have changed my mind ; but I have not. I will not affirm everything in the Creeds — but that is different. That is precisely where I draw the line, and believe myself to be right in drawing the line. It is also, if I am not mistaken, where our Bishops drew the line in the joint resolutions which they issued last year. I believe that they exercised a very wise discretion. I speak for myself, and for my own confession of faith. I do not doubt that there are some who will say that, having gone so far, I ought to go the next step further ; and some might hint that I drew back to save my skin. So far as I know myself and my own motives, it is not to save my skin. If I thought it the honest thing to say a point-blank No, I do not think that I should hesitate to say it. But I plead guilty to being one of those who believe that truth lies in a nuance ; and this — the difference between not affirming and denying — is the precise nuance in which I think it lies. The abstinence from (full) affirmation is consistent with a great amount of partial affirmation.

I will explain just what I believe to have been, and in a manner to be, the real function of the clause in the Creed about the Virgin Birth.

The Jews, as we know, used habitually to speak of raising ' a fence or hedge round the Law '. We should perhaps more naturally take a metaphor from fortification, and speak of ' throwing up an outwork ' in front of our citadel. In either case the idea would be of keeping the enemy at arm's length ; putting an additional obstacle in his way, before he could begin to lay sap or mine to the keep or centre of the position. If one may venture to ascribe motives to the Almighty, that is why I beUeve Him to have decreed that the full belief in the Virgin Birth should prevail for so long. There are abundant analogies for this in the authenticated history of mankind and, more particularly, in the history of the reception and interpretation of the Creeds. One of the greatest mistakes which men have made, and are still making, about God, is in attributing to Him, in the ages of the past as well as in the present, what I may venture to call a punctilious determination of the wiU towards securing the prevalence throughout the world of what we call ' literal ' truth. All through the early ages of mankind ' poetical ' truth has been the rule, and ' literal ' the exception. This may be different from what we should expect. But anyhow it is plain matter of fact, and we must not shut our eyes to it. It is not for us to know the reasons for this particular characteristic of the workings of Divine Providence ; they are beyond us, and belong to those vast rangings through time and space by which these workings are governed. It may well be that ' the times of this ignorance ', or of this latitude, are coming to an end. We are not concerned with the future, but only with the past ; and in regard to the past we must resign ourselves not to know, or to know very imperfectly. Even we men, dullsighted and falhble as we are, can see a multitude of reasons, short of its literal truth, for the prevalence of the belief in the Virgin Birth ; it has been of immense and prolonged benefit to mankind. Even at this day, it goes hard to let it drop out of our range of vision ; and only (what some of us think) imperious necessity compels us to loosen our hold upon it. I should on all grounds, and in particular out of piety towards the past, refuse to deny the Virgin Birth. Those who will may think that I am splitting a hair in doing so. But I find myself able to subsume the idea of the Virgin Birth under the yet larger and more important idea of Supernatural Birth. I will venture to express my meaning in a phrase : it all seems to me to stand (sit venia verho) for the direct influx of Deity into manhood.

We are prepared for such a conception by our belief in Divine Immanence ; it is no strain upon us to conceive of a supreme and unique act and form of this Immanence. And, with all possible deference for my revered friend, Dr. Swete, if we can conceive of it under a form that is in accordance with nature, that is far easier for some of us than to think of it under conditions that we should call contra naturam.

Again, if I had time, I should be prepared to show that this form of the conception was entirely congruous with all the Old Testament analogies. The Jews — without any exception, so far as I know — thought of divine intervention in human births as something superadded to the natural process, not as a mutilation of it. The idea of divine fatherhood taking the place of human fatherhood, is pagan and not Jewish. That is one of the puzzles attaching to the stories of the Nativity in St. Matthew and St. Luke. I am not sure that anything un-Jewish is implied by the latter Evangelist. It is implied — or shall I say, half -implied ? — by the former ; for there are traces, not wholly obliterated, that the Genealogy which he incorporated, originally ended 'Joseph begat Jesus'. I doubt if the other idea arose actually in Palestine ; I suspect that it came in somewhere on the outskirts, from Syrian syncretism.

IV

We are met for counsel, and I would venture to expand the main point of what I have just been saying into a piece of more general advice or suggestion. I think that we should all be on our guard against 'denials'.

10 Form and Content in Christian IVadition

I do not think that a blank and unqualified denial — putting a ' not ' into the Creed — is anywhere required of us.

Incidentally I may observe — not as a motive, but as a simple statement of fact — that by abstaining from denials we make our own position as English Churchmen impregnable. So long as we are on our guard against the point-blank ' not ', no one can touch us.

This maybe worldly wisdom, but, to my thinking, it is truth as well. And it is because it is truth that I commend the advice to you.

Relative truth, it should be remembered, is still essentially truth and not falsehood. For many long centuries it may have been the best truth available. In any case, it is what God has willed for a time, if not in permanence ; and we can never think or speak of it otherwise. That fact alone precludes the possibility of ' denial '. Relative truth is not negatived but superseded. The nearest analogy in nature is the way in which the snake sloughs its skin. The old skin does not come off until the new skin is fully formed.

There is another practical suggestion which I will make, if you will allow me. Our object is to keep up the fullest possible continuity with the past. Whatever the outside world may thmk of us, we are not disloyal ; we are not indifferent to our inheritance. We too are anxious that ' all our days ' — all the days of the Christian Church —

should be Bound each to each by natural piety.

Those of us who are students seek to attain this end by an ever deepened study of the past. They undertake that study in no cold, detached, dispassionate spirit. They ' think upon the stones of Zion ' as rich with history.

as the member of an ancient and illustrious family thinks upon the stones of his ancestral home.

Study undertaken in this spirit cannot be too sympathetic. The mind that has a true sense of continuity will always be seeking — not only to understand the formulae which it is investigating, not only to enter, and to enter fully, into the grounds on which they were based, but to steep itself in the spirit which lay behind them ; it will be always trying to catch something of the balance and breadth of view which is distinctive of the decisions of the Church Universal and which marks them off from the narrower shibboleths of the sects. Because we in these latter days are not able to adopt as our own the exact expressions — iurare in verba — of the Old Masters, it by no means follows that we shall not have a great reverence for them ; that we shall not try to live again their life, and to make the spirit, if not the letter, of their reasoning a pattern for our own.

But the particular point of practical suggestion that I would ask leave to make, is that we should not mix up our study of the past with our attempts at definition and formulation in the present. Ancient and modern are better kept apart. We shall spoil our study of the ancient if we are constantly intruding into it modern questions and modern difficulties ; and we shall equally hamper the free endeavour to express ourselves in the language of our own day, if we burden ourselves with questions which really belong to the older context and not to our own. Let us look at the ancient world with the eyes of the ancient world, and then at the modern with the eyes of the modern. Let us try to think out each set of conclusions by itself before we attempt to combine them. When we know accurately what the ancients thought and why they thought it, we shall be better able to find equivalents for their teaching in terms that are frankly and genuinely modern.

12 Form and Conte7it in CImstian IVadition

VI

It is a great mistake to suppose that we have any desire ' to jettison the Creeds '. I do not say that we might not like if we could — though of course we cannot — to redraft them. Any such idea can at present be nothing more than a pious aspiration. And yet it is, I hope and believe, an aspiration with some substance in it. It may be realized in that day — which our grandchildren may see, if not our children — ' the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World ', when the Churches are reunited.

We can conceive even now the lines on which we should like to see the Creeds redrafted. We should like to see them no longer what they largely are — so many negations of heresy, but real constructive summaries of the faith that is in us. In the meantime we look up to them as great historic monuments, landmarks and beacons, which still show us the way we should go, although they are somewhat worn and weather-beaten. We always think of them as what God has willed. They are clothed in language that was natural and suitable at the time — and not only so, but the product of deep and strenuous thinking. Even if we regard them as relative rather than absolute, yet as relative they have the strongest claims on our respectful attention. They are a constant reminder of the direction in which we should aim.

The chief characteristic of our modern thinking about the deepest things in the universe, is its greater simplicity. The difference between ancient and modern methods all points in this direction. We should never think now of working out our beliefs with the minuteness aimed at in the Early Creeds. The methods employed in their construction lent themselves to minute definition. They were more like the codifying of a body of law than a statement of the foundations of true religion.

Dr. Sunday I 13

In drawing up the Creeds, the ancients went upon a number of assumptions that we can make no longer. They assumed the strict inerrancy of all the Scriptures ; they assumed the literal and equal accuracy of all the narratives of the Old and New Testaments alike. They had behind them a different Weltanschauung from ours. They thought of the sky as a solid vault resting on pillars ; they thought of the sun and moon and planets as fixed in concentric spheres, which revolved within one another. They believed that irregularities occurred in the order of nature without any of the limitations that we should set to them now. It is really out of the question that the young men of the present day should be expected to subscribe to every item in formulae constructed under conditions such as these.

The principle which enables our young men to accept the Creeds, is that which I have had in view throughout this paper, the principle of the relativity of expression. They believe that the Creeds are true, not so much in the minute technical detail which was in men's minds at the time when they were composed, as on broad spiritual lines. They would not deny the technical details ; they believe that they all had a certain relative Tightness in the periods that understood and could assimilate them ; they are perfectly ready to believe that the good Providence of God presided over the whole evolution. But they, none the less, believe that God has ' provided some better thing for us, that they, without us, should not be made perfect '.

It does not really matter that all the living beliefs of the present day cannot be put, or must be imperfectly put, into words. A great deal may remain as a matter of feeling rather than of words ; in the sense in which Wordsworth wrote :

We feel that we are greater than we know.

The central belief of Christendom is itself an example of this. All the terms in which it is described in the New

Testament are themselves relative terms. They all have their history, and they must be interpreted in accordance with that history. Of course we must fill our minds with this to the very best of our ability. It may not, in the end, be easy to digest the result into a sentence. But we shall most certainly go away saying to ourselves, ' My Lord and my God.'

VIII

If the main result of modem thought as applied to the subject-matter of the Creeds is a general tendency towards simplification, that should remove from those who are committed to it at least one of the accusations that are often brought against them. We are told that Modernism tends to place a gap between the learned and the simple. Just the contrary. It tends to bring the learned and the simple nearer together. Its whole effect ought to be to induce the learned to formulate their beUefs in terms which they can share whole-heartedly with the simple. It is really the Traditionalists who do what they accuse us of doing. They would bind upon the unlearned all the technical apparatus of ancient tradition. Of course they bind it upon themselves as well as upon others. But, to say the truth, they do not succeed in binding it upon either. The human spirit refuses to be bound in such a way. As a matter of fact, they exemplify those lines of Matthew Arnold's. They know what they say they feel, and they know what they think they feel ; but they do not know what they feel indeed.

What does the average worshipper reaUy make of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds ? What does he reaUy make of many of the Psalms and Lessons ? There is always enough left of which he can make something, but in these parts of the services there must be always a great deal that is simply unassimilated.

So far from setting a premium upon learning, the tendency of the modernist is all the other way. He regards the Creeds as products of excessive intellectualism . What he wants to do is to get out of the grooves of these over-minute and sometimes sujierfiuous definitions. The modernist seeks for his ideal quite at the other end of the scale. He is moved to his depths by the sight of the simple saint upon his knees. He would like to put into his creed,

Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.

All this does not prevent the man to whom is committed the talent of learning from making such use of it as he can. It is part of the obligation laid upon him. But he would, none the less, join from his heart in St. Paul's correction.

And yet show I unto you a more excellent way.

IX

One other consequence follows from this. The genuine modernist, who has really taken in the principle of ' the relativity of expression ', will have no false pedantry about him in disparaging the value of either the thought or the expression of previous ages. If he seeks to express his own thought in the sincerest language he can find, it is not from any petty ambition to be ' up to date '. He has no Pharisaical feeling of superiority towards his next door neighbour who remains at a less advanced stage. He is concerned with his own duty, and he avoids comparisons of this kind. He always respects the honest convictions of another, even though they may be a little behind the times. It is better to be behind the times than to be puffed up with the conceit of theories half digested and half understood. It is always safe advice to one who is struggling out of one phase into another, not to be in too great a hurry but to make sure of his ground, to proceed pedetentim, by one step at a time.

16 Form and Content in Chnstian Tradition

The great aim (as I have said in another place) of the Modernist Quest is the unification of thought. There have been times when the thought of an age has been completely unified. It was so in Clement of Alexandria and Origen ; it was so in St. Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen. But from the Reformation onwards, with the insistence upon verbal inspiration on the one side, and with the development of the natural sciences and of a purely lay philosophy on the other, there was for a long time an increasing divergence between theology and secular thinking. This began to be reduced as the critical movement gradually made itself felt ; and various half measures have been taken, and various half-way haltingplaces have been erected. But only with the rise of Modernism can it be said that the frank and full unification of secular and religious thought has come to be faced as a definite ideal. We may be sure that, once clearly grasped, this ideal will not be let go again.

Until the beginning of Modernism, the Church of Christ had been content to let unification go by the board. There has always been one little corner of the globe that has been exempted from the rules, a hortus inclusus to which the methods and hypotheses applicable elsewhere were held not to apply. We desire to make the methods that we apply to it strictly homogeneous. We are convinced that life in New Testament times was not conducted as if in the atmosphere of a dark seance. We are convinced that bodies in those days did not float in the air or materialize and dematerialize at will. We have no doubt in our own minds that, of the two hypotheses — that these things really happened, and that they came to be thought to have happened on the basis of widely prevalent ideas — the latter is by far the more probable. The belief in this enables us to throw open the doors of the dark chamber, and to let in hght and air.

Ih\ Sanday I 17

When Mr. Knox, in his easy-going manner, paraphrases or parodies our view of the Descensus ad Inferos as meaning that

Smce the people of the time [of Christ] were the sort of people they were, that is just the sort of thing they would have thought He did,

he is saying exactly what we really think ; and we have practically no doubt that the explanation is the most probable that can be given. And I am afraid I must reply to another critic of mine that it is not a tenable view to apply this kind of explanation to the Descensus and to refuse to apply it to other clauses of the Creed.

I know that it will seem an audacious, and even a presumptuous thing to say, but I am almost as sure as I am of anything that the view which I have just been propounding can be permanently maintained, and I greatly doubt whether any other view can.

For myself, I have always said that I do not deny the reality of miracle. What I contend for is that there are in the nature of things (i. e. in the world as God has made it) limitations to miracle of which the men of our Lord's day were not aware, but of which we are aware now.

I must confess that, since the War began, it has absorbed all my thoughts, and I am behindhand with my theological reading. I have not yet read either Dr. Headlam's book or Dr. Illingworth's. I know that, when I do read them, it will be with all respect. The writers are sure to have stated with the greatest ability the view opposed to mine. But I cannot think that they are likely to lead me to change an opinion which it has taken me a lifetime to form.