Old and new theology : a constructive critique

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COMPLIMENTS.

OLD AND NEW THEOLOGY.

Preface

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THE oft-quoted remark of Vinet, that “even now, after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we may be involved in some tremendous error of which the Christianity of the future will make us ashamed,’ must be my excuse for attempting what will seem alike to dogmatists and sceptics a presumptuous task. A “constructive critique of Theology, old and new,” implies that there is both a constant and a variant element in faith: dogmatists deny the latter and sceptics the former. As a result of this, our age stands between these two Theologies, that of the past and that of the future, in an attitude of indecision which reminds us of the phrase applied to the political deadlock of Germany a few years ago, Gehemmter Lortschritt, Gefordeter Riicktritt, “ Progress hindered,” “ Reaction forwarded.” ‘This is the mocking comment of our age on its theological guides, who can neither break with the past nor throw themselves forward into the future. We stand where two ways meet, uncertain which course to take. Theology sits like Theseus turned to stone, “sedet eeternumque sedebit, Infelix Theseus.”

It is this fossilized aspect of spiritual truth, fixed in form instead of clothing itself in fresh form at each fresh age of the world, which leads men to ask whether there can be a living truth of God at all. If God has “more light to break out of His word,” as Robinson told the Pilgrim Fathers at Leyden, it must be said of our day as of his, that no one seems on the look-out for it.

Much of our modern scepticism is accounted for by this attitude of divines. This age, like other ages, has its own ruling ideas, its Zeit-getst, which is summed up in the humanitarian phrase of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Medicine and jurisprudence have revised their teaching in harmony with these ruling ideas. Theology alone holds back under the fear of unsettling men’s minds. But men’s minds are already unsettled, and it is this fear of change which only widens the breach and deepens the existing unsettlement. When Beccaria, on the eve of the great reform of jurisprudence, described the story of human progress as “ presenting the picture of an immense sea of error in which only a few, in confusion, and at a great distance from each other, emerge to the surface ot truth,’ he had no thought of dogmatic Theology with its wrecks strewed on a sea of error; and yet the same criticism which detected error in law may also detect error in Theology. It is upwards of twenty years since I first set myself to trace out what seemed to me to be the missing link in our popular Theology. A spiritual Theology seemed to presuppose some spiritual faculty in men; I was led in this way to

Preface. 1X trace the error of all dogmatic Theology to its one taproot in a defective psychology. In a previous work on the Tripartite Nature of Man, 1 pointed out that with the exception of the Alexandrian school of Platonizing divines, theologians in general have neelected Christian psychology, and so have lost the key to such dogmas as original sin, conversion, regeneration, and the restitution of all things. So true is the phrase, Hhew! paupertina philosophia desinit in paupertinam theologiam.

The poverty-stricken Theology of the West dates from the time when a shallow unscriptural conception of man became the “ruling idea” of Latin divines. We do the great Augustine injustice when we make him exclusively responsible for this. He was incomparably the greatest Church teacher of the school of the North African dogmatic divines, who were all moulded on a bad model. It is Tertullian, more than any one else, who is responsible for having given the Theology of the West a wrong set with his crude literalism and sensuous misconception of future rewards and punishments, Uneasy suspicions, it is true, have stirred the best minds of all ages to seek out this root error, and to detect the leaven hid in the three measures of meal. But whether it was the leaven of the Pharisees as formalism, or of the Sadducees as scepticism, or both combined, the Pietists of the past have been unable tosay. They have failed to strike their finger on the defect of Theology, and while using the Pauline contrasts between flesh and spirit they have not gone deep down to the root of the difference between the first and the second x Preface.

Adam, and so to explain what we commonly speak of as the Fall. For want of a sound psychology to supplement Theology, these very divines who denounced the Babylonian captivity of the Church either to Popish or prelatist errors have, with a few insignificant exceptions, bowed the neck uninquiringly to a tradition of North African Theology, which they accepted as Paulinism pure and simple, when in reality it is a strange perversion of the good news of which the great apostle of the Gentiles was the chief messenger.

Educated men have long seen this, and trained divines have always had their scdlicets and distenguos with which to slip out of the knots of a too crabbed and scholastic Theology. But the laity have felt that a system burdened with so many difficulties and contradictions, with lmitations on the right hand arising from God’s decrees, and on the left hand from man’s free will, was scarcely worthy of its Divine Author. The comment of Alphonso of Castile on the Ptolemean astronomy, “with cycles and epicycles scribbled o’er,” that if called in, he could have suggested a much more simple system, is what men have said of the current Theology. There has sprung up, then, a deepening impression on all sides that a new Theology is called for by a new age. The “ruling ideas” in jurisprudence and medicine have all been silently revised and renewed, and it is only in Theology that the same “ruling ideas” pass on from age to age unquestioned and unchallenged. The assumption that Paulinism and the popular Theology are inseparable is the root of much

Preface. x1 current unbelief. It explains the attacks of its open enemies, and also accounts for the failure of its ablest apologists. As a matter of fact, neither the attack nor the defence touches the real point in dispute. The one assumes that the source must be tainted from whence such turbid waters flow, the other that the river must be pure whose source proceeds from “the throne of God and of the Lamb.” Both sides are thus contending on wrong issues, and so they tilt on for ever without touching each other’s shields.

The remedy lies deeper, and in a direction which, as a people, we are constitutionally indisposed to take. Goethe, who was no unfriendly judge of the English character as a whole, described us “a practical people but pedantic, and that our vision was limited in all directions outside affairs.” This is a true witness, and the price that we pay for our genius, for the affairs of real life, is a certain speculative timidity, and a distrust of any root-and-branch criticism of our theological traditions. The modern Englishman has the same contempt for what, in his conceited ignorance, he describes as cloudy German metaphysics, as the rough Roman of the early empire had of the starveling Greek, the Greculus esuriens of Juvenal’s time. Hence his distrust of such a phrase as a “ New Theology.” He has no objection to verbal criticism of such phrases as the “Fall,” or “Imputation,” or “Satisfaction,” but then they must be verbal only.

But in Germany, where, for a variety of reasons,

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Dogmatik has long since passed into Dogmen-Geschichte, there is less distrust than with us of a thoroughgoing criticism. Ever since Kant led the way as a Bahn-brecher, pathfinder, and pioneer in one, as we should read the phrase, philosophy first, and after it Theology, have in Germany moved in this path of constructive criticism. The ruling ideas of an age, such as that of the Deists, is felt to be inadequate to express the beliefs of an age which is not deistic at all, and whose very way of looking at the supernatural differs 71 toto from that of our fathers.

In America as well as in Germany, though for different reasons, a critique of religion at once destructive and constructive will not have to break through so thick a crust of prejudice as in this country. The American intellect is set in some respects in a different mould from ours. ‘There is not the same distrust of novelty. On the contrary, the same inventive skill which is let loose on mechanical novelties, some of them only “notions” at best, runs also out into mental and moral inventions. In a new world, a new Theology does not perplex the mind with fear of change as much as it would in the old world. There is another reason for this greater openness of mind in America. As it was there that the Theology of Calvin was pushed to the last point of logical consistency by Jonathan Edwards and his school, so the reaction has set in there with the most rigorous consistency. New England Theology has long had its “old lights” and “new lights,” its “hard shell” and “soft shell” Calvinists: but now that

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Unitarianism and Universalism have stepped in to claim some of the spoils of war, and are the residuary legatees in many cases of the old ultra-Calvinistic Churches now defunct, there is a disposition and a desire on all sides to reconstruct Theology out of its ruins.

No such necessity having arisen, as yet at least, in this country, we shall be told that we are only unsettling men’s minds by raising such questions at all. But our answer is, that men’s minds are unsettled already, and that the very worst state that a Church could fall into is when men outwardly conform to it while they dissent inwardly. We are not, happily, sunk so low in this respect as they are in France, where one sex are dévots and the other sex libres penseurs. But we are fast) approaching it, and this too pedantic adherence to | antiquated phrases, out of which the primary and spiritual | import has been evacuated by constant iteration, is only hastening on the crisis. It is not too late to avoid this eclipse of faith, or as we may describe it, this glacial epoch of the world when faith dies down into agnostic indifference, if we only have the courage of our convictions. To do this, we must brush aside as irrelevant the cautions of the timid and timeserving, the warnings of the narrow and dogmatic, and harder still to bear, the sneers of the indifferent and the sceptical, who are the most dangerous by far of the three classes with whom we differ. As for the timid, who think they take their religion straight out of their English Bibles, and are unconscious how much muddy

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metaphysics enters into the popular Theology, we can only ask them to pass the subject by altogether. A critique of philosophy is written for philosophers, and equally so, a critique of Theology for theologians. Turning to those unnatural allies, the dogmatists and the sceptics, we may leave their objections to answer each other. It is more than we dare expect that this, or any other work of apology, will slay these hydras of doubt and dogmatism sent to strangle the infant spiritual consciousness. But our standpoint and aim may be summed up in a word, as the attempt to restate the truths of the old Theology in the hght of this spiritual consciousness. The pneuma, or God-consciousness, is dormant but not dead in every man. It has been said by Dean Stanley that there ‘are three ages of Church history—the Petrine, or that of Dogmatic Catholicism ; the Pauline, or of Dogmatic Protestantism; and the coming age of Johannine of mystical and spiritual thought which we are now entering on. This contrast is fanciful if carried too far, and certainly none but the Tibingen school would pretend that these contending types of Theology were not harmonized among the apostles themselves. But it is not saying too much to observe that as there has been a dogmatic hierarchical and a dogmatic Biblical type of Christianity, so the type we are entering on to-day is at once freer and more devout than the two former. The Theology of the future, as we may call it, aims at absorbing all that was good in the old Rationalism, and also in the old Mysticism, long and widely divided. The new Theology is thus distinct from

Preface. x the old, and yet it is its legitimate descendant and its heirat-law. Parent and child may misunderstand each other, as is often the case, and busy flatterers and mockers on both sides may make mischief by widening the breach which they should desire to close. But we need not be shaken in our faith in an ultimate reconcilement of old and new forms of truth by these alarms. When did a new truth ever enter the human mind unless under storm and stress? It is so with the kingdom of heaven. It is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force. Hence we have no wish to minimize these contrasts, or to tone them down to the level of the platitudinarian party, who first denounce the use of such a phrase as a new Theology, and then end when it has won its way by saying sapiently, “we always thought so.” The late Dr. Whewell used to say that every new view of science had to pass through these three stages, and he added that he had lived through all three experiences himself. 1. It was absurd. 2. It was contrary to the Bible. 3. We always thought so.

It will not be long—the writer himself may live to see it—when this new Theology will pass into the third stage, when its opponents will say, “ we always thought so.” This will be the sure sign that its work is done. It will then be time for it to give place to some fresher type of thought. So, let us add, in conclusion, each age may and should construct its own Theology. Let the twentieth century outgrow the ruling ideas of the nineteenth as. much as we do those of the eighteenth.

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We shall be the last to complain that our work has become obsolete. It was so with that now forgotten but once famous work, Abraham Tucker’s Light of Nature. Tucker did good yeoman’s service for the eighteenth century, as it is our desire to do for our own age. For both him and me it should be enough if we can make some crooked places straight and some rough places smooth before the coming of Christ, and to remember “ He must increase, but I must decrease.”

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COON BENS:

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Introduction

Limits of the Inquiry—Theology has four Divisions : Bibliology, Theology Proper, Soteriology, Eschatology—Bibliology outside this Inquiry, which assumes the truth of Revelation and Miracle—The new Theology proposes to subject to Criticism the popular Teaching on the Being of God, the Plan of Redemption, and the larger Hope for the Race here and hereafter,