Religious reality : a book for men

Preface

BY

THE BISHOP OF LICHFIELD

Tuts isa book which is wanted. Thoughtful men, in every class, are not afraid of theology, 7.e. of a reasoned account of their religion, but they want a theology which can be stated without conventions and technicalities; they do not at all care for a religion which pretends to do away with all mystery, but they are glad to be assured of the essential reasonableness of the Christian Faith; they do not expect a ready-made solution of the problem of evil, but they wish to see it honestly faced; above all, they want to know how Christian truth bears on the real problems of life; the best-of them are not at all afraid of a religion which makes big demands on them, but they know well enough the difficulty of responding to those claims, and their greatest need of all is to find and to use that hfe and power, coming from a living Person, without which our best aspirations must fail and our highest ideals remain unrealized.

These needs seem to me to be satisfactorily and happily met in the following pages. My friend and v vi PREFACE BY BISHOP OF LICHFIELD chaplain, Mr. Rawlinson, has had good means of knowing what men are and what they want. He has had to do with the undergraduate, with officers and men in the Army, and with the ordinary civilian in parish life. He has been able to see the nature and needs of our British manhood at different angles, and he is the sort of man with whom men are not afraid to talk. He has had good opportunity of diagnosing the situation, and this book shows his skill in dealing with it.

I do not find myself in agreement with everything in these pages, but when I am conscious of difference of view, I am no less grateful for the stimulus to thought. I am specially thankful that the writer has been so courageous in tackling the most difficult subjects.

I know that the author’s one desire is to help men to be more real in their religion. I share his hope, and I believe that this book will do much to accomplish it.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Tus book has grown out of the writer’s experience in preparing men and officers in military hospitals for Confirmation. It represents, in a considerably expanded but—as it is hoped—still simple form, the kind of things which he would have wished to say to them, and to others with whom he was brought into contact, if he had had more time and opportunity than was usually afforded him. It seemed necessary to write the book, because there did not appear to be in existence any reasonably short book on similar lines which covered the ground of Christian faith and practice as a whole, and which approached the subject from the point of view which seems to the writer to be the most real.

The writer is consciously indebted in the first chapter to the discussion of our Lord’s teaching and character in Dr. T. R. Glover’s fascinating book, The Jesus of History. It is possible that there are other and unconscious obligations which have been overlooked. Here and there acknowledgment is made in footnotes, and an occasional phrase, ‘‘ lifted” from some other writer, has been placed in inverted commas. vii vil AUTHOR’S PREFACE

In Chapter VIII. of Part I. the author has echoed the thought, and to a certain extent the wording, of parts of his own essay on ‘‘ The Principle of Authority ” in Foundations.

For help in the correction of the proofs, and for criticisms and suggestions which have led to numerous modifications and improvements in matters of detail, the thanks of the writer are due to various friends, and more particularly to his brother, Lieutenant A. C. Rawlinson, of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars ; to the Rev. Austin Thompson, Vicar of 8. Peter’s, Haton Square; and to the Rev. Leonard Hodgson, Vice-Principal of 8. Edmund Hall, Oxford.

November, 1917.

Contents

PREFACE BY THE Bisuop of LICHFIELD ...+,.. ie RRO TONG ass os Gr TV in peg Pe eae ca fg igh eee ty An PART I THE THEORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

CHAP.

VII. Tus CuurncH AND HER Mission INTHE WoRLD. . 42

Introduction

ViTat religion begins for a man when he first discovers the reality of the living Gop. Most men indeed profess a belief in Gop, a vague acknowledgment of the existence of ‘“‘One above”: but the belief counts for little in their lives.

Gop, if He exists at all, must obviously be important: and it is conceivable that He prefers the dogmatic atheism of a man here and a man there, or the serious agnosticism of a slightly larger number, to the practical indifference of the majority. “There are two attitudes, and only two, which are worthy of a@ serious man: to serve GoD with his whole heart, because he knows Him; or to seek Gop with his whole heart, because he knows Him not.”

The ordinary Englishman is in most cases nominally a Christian. As a rule he has been admitted in infancy by baptism into the Christian Church. But he is ignorant of the implications of his baptism, and indifferent to the claims of a religion which he fails to understand. These pages are written with the object of explaining what, in the writer’s judgment, the faith and practice of the Christian Church really is.

xi

.

Chapter I The Man Christ Jesus

It is best to begin with a study of the teaching and character of Christ. Scholars for about a hundred years have been studying the Gospels historically, “like any other books.” It is now reasonably certain that the first three Gospels—those which we know as the Gospels according to 8. Matthew, 8S. Mark, and 8. Luke—though not, of course, infallible or accurate in their every detail, reflect nevertheless in a general way a trustworthy portrait of Jesus as He actually lived. The sayings ascribed to Christ in their pages bear the marks of originality. The outline of the events which they describe may be taken as being in rough correspondence with the facts. The Gospels as a whole represent pretty faithfully the impression made by the life and character of Jesus upon the minds and memories of those who knew Him best.

We are very apt to regard the Gospels conventionally. B

An inherited orthodoxy which has made peace with the world takes them for granted as “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” An impatient reaction from orthodoxy sets them aside as incomprehensible or unimportant. It is worth while making _ the effort to empty our minds of prejudice, and to allow the Gospels to tell their own tale. We shall find that they bring us face to face with a Portrait of surprising freshness and power.

It is the portrait of One who spent the first thirty years of His life in an obscure Galilean village, and who in early manhood worked as a carpenter in a village shop. He first came forward in public in connexion with a religious revival initiated by John the Baptist. He was baptized in the Jordan. What His baptism meant to Him is symbolized by the account of a vision which He saw, and a Voice which designated Him as Son of Gop. He became conscious of a religious mission, and was at first tempted to interpret His mission in an unworthy way, to seek to promote spiritual ends by temporal compromises, or to impress men’s minds by an appeal to mystery or miracle. He rejected the temptation, and proclaimed simply Gop and His Kingdom. He is said to have healed the sick and to have wrought other “signs and mighty works”: but He set no great store by these things, and did not wish to be known primarily as a wonder-worker. He lived the life of an itinerating Teacher, declaring to any who cared to listen the things concerning the Kingdom of Gop. At times He was popular and attracted crowds: but He cared little for popularity, wrapped up

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS 3

His teaching in parables, and repelled by His “ hard sayings”’ all but a minority of earnest souls. He gave offence to the conventionalists and the religiously orthodox by the freedom with which He criticized established beliefs and usages, by His championship of social outcasts, and by His association with persons of disreputable life. Unlike John the Baptist, He was neither a teetotaller nor a puritan. He was not a rigid sabbatarian. He despised humbug, hypocrisy, and cant: and He hated meanness and cruelty. He could be stern with a terrible sternness. His gaze pierced through all disguises, and He understood the things that are in the heart of man. He saw things naked. He has been called “the great Son of Fact.” He was never under any illusions.

He faced the hostility of public opinion with unflinching courage. He expected to be crucified, and crucified He was. He warned those who followed Him to expect a similar fate. He claimed from men an allegiance that should be absolute: the ties of home and kindred, of wealth or position in the world, were to be held of no account: anything which stood in the way of entire discipleship to Himself, however compelling its immediate claim, was to be sacrificed without hesitation for His sake. He saw nothing inconsistent between this concentration of men’s allegiance upon His own person, and His insistence upon Gop as the one great Reality that mattered.

The motive of His whole life was consecration to the will of Gop. He was rich towards Gop, where other men are poor. The words were true of Him, as of no one else, “I have set Gop alway before me.” His mission among men He fulfilled as a work which His Father had given Him to do. “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O Gop.” He loved men, and went about doing good, because He knew that Gop loved men, and meant well by them, and desired good for them, and not evil. He was pitiful, because Gop is pitiful. He hated evil, because Gop hates it. He loved purity, because Gop is pure.

He delighted in friendships both with men and women: but you could not imagine anything unclean in His friendships. He was not married, but He looked upon marriage as an utterly pure and holy thing, taught that a man should leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife so that they twain should be one flesh, and recognized no possibility of divorce except—and even this is not quite certain—on the ground of marital unfaithfulness. He had one and the same standard of purity for men and women.

He loved children, the birds and the flowers, the life of the open air: but He was equally at home in the life of the town. He went out to dinner with anybody who asked Him: He rejoiced in the simple hilarity of a wedding feast. He was a believer in fellowship, and in human brotherhood. He was everybody’s friend, and looked upon no one as beyond the pale. He loved sinners and welcomed them, without in the least condoning what was wrong. He looked upon the open and acknowledged sinner as a more hopeful person from the religious point of view than the person

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS 5 who was self-satisfied and smug. He said that He came to seek and to save those who knew themselves to be lost.

He chose twelve men to be in an especial sense His disciples—learners in His school. To them He sought to reveal something of His deeper mind. He tried to make them understand that true royalty consists in service ; that if a man would be spiritually great he should choose for himself the lowest room, and become the servant of all; that the privilege of sitting on His right hand and on His left in His Kingdom was reserved for those for whom it was prepared by His Father ; the important thing was whether a man was prepared to drink His cup of suffering, and be baptized with His baptism of blood. But He did speak of Himself as King, He accepted the designation of Himself as the Christ of Gop, and spoke strange words about His coming upon the clouds of heaven to judgment. He held that by their relation to Himself and to His ideals the lives of all men should be tested, and the verdict passed upon their deeds. For making these and similar claims He was convicted of blasphemy and put to death.

His disciples failed to understand Him. The Gospels are full of the contrast between their minds and His. Of the chosen Twelve who, as He said, had continued with Him in His trials and to whom He promised that they should eat and drink at His table in His Kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, one betrayed and one denied Him when the time of crisis came, and the rest forsook Him and fled. The fact that their faith and loyalty were subsequently re-established—that the execution which took place on Calvary was not the complete and summary ending of the whole Christian movement—that, in the days that followed, the recreant disciples became the confident Apostles, requires for its explanation the assertion in some form of the truth of the Resurrection.

With regard to the precise form which the Resurrection took there may be room for differences of opinion: the accounts of the risen Jesus in the various Gospel records cannot be completely harmonized, and the story may here and there have been modified in the telling. The fact remains that apart from the assumption as a matter of historical truth that Jesus was veritably alive from the dead, and that He showed Himself alive to His disciples by evidences which were adequate to carry conviction to their incredulous minds, the origins of historical Christianity cannot really be explained.

In the Gospel according to 8. John it is stated that the crowds said of Jesus, ‘‘ This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the world’’: and so much, at the least, the average Englishman is ready to admit: for to call Jesus Christ a Prophet—even to call Him the supreme Prophet—is to claim for Him no more than a good Mohammedan claims for Mohammed.

The word “ prophet ”’ in itself means one who speaks on behalf of another: and a prophet is defined to be a spokesman on behalf of Gop. He is essentially a man with a message. In so far as he is a true prophet he is one who by an imperious inner necessity is constrained to declare to his fellows a word which has

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS 7 come to him from the Lord. And the prophet’s word is urgent: it brooks no delay. It is impatient of conventionalisms and shams. It breaks through the established order of things in matters both social and religious. It is dynamic, vivid, revolutionary. It goes to the root of things, with a startling directness, a kind of explosive force. It disturbs and shatters the customary placidities of men’s lives. It forces them to face spiritual realities, to look the truth in the face.

All this is true in a pre-eminent degree of the words of Christ. There is a force and directness, an energy and intensity about His teaching, which is without parallel in the history of the world. It might have been thought impossible for His utterances, in any age or under any circumstances, to become conventionalized : but the miracle has been achieved. Christianity is to the average Englishman an established convention and nothing more.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” said Jesus: but we say rather, ‘‘ Blessed are the rich in substance.”

“ Blessed are they that mourn”: but that is not the general opinion.

‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth ’’—but who amongst us really believes it ?

“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”

** Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy’: but to-day a more popular maxim is, “ Be not merciful unto them that offend of malicious wickedness.”

** Blessed are the pure in heart ’’—and how many of us are that ?

“Blessed are the peace-makers”’: but in a time of war they are not very favourably regarded.

“* Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake ’’—is that your ambition, or mine ?

“Ye are the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world ’—then the earth, it is to be feared, is a somewhat insipid place, and its light comparable to darkness visible. ‘‘ If any man will come after Me, let him take up his Cross, and follow Me’: but most of us make it a tacit condition of our Christianity that we shall not be crucified.

Is it not true that we habitually refuse to take seriously His teaching about man; that we water down His paradoxes and conventionalize His sayings; that we blunt the sharpness of His precepts, and shirk the tremendous sternness of His demands ?

And does His teaching about Gop fare any better ? Gop was to Jesus Christ the one Reality that mattered ; is that in any serious sense true of us? Gop, He taught, cares for the sparrows, numbers the hairs of our heads, sees in secret, and reads our inmost hearts. Gop knows all about us, loves us individually, thinks out our life in all its relations, and makes provision accordingly. There is nothing which He cannot or will not do for His children.

He is near and not far off: He is also on the throne of all things—the Universe is in our Father’s hand, and His will directs it. “Oye of little faith, wherefore did ye doubt?” Fear, on the ground that things are stormy, is a thing Christ simply cannot understand.

Gop, moreover, is loving and generous, royal and

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS 9 bounteous: forgiving sinners: sending His rain with Divine impartiality upon the just and the unjust alike. “His flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man’s garden.” He loves even His enemies, for He is equally the Father of all.

And man is made for Gop, and belongs to Gop. Gop and man need one another: all that is requisite is that they should find one another: and that is the Good News. The discovery of Gop is the Pearl of great price, a Treasure worth the sacrifice of everything else : the experience of a life-time, and a life-time’s acquisitions, apart from GoD, are not worth anything at all.

We who call ourselves Christians, do we seriously believe these things? Do we really share Christ’s outlook upon Gop, or His hope for man? Is our view of life centred in Gop, as was His? Or do His words of reproach fit us, as they fitted 8. Peter— You think like a man, and not like Gop ”’ ?

“The way to faith in Gop, and to love for man,” it has been said, “is to.come nearer to the living Jesus.” If we would learn Christ’s great prophecy about man and Gop, we must read the Gospels over again, with awakened eyes. We must take seriously the man Christ Jesus. We must hear the words of His prophecy, and face honestly the challenge of His sayings. We must confront the central Figure of the Gospels in all its tremendous realism, watering down nothing, explaining nothing away; “‘ wrestling with Jesus of Nazareth as Jacob wrestled with the angel, and refusing to let Him go except He bless us. In the end He does bless those who wrestle with Him,” and we shall not in the end be able to stop short of confessing Him as Gop.

For the message of the Gospel story is ultimately not even the teaching of Christ: it is Christ Himself. He, alone among the world’s teachers, perfectly practised what He preached, and embodied what He taught. And therefore the truth of Gop and the ideal for man in Him are one. In Him we see man as he ought to be, man as he is meant to be. And because we instinctively judge that the highest human nature is divine, and because also we feel that Gop Himself would be most divine and worshipful if we could conceive of Him as entering in and sharing our human experience and revealing Himself as man, those who have reflected most deeply about the matter have commonly been led to believe that so indeed it is. They have felt that in Jesus Christ man, as the mirror and the Son of Gop, reflects the Father’s glory. They have felt that in Jesus Christ Gop, the Eternal Source of all things, has expressed and revealed Himself in a human life ; that Gop has spoken a Word, a Word which is the expression of Himself: and that the Word is Christ. “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father.” For there is, in truth, something in Jesus of Nazareth which compels our worship. And if we will take seriously the human Jesus we shall discover in the end Deity revealed in manhood, and we shall worship Him in whom we have believed.

But that, of course, is dogma: in other words, it is the deliberate judgment of Christian faith. It is the

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS it expression, as a truth for the mind, of the value which a soul which is spiritually awake comes to set upon Jesus because it cannot do otherwise. A judgment like that is the conclusion—it ought not to be taken as the starting-point—of faith. There are many, of course, who are willing to begin by assuming pro visionally that it is true, upon the authority of others who bear witness to it: and that is not an unreasonable thing to do, provided a man afterwards verifies it in the experience of his own life. But belief in the divinity of Jesus is too tremendous a confession lightly to be taken for granted by mere half-believers of a casual creed. Convictions worth having must sooner or later be fought for: they must be won by the sweat of the brow. And if a man is not content permanently to defer to the authority of others, he ought not to begin by taking for granted the doctrine that Jesus is Gop. He ought to begin as the Apostles began, by taking seriously the Man Christ Jesus.

Chapter II The Revelation Of The Father

It was characteristic of the ancient Jews that they had a vital belief in the living Gop: and belief in Gop, and that of a far more real and definite kind than the modern Englishman’s vague admission of the existence of a Supreme Being, was a thing which Jesus was able to take for granted in those to whom He spoke. Gop to the Jew was the Gop of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, holy and righteous, gracious and merciful: active and operative in the world, the Controller of events: having a purpose for Israel and for the world, which in the process of the world’s history was being wrought out, and which would one day find complete and adequate fulfilment in the setting up of Gop’s Eternal Kingdom. What Jesus did by His life and teaching was to deepen and intensify existing faith in Gop by the revelation of Gop as Father, and to revive and quicken the expectation of Gop’s Kingdom by the proclamation of its near approach. The application to Gop of the term ‘‘ Father”? was not new: but the revelation of what Gop’s Fatherhood meant in the personal life and faith of Jesus Himself as Son of God was something entirely new: while in Jesus’ preaching of the Divine

THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 13

Kingdom there was a note of freshness and originality, and a spiritual assurance of certainty, which carried conviction of an entirely new kind to the minds and hearts of those who listened.

All the more overwhelming must have seemed to the disciples the disaster of their Master’s crucifixion. It was not merely that the hopes which in their minds had gathered about His person were shattered: their very faith in Gop Himself, and in the goodness of Gop, was for the time being torn up by the roots. Nothing but an event as real and as objective as the Crucifixion itself could have reversed for them this impression of sheer catastrophe. The resurrection of Jesus, which was for them the wonder of wonders, not only restored to them their faith in Him as the Christ of Gop, now “‘ declared to be the Son of Gop with power by the resurrection from the dead ”’ ; it also relaid for them the foundations of faith in Gop and in His goodness and love upon a basis of certainty henceforth never to be shaken. “ This is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you, that Gop is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

Meanwhile what of Jesus Himself—this Christ, through their relationship to whom they had come by this new experience of the reality of Gop? In symbolical vision they saw Him ascend up into the heavens and vanish from bodily sight: in pictorial language they spoke of Him as seated at Gop’s right hand. They were assured nevertheless—and multitudes in many generations have echoed their conviction—that He was still in their midst unseen, their living Master and Lord. Instinctively they prayed to Him. Through

Him they made their approach to the Father. He had transformed for them their world. He was the light of their lives. In Him was truth. He was their way to Gop.

All the great movement of Christian thought in the New Testament is concerned in one way or another with the working out of this experienced significance of Jesus. The maturest expression of what He meant to them is contained in the great reflective Gospel —an interpretation rather than a simple portrait of the historical Jesus—which is ascribed by tradition to 8. John. The Christ of the Fourth Gospel is man, with all the attributes of most real and genuine manhood: but He is also more than man. He is the selfutterance—the Word—of Gop. He came forth from Gop, and went to Gop. He is the revelation of the Father, the expression of Gop’s nature and being “‘in the intelligible terms of a human life.” To have seen Him is to have seen the Father, because He and the Father are one. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life: the Bread that came down from heaven: the Fountain of living water: the Lamb of Gop, that taketh away the sin of the world.

Later Christian orthodoxy never got farther than this. All that the formal doctrine of the Incarnation— as expressed, for example, in such a formulary as the Athanasian Creed—can truly be said to amount to is just the double insistence that Christ is at once truly and completely man, and also truly and completely Gop. The paradox is left unreconciled—“ yet He is not two, but one Christ.” The Godhead is expressed in manhood : in the manhood we see Gop.

THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER 15

What does it mean to confess the Deity of Christ ? It means just this: that we take the character of _ Christ as our clue to the character of Gop: that we interpret the life of Christ as an expression of the life of Gop: that we affirm the conviction, based upon deep and unshakable personal experience, that “Gop was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.”

What is the real question, the most fundamental of questions, which arises when we seek to interpret the world we live in? Is it not just the question: What is the nature or character of the ultimate Power or Principle or Person upon which or upon whom the world depends? Is not every religion, every imagined deity, in one sense an altar to the unknown Gop? The venture of Christian faith consists in staking all upon the assumption, the hypothesis abundantly verified in the life’s experience of such as make it, that the character of the unknown Gop is revealed in Christ: that the love of Christ is the expression of the love of Gop, the sufferings of Christ an expression of the suffering of Gop, the triumph of Christ an expression of the eternal victory of Gop over all the evil and wickedness which mars the wonder of His creation. If we were to look primarily at the life of Nature, we might be tempted to say that Gop was cruel. If we considered certain of the works of man, we might be tempted to conclude that Gop was devilish. Looking at Jesus we gain the assurance that Gop is Love. We behold “the light of the knowledge of the glory of Gop in the face of Jesus Christ,”’ and we are satisfied.

And so we come to Jesus—the Prophet that is come into the world: and what we shall find, if we will suffer Him to work His work in us, is this. He will change our world for us, and will transform it. He will redeem our souls, so that there shall be in us a new birth, a new creation. He will show us the Father, and it shall suffice us. He will set our feet on the road to Calvary, and we shall rejoice to be crucified with Him. He will convert us—He will turn our lives inside out, so that they shall have their centre in Gop, and no longer in ourselves. He will bestow on us the Spirit without measure, so that we shall be sons and daughters of the Highest. And we shall know that we are of GoD, even though the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we shall know that the Son of Gop is come, and that He hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and that we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ.