Sharing in creation : studies in the Christian view of the world

Front matter

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MACMILLAN & CO., Limrrep

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltp. TORONTO

Foreword

THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP

John Bohlen, who died in Philadelphia on the twenty-sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of one hundred thousand dollars, to be distributed to religious and charitable objects in accordance with the well-known wishes of the testator.

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and paid over to ““The Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia,’”’ in trust, a sum of money for certain designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of ten thousand dollars was set apart for the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and conditions:

The money shall be invested in good substantial and safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred copies of two or more lecture sermons. These Lectures shall be delivered at such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time

8 FOREWORD to time determine, giving at least six months’ notice to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as lecturer a second time within a period of five years. The payment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and received by the trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of printing the lectures and the other incidental expenses attending the same.

The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the “Bampton Lectures,’ at Oxford, or any other subject distinctly connected with or relating to the Christian Religion.

The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the persons who for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity, the Rector of said Church, the Professor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may nominate the lecturer.

Under this trust the Rev. W. Cosby Bell, D.D., was appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1925.

Preface

I have read somewhere a piece of advice to theologians to the effect that they are more fruitfully occupied when dealing with problems within the world than when they essay to deal with the problem of the world. And, indeed, the mind works more easily and with less sense of strain at problems of practice than at the problem of meanings. But if the above advice is disregarded in these lectures, it is because of the conviction that what one shall think of the details of life and how one shall act in its particular situations depends very largely upon one’s view of the world as a whole. It is not the theologian or the philosopher, but Life itself that raises the problem of the meaning of life; it is always coming to us with the question that Jesus put to his disciples, ‘‘Whom say ye that I am?’’; and, in words or in deeds, we can not avoid giving an answer. And any attempt to find the right answer in words should be only a step towards finding the right answer in deeds.

These lectures represent an effort to suggest some of the outlines of such a basic philosophy of life. , They make no special claim to originality; there is nothing in them of importance which has not been said or suggested elsewhere on an ampler scale. Nor do they represent any effort at complete-

10 PREFACE ness; there are many important questions visibly left to one side. Rather are they an attempt to suggest in the briefest and simplest fashion possible some of the main features of a view of the world that results when one attempts to bring contemporary knowledge and thought into relation with the Christian religion. And they are written in the conviction that in such commerce and interchange between what we have always known and what we have more recently learned lies the only hope of any fuller understanding of either. If Christianity needs to make itself at home, as is so often said, in the modern world, the modern world needs even more desperately to make itself at home in Christianity. Religion can get along after a fashion without a great deal of knowledge and still breed faithful and useful living in the world; but knowledge, grown irreligious and undutiful, might well become an agent of destruction. Knowledge is power, but power is an indeterminate thing until it is settled to what ends it shall be used. And knowledge that has not learned to serve the highest ends of the world raay be no blessing but only a scourge.

The lectures record the further conviction ‘Gat any better religious understanding of the world must be sought along lines openly and confessedly Christian. Many of the questions dealt with are such as would have come under the old heading of “‘Natural Theology,’ understood as the effort to construct a philosophy of the world without the aid of “Revelation.’ But surely all that is “natural” is also revealed and all that is ‘“‘revealed” is but the very climax and culmination of the natural. And while

PREFACE 11 the attempt can be made—no doubt usefully—to interpret the world as far as may be without bringing into play the characteristic Christian data, such a proceeding can not but be, for the Christian teacher and student, a highly artificial one. To discuss the purpose of the world without using the meanings that have come to us through the Incarnation, to discuss the problem of suffering without using the light that falls upon it from the cross—that is as if one sought to open the door without using the key. It might even be urged with some force, that “Natural Theology” has been an anachronism for nineteen hundred years. If Jesus Christ be what Christians think him, the Lord of all, he is also the key to all. And it can not be required of the Christian that he should try to make sense of his world without taking advantage c: what is, for him, its central Fact.

Finally, it is suggested throughout the lectures that no problem of life is at present completely soluble on the level of thought alone. And this because life is actually incomplete and the world unfinished. ‘Therefore, for most of our problems, the full solutions remain yet to be worked out, and every question of theory brings us sooner or later face to face with a question of practice. In all reflection a point is always reached where, before further progress can be made, something must be done. Christianity is, indeed, neither a philosophy nor a life, but both, and both at the same time. At its center there stands not just a great idea, but a great Personality who embodies both thought and action—who is Way and Truth and Life.

12 PREFACE

That Personality seeks to breed in his followers, neither a system of thought alone nor yet just a program of action, but a spirit of enterprise in which thought and action shall co-operate in the task of making the Kingdom of God. And the line of advance towards a better religious understanding of the world lies along the line of fuller exploration of the possibilities of discipleship to Jesus.

The thanks of the writer are rendered to the Trustees of The John Bohlen Lectureship whose action made the delivery of these lectures possible. They are printed as, with some necessary contractions, they were delivered. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the Rt. Rev. H. St. George Tucker for a careful reading of the entire manuscript and for various criticisms and suggestions made by him. Portions of it have also been kindly read by Dean Berryman Green and Prof. W. E. Rollins. My wife, Anne Lee Bell, in the course of criticizing, appreciating, typing and revising the lectures has acquired a familiarity with them not likely to be duplicated.

W. COSBY BELL.

Virginia Theological Seminary, © March, 1925.

Chapter I

Introduction: (1) Increased knowledge of details adds to the difficulty of a study of the idea of creation; (2) but such an inquiry can not be shirked, for fundamental questions are the important ones. Moreover (3) it is our,own world that we have to understand and (4) real, if incomplete, knowledge of it is possible.

I. Tue Inka or CREATION AS A RELIGIOUS TRADITION ih

Il. Toe REASONABLENESS OF F'arTH IN Gop AS CREATOR..... 1

In non-Christian religions—Dualism of early thought.

In the religion of Israel and in Christianity: (a) References. (b) Problems raised by evolution. (c) The interpretation of Genesis chh. i-iil. ,

Faith in God (a) grows up out of the many-sided life-process; (b) in its Christian form, is the gift of Jesus; and (c) depends for its continuance upon the continuing experience of life with God. (d) That it should become reflective means attempts at a philosophy of faith.

. Beliefs and their verification. (a) Our knowledge real but incomplete. (b) Hence initial beliefs take the form of postulates. (c) The nature of the postulation process. (d) Postulates may be increasingly verified as they are found (1) to interpret experience and (2) to meet the needs of life. (e) Such a process of successful verification issues in rational knowledge.

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14 CONTENTS

3. Faith in God is found rational in proportion as the idea of God approves itself a principle of Light and of Life.

4, The uses and limitations of philosophy.

Ill. A JUSTIFICATION OF THE INITIAL VENTURE...........

1. A fully reasoned faith in God has to be won.

2. The initial venture, in the case of the young, commonly made on the basis of authority.

3. The study of the history of religion reveals a wider authority—the authority of Man.

Chapter II The Method Of Creation

Evolution means more exact knowledge of creation.......+..06. I. CHrisTIAN THEISM AND EXVOLUTION..........2++-+00.

Three main causes of difficulty: 1. Failure to distinguish between the form and the substance of belief. But Christian faith is faith in God, not in any particular kind of process.

2. A deistic view of God’s relation with the world. But God as Holy Spirit is immanent in the natural process.

3. Confusion of the scientific theory of evolution with interpretations of it made by Naturalistic philosophy. But other—and better—interpretations are possible. Evolution may be understood as the creative method of God.

Il. Man’s. PLACE. Ins NATURD S $s Se a ee eee

1. The Christian view of man’s value reflected in the older science.

2. But called in question by modern astronomy and the theory of evolution.

3. Man and astronomy. (a) Twoscalesof measurement—quantitative and qualitative. (b) The spiritual valuation of man, (c) in a spiritual universe.

4, Man and evolution. (a) Two features of the evolutionary process—continuity and difference.

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(b) Man’s continuity with all below him. (ce) And difference. (1) Evolution is the working out of the specific possibilities of life, (2) and man is the climax of earthly evolution, physically and spiritually. (c) Hence man fulfills the past history of the earth and seems to hold the keys of the future.

5. The evolutionary process read (a) backward and

(b) forward. Man interprets Nature. 6. Man dignified by his history. 7. The moral meaning of his supremacy.

1. Creation a continuous process.

2. Two types of representation, (a) Emanation, (b)

Creation. 3. A possible synthesis.

IV. CrEeaATIon A Co-OPERATIVE ENTERPRISD......... 1. Relative independence and power of initiative in

(a) Animals and (b) Man.

2. Man’s relation with God that of dependentindependence.

3. In man, life becomes raw material for art. 4, And God works increasingly with spiritual tools. 5. Creation becomes a task shared by God with man,

6. The question whether this constitutes a limitation of God.

Chapter III

The question raised whether the world has a central Purpose Berar PURPOSEFUL WORLD el yee oe bed aants

1. A purposeful system defined. 2. Picturization of the world-process.

3. Two features of the process: (a) progress, (b)

correlated progress. 4, The process seems to be purposeful.

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Cn

Il. Tue 1.

2. 3.

IV. MAN AND NaTuRE

CONTENTS

. But purpose is to be discovered as a spiritual quality of the whole, not as one physical factor among others.

PURPOSH OF THE WORLD. i...2.<s0+ sees ae

The question becomes, What is the purpose of the world?

“Happiness” is not an adequate answer.

The answer suggested by the world itself is “Life.”

. Life can fulfill itself only through harmonious effort directed towards the highest ends.

. This is the idea of the Kingdom of God, which is, therefore, the chief end of the world.

WoORLD-PURPOSE AS REVEALED IN JESUS......... . Jesus relates himself to the world-purpose and brings it into focus for us.

. This the essential meaning of the New Testament conception of him as the Logos or Word of God.

. The discovery of the purpose of the world focussed in Jesus gives to life (a) the sense of direction and (b) an adequate object for service.

The official Christian view as expressed (a) in the ancient creeds, (b) in the Old Testament, (c) in the teaching of Jesus.

. This view not always maintained in historic

Christianity.

. Resulting alienation from the world—not always unjustified.

. Any Christian reconciliation of spiritual and natural must conserve the primacy of the spiritual. Such reconciliation is to be found: (a) in the recognition of Nature’s kinship with us; (b) in the increasing use of the natural as the instrument of the spiritual.

- But such a transformation of the material is not inevitable; there are always two ways.

. The problem to be solved finally not by ascetic flight but through creative action.

. Summary.

eoceeoereeee ese ee eevee eevee ee ee ee eevee

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CONTENTS 17 CHAPTER IV THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD PAGE The question of Providence raised in relation with the purpose IEREOOTIO DMI y ea hi tt UMC IGEN TE GoM dine SMS Lae RRC aN AS yay 136 Ae LOE IDWA OF PP HOVIDENCE 0.5 Sols do ldaiaiivsie ce ve deldlelaun 136

1, Three presuppositions of providence.

2. Immanence and transcendence defined.

3. Attempted discriminations: general and special providence; nature and grace. Providence defined.

4. It is only a fragment of a whole that we have before us—yet the fragment should give us real knowledge.

5. Real knowledge must be based on actual experience.

6. Two unsatisfactory views: (a) that every event necessarily embodies a purpose of God; (b) that providence consists exclusively in meeting individual emergencies.

7. Our view of providence depends upon our view of life.

8. The normal process of the world is providential. It has three main features.

9. These features must be kept in mind in any discussion of providence that is relevant to our actual world.

II. Some Princreues OF PROVIDENCE......... 00sec eeeeess 151

1. The principle of Growth.

2. The principle of Law.

3. The principle of Freedom (a) in Man, (b) in God.

4. The principle of Religion—Prayer.

5. The principle of Care for Individuals.

III. Jesus Curist AS PROVIDENCE IN ACTION.........0+006. 169

1. Specially significant periods in history.

2. Jesus Christ is Providence incarnate.

3. Two far-reaching provisions of God revealed in him. (a) The duty of Joy. (b) The duty of Service.

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4, On the religious level the speculative euestions of providence change into practical préb:vms. 5. Final definition of providence.

6. Actual life is the outcome of human initiative and divine providence.

Chapter V The Problem Of Suffering

1: Tam PROBLEM: DEFINDD, sss 0sis cs tiie Fa ea 1. Not all suffering is the result of sin. 2. Mill’s indictment of Nature. 3. Huxley’s suggestion that ethical life must take the form of a struggle against Nature. 4. The problem is fully felt only on a religious view of the world. 5. The problem re-stated from this standpoint. 6. It is not a problem of reconciling ‘‘suffering” with “omnipotence.”

II. Toe DIMENSIONS OF THE PROBLEM.........-.-2+ece00- 1. Sentimental optimism and pessimism. 2. The main rhythm of life is optimistic.

Til!) Some. Vital Vaburs or Pamc..5).oeaeuia se pee ee 1. Pain is experimentally found to perform certain functions and is correlated with the production of certain values: (a) In the animal world, (b) in the human world. (c) Correlation with spiritual values. 2. This suggests that the element of suffering in life is purposeful. 3. We can begin to understand the world only in the light of its own end, the increase of life. . The romance of life. 5. This view of the world results in optimistic realism.

nes

IV. SurrerRING AND THE PURPOSE OF THE WORLD

1. The world not only a place of training but also a field of service.

2. We may come to feel that the end is worth the cost.

3. There is healing power in fellowship among the servants of the Purpose.

4, And in the fellowship of God.

V. Tue TRANSMUTATION OF SUFFERING...........00000:

1. Such a view does not enable us to interpret every event.

2. Nor is every event necessarily the result of a particular purpose of God.

3. Events may occur that are accidents for God as well as for man.

4. And yet they may be creatively dealt with by God and man and so transmuted into good.

5. Future possibilities.

6. Optimism and pessimism in St. Paul and Schopenhauer.

7. The solutions offered by Buddhism and by Chris-

No

CONTENTS tianity.

Conclusion

. The idea of religion as a means of escape from life. . The idea of religion as loyalty to God. . Jesus teaches us that religious loyalty finds its deepest expression in service of the purposes of God.

. Religion, so understood and practiced, solves the problem of escape from the weaknesses of self-consideration.

. And confers the gift of power. . The victories of religion are won by offering men tasks worth the gift of a life.

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- cs ie ee oy

*.

Chapter I The Maker Of Heaven And Earth

There is some reason for hesitation, nowadays, before attempting a study of the Christian idea of Creation. The business of making worlds, though it be only on paper, is not so easy as it once was. And the increased difficulty is due to increase of knowledge. It is the fact that we know more about the actual structure and working of our world that makes us less willing to embark upon hasty generalizations. On the one hand an enlarged appreciation of the magnitude and complexity of the process which has conferred upon us the gift of our brief lives, has bred in us a deepened sense of its mystery. And on the other, the same appreciation tends to temper with caution our philosophic valor. There are appalling masses of brute fact which must be taken into consideration. The sciences—physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology—have poured new riches into the common stock of knowledge; and with this fresh knowledge, theory must make terms. Our view of the world must reflect as completely as possible our knowledge of the world. And if, as may well be, our familiar religious beliefs about it remain, unimpaired or even strengthened, yet they stand, often, in new settings and come to us with fresh emphases.

The difficulty is increased by the fact that much of the new knowledge is of a sort that can be fully understood and handled only by specialists. And the non-specialist who undertakes the task of interpretation is exposed to all the perils of collision with facts which he knows incompletely or not at all. And yet there would seem to be need among our specialists of those who are prepared to take the risk of specializing in interpretation. For after all, the most important question we can ask is not just how much we know, but what is the meaning of our knowledge for life. Until we have asked that question and found some sort of answer to it, though knowledge may come, wisdom lingers. It is, indeed, significant that in each of the great races of mankind, the earliest reflection upon the world takes the shape of a cosmogony, a doctrine of creation. Whence comes our world? What does life in it mean? Whither is it bound?—these are the first questions because they are the most important questions. Some answers to them must’ be found—or we must decide that no answers are possible—before we can get on intelligently with the business of living. The kind of system to which we belong determines, in the last resort, the kind of life that we ought to attempt. Here, as always, the most fundamental questions are the most practical ones. It is not presumption but necessity that leads children to ask the largest questions first: Who made the world? And why? And when?

The importance of the task, then, is its justification. And something of unnecessary difficulty may be avoided by remembering that it is this world that we have first of all to understand. It is, as the philosophers say, our primary datum—the immediate thing given us as matter for reflection. No doubt the starry heavens that wakened Kant to wonder are, in a sense, part of our experience also, but we know comparatively little about them. What we do know, however, is enough to assure us that the entire universe in which we live is, in some sense, a single coherent system. And this means that knowledge of a part ought to give us some knowledge of the whole. To know truly something of this world is to know something of the wider system in which it is a member. To know God as He meets us and deals with us in this world of time and space, is to know God truly, however incompletely. To know man as he strives and struggles on this planet, is to know the beginnings of all that man may someday become.

The agnostic suggestion that neither God, if there be a God, nor the world, nor man can be really known, we may put aside as philosophic neurasthenia. We were born, as a race, of our world, bone of its bone, flesh of its fleshe We have been living, as a race, in our world for many thousands of years. And we have been living in it with some success; we have made fairly effective liaison with its processes and are able increasingly to understand and control them. We have lived in it long enough, too, to have acquired a certain perspective. The course of its history begins to be long enough for us to pick out salient tendencies therein and frame a judgment from them upon whither it is moving. And each day and every hour of each day the world is the very texture of our life; it is calling to us with a thousand voices; it is offering us a thousand experiences; it is demanding of us a thousand responses. It is no remote and alien star, this world of ours, nor are we aliens in it, but rather its own children. It is the theatre of our existence, and, unless we are a race of congenital morons, we ought to know something substantial and serious about it. We have no excuse for not knowing; it is our business to know. And we have no right to dismiss even the largest questions with a non-possumus, until we have tried to answer them—no right to abandon the idea of God before searching for Him; nor to dismiss religion as moonshine without conducting any religious experiments.

I THe Reiicious TRADITION

Different answers have been and are still being given to the question as to the whence and whither of the world. It is from the dark to the dark, answers the agnostic. We can not tell whence we come or whither we are bound. It is from dust to dust, answers the materialist. All the order and organization and life that constitute our world were born of matter in motion; into matter in motion they subside at the last. The Christian answer is an answer of hopeful knowledge: Itis from God to God.

That answer comes to us first in the form of a religious belief, an element in the normal religious life. And the belief is not confined to any one religion nor to any one section of mankind. The conviction that our world is somehow the expression of intelligent, purposeful Power of the sort we name Divine is a world-wide belief, a racial belief of man. We find it in its crudest form in the so-called “high gods of low races,’”’ of whom Andrew Lang makes, perhaps, too much in his Making of Religion. Thus the Baganda, a central African tribe, worship Katonda, ‘‘The Father of the gods,” “the Creator, who is said to have made all things.’ Traces of such higher creative Powers are to be found in many savage religions. It is true that recognition of them co-exists with belief in many lesser gods and that the larger part of the tribal worship is directed towards these more accessible beings. But the belief in supreme creative Power is there also, and it is a germ out of which clearer ideas may develop.

On higher levels of civilization the belief that our world is the outcome of creative intelligence takes on more definite forms. We find it in Egypt as early as 2000 B.c. “Hail to Thee, Amon-Ra,”’ runs an ancient hymn, “maker of all things, lord of law, father of the gods, maker of men, creator of beasts, the One without a second.’” We find it in India, in the hymns of the Rig-Veda that center on Varuna: “This Lord, who knows all things, has propped up these heavens; he has fixed the boundaries of the earth. . . . All things, O Varuna,

1 Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 290. 2 Renouf, Origin and Growth of Relig. in Anc. Egypt, p. 220.

are of thy creation.””’ The Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of Persia, begins with these words: ‘‘I proclaim and worship Ahura-Mazda, the Creator.” In the ancient religion of China, Tien or Heaven, the Supreme Spirit, is regarded as creator of mankind, sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership with earth.

Heaven in giving birth to the multitudes of the people, To every faculty and relationship annexed its law.?

So, all round the world, we discover the religious mind of man struggling to lift itself out of the murk of irrational polytheism into clearer air. It is an attempt, it is true, not so far completely successful. ‘These quotations represent high water marks of the ancient religious spirit. And these insights do not, in any of the cases referred to, succeed in organizing themselves into a clear-cut monotheistic religion. They record an effort and a tendency rather than a completed achievement.

A comparison of various early cosmogonies reveals, indeed, as a fairly constant feature a sort of naive dualism. The divine creative agency is usually pictured as impressing form and order upon an already existing chaotic material. On early levels this would seem to be nothing more than an inevitable limitation of that picture-thinking which is the form of all early reflection. One can visualize creative activity only in relation with some sort of raw material given it to work upon. That is the form of our own creative enterprises, and to our

3 Sht King, ITLiii.2 own experience we are tied so far as our power of imaging is concerned. It is more important that such childlike, unrefiective dualism often serves as the basis of a later philosophy which casts it into reasoned form and makes it explicit. For, indeed, every early philosophy has its roots in a complex of still earlier unrefiective religious beliefs and takes its color from them more than is generally supposed. “The idea of a primordial chaos, which was a staple element in myth, passes over in another form, into the philosophical construction of the great thinkers of antiquity.’’* It is so in Greece, where the Greek notion of hulé, or unformed raw material, which is only partly malleable by Mind, generates the dualism that dogs all later Greek philosophy. Something of that ancient dualism passed into Christian theology in later centuries. And if Christians have sometimes been trained to think of the world of nature as the enemy of God, it is partly through contact with strains of thought that came from Athens rather than from Israel. The Christian sacred literature begins with the explicit assertion that our world owes its origin to the creative action of one personal God. ‘‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Even if, as some scholars think, there are reminiscences of an earlier dualism present in the Genesis account, they never play any part in later Jewish thought and never achieve a reasoned form. The strict monotheism of the later Hebrews, together with their strong tendency to refer all events to the causal action of Jehovah, forbade the recogni- 4 Matthews, Studies in Christian Philos., p. 195.

tion of any original material existing along with Him but not derived from Him.

Throughout the Bible it is the religious interest that controls the outlook and determines belief. And the biblical references to creation are in character religious rather than speculative or scientific. The statements made about it are couched in the everyday language of life rather than of the schools; they are picturesque rather than precise, suggestive rather than descriptive; informal and unphilosophized. But the Old and New Testaments unite in understanding the world of material things and of human life as the creation of God. So Isaiah writes: ‘Thus saith the Lord who created the heavens; He is God who formed the earth; He created it not a chaos; He formed it to be inhabited.”® The same assertion meets us in the opening verses of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Through Him were all things made.” ‘By faith,’ writes the author of Hebrews, ‘we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of the things which appear.’’®