Theology in church and state

Preface

As I am to speak of a term so controversial as dogma, may I explain how I seek to use it. Historians like Harnack would limit it to a final system of belief, given more or less miraculously and imposed authoritatively by the Roman Church. Its popular use applies it to all theology, and identifies it with dogmatics. But the word, with its implicate of finality, seems so valuable for the idea of a Christian society, and so venerable in its great history, that I should be unwilling to surrender either it or its co -relative word Church to a sense so rigid as Rome's or so vague as that of the public. There must be some statement (however we use it) of that which is creative for a Church, some truth which is final and for a Church can never be other than true. For a Church there must be a stateable something fontal, fundamental and final, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The Roman Church holds that that statement is quantitative in vi PREFACE

an elaborate system of belief and polity ; the Evangelical Church may reduce it qualitatively to a point of infinite dynamic in the fact, act, and truth that God was and is in Christ reconciling the World to Himself. But in either case it is a truth not simply held by the Church but held as constitutive for it. It holds the Church rather than is held by it. And that is the Church's dogma.

Rather than part with the word the attempt is here made to transfer it from the one use to the other, to indicate that within the wide range of a free theology there is an inner circle called Church doctrine, and within that again, the holiest of all, the dogma ; which is not simply of the Church's teaching but of its being, expressing not the Church's creature but its creator. There is a theology which is of the thinker's freedom, a speculative system ; there is one which is of the Church's property, an explication of its common faith ; and there is one whose property the Church is — which is of the Christian constitution, a statement of revealed grace. The last is brief but yet endless, and no term better fits it than dogma. Unless indeed that is held to be incurably vitiated by pre-emption for Rome's elaborate

PREFACE vii

and intolerant system substituted for the truly Catholic intolerance of the Gospel. In which case I would suggest a word like K^pvy/txa^ the burthen of the Church's gospel. It is not reduction I suggest but rather compression. I venture on the attempt to rebottle the genie, to recall him from an expansion in which he covers (and hides) the heavens to a portable vehicle which the Church can carry and use everywhere as the positive source and bond of its unity in the Spirit. We hear too much of a unity of Spirit ; too much, that is, by comparison with the reality which is the positive and objective source of the Spirit, and of any subjective spirituality of ours. So much for the first part of the book.

Some years ago I came across Maitland's edition of Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Age, to find that here was a point of view so new and thorough as to suggest a reconstruction of many aspects of our usual attitude on Church questions, as well as on certain others. Then, in 1913, I read Dr. Figgis' book, so largely based on Gierke, Churches in the Modern State. This work of a historian highly erudite and spiritual acted so strongly on me that, falling on the viii PREFACE

soil prepared by Gierke, it sprang up in the second portion of this book. The principles there treated are of the first value for a theory of the Church which is to be just both to its distinctive life and dogma, its long history, and its relation to the society round it. Or if any one will say the society within it there is much virtue in that ; for there is a commanding viewpoint from which it is more correct to speak of a Free State in a Free Church than of a Free Church in a Free State. The ideal Church is nearer the Kingdom of Heaven and its dimensions than the ideal State. It is therefore the greater body, which includes the less. The Church gives principles for the State, but the State does not give principles for the Church and only few methods ; and Free Churchmen should of all men remember from their origin and history that only Christian forces can give practical effect to political ideals, and that modern politics have grown out of conflicts substantially religious.

The conviction of this book is twofold. First that the idea of the Church and its supernatural life by a new creation is decaying in several of the Churches that have been

PREFACE ix

most critical about its relation to the State ; whereas it is only a high and distinctive idea of the Church that gives us any right or principle regarding that relation. And, second, that a true Church is inseparable from a belief in certain doctrines for which men are ready to die — is, indeed, impossible without such belief ; and the decay in the Church idea (as distinct from that of a mere association, sympathetic or religious), is due chiefly to the decay of doctrinal interest and conviction. No theology, no Church.

I may add the farther opinion that no amount of political action taken by itself, however suffused by sympathy or righteousness, will bring to pass the Kingdom of God, or realize more than an unstable satrapy of it. When the Church, with its unearthly message and power, becomes a mere creature of the State, or when it becomes a spiritual luxury, salon, or hospital, outside the interests of the strong men or those honoured as efficient — then religion and ethic alike are paganized. They cease to be either spiritual or moral. And they head for a moral debacle which is the collapse of Humanity. Culture becomes, as it was in the Italian Republics, the engine

PREFACE of wickedness and the varnish of cruelty. Macchiavelli is its prophet. And the war has shown us in Belgium the nature of its most ambitious champion to-day.

My thanks are due to my colleague, Rev. Prof. Andrews, B.A., D.D., for his kind revision of proof.

CHAPTER PAGE

II Doctrine and Theology ... 46

III Variations of Dogma and its Concentra-

IV Creed Subscription and Unity . . 83

PART II V Dogma and the State . . . .119

VI Corporate Personality — Rights Intrinsic or Conferred . . . .138 xi b xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

VII The Corporate Personality of the

Church 183

VIII Difference of Church and State as

Public Corporations .... 206

IX Reciprocal Recognition . . . 231

X Church and State a Re igious Issue . 248

XI The Above Illustrated in the Relation of Church and State in Theological Teaching ..... 267

Epilogue . . . . . 30S

Appendices . . . . . . HI6

INTRODUCTION

A MANIFOLD CHURCH THE ORGAN OF A RICH GOSPEL

Nothing so eases theological or philosophical friction as the gift of insight, the spirit of the depths. The passion of the Gnostics and mystics for the Abyss is right ; " the farther we go into the sea the deeper it is " ; it is their method of entry that is wrong. To the divining power every new phase magnifies the unity of the old purpose, and enriches its fullness. True breadth is founded deep. The original and comprehensive minds are at the same time the profound minds. They plant all progress but the deeper in the past and in the soul. It is lack of depth that is the chief source of division. Breadth alone cannot stand its own tension. It is often remarked that Broad Church has practically passed into High ; and in the stress of life Liberalism, without ceasing to be liberal, passes into Catholicism either of the sacramental or the evangelical form. The

xiii xiv INTRODUCTION

reason is what has just been said. Mere HberaHsm cannot stand its own tension. As it broadens it grows thin and rends. It grows shallow, and, in the less instructed forms, strident. It lacks " nature," through its very insistence on the natural. In gaining range it loses repose. It grows interesting — and powerless. It is so preoccupied with thought that it becomes inadequate for life. There is no depth to feed the breadth and to reconcile the extremes. The heart needs more than the mind can give, and the conscience needs a reconciliation and peace which mere harmony cannot bring. Even emotional thought lacks eternal foundation. And a revelation which is but illuminative pales and fades for want of the creative power involved in a redemption. To follow the gleam does not bring us to the Light of the World. The highest curiosity does not reach the everlasting strength. And the seekers after God do not arrive till they feel themselves found by the Searcher of hearts, and know only because they are known by the Eternal Choice.

" Do you understand all these things ? " said Christ, as He expounded in parables the hoary laws of the new kingdom — old as powers.

INTRODUCTION xv

new but as commandments. Or again, ** The Spirit shall lead you unto all truth." Or once more Paul, " I have declared unto you the whole counsel of God " in a central and germinal Word. By faith's insight we see the world in its wealth and unity. We enter the fullness. And there has never been an age when the sense and passion of the world's fullness, darkling as it may be, was so intense as now. But we can see life whole only if we see it from its centre. We must find the Eternal at the heart of Time, and then return to trace it in the order of the day. We do not lose the particulars in the general but we do make them yield up their universal ground ; we wish less to systematize them ; and we are comparatively indifferent to their getting in each other's way, so long as we find them to be sacramental for the message of the whole.

I will illustrate from what is in some ways the most Christian of all the arts — Music. The spiritually minded, mentally gifted man, who develops to cosmic insight his intercourse with the God of Christ, is like an appreciative critic who listens to the performance of some great tissue of musical xri INTRODUCTION

art and poetic thought, crystalHzing on a central idea. He is jealous that the authentic central word should be offered to the world, as it left the Master's soul, that his whole, and true meaning should be offered to the intelhgence of a world to which music has a divine message ; and especially that it be adjusted, in a growing tradition, to a later age than the Master's own. He is concerned that we should have the master's word as it was revealed originally, but plastically, in his inspired and creative soul. That message is destroyed by false emphasis, by careless neglect of expression, by exaggerated time, by slovenly syncopes, by flatness of tone. You may have a mechanical accuracy, a verbal infallibility, or a feat of memory and dexterity, and withal an obvious inability to realize the idea and emotion of the work. It is possible to maim and kill a thing of eternal beauty, while keeping the most pedantic faithfulness to the written notes. The good critic is more severe on a false accent than on a false note, as Beethoven himself was. " He was comparatively careless," says his biographer, " about the right notes being played, but angry at once at any failure in expression or

INTRODUCTION xvii

nuance, or in apprehension of the character of the piece ; saying that the first might be an accident, but that the other showed want of knowledge, or feehng, or attention."

It is so with the symphony of the Eternal Word. That Word is a solemn music in a mighty unity and fullness. It speaks to the soul in a speech beyond words. It says more than the sounds say. But, also if it speak to the soul, it speaks to a subtle thing and a complex, a thing also of infinite mobility and variety — yet infinitely one. Therefore the whole Word of God is in the nature of a symphony on a theme. It is a sum of voices in a divine perspective and tissue round an idea, a significance, a message. It has a harmony deeper even than the wealth of counterpoint. It has the harmony which belongs to a cosmic thing and a living thing, not only fitly joined together, but compacted and organized by that which every bar or tone serves. There is such a thing as the " proportion of Faith " ; there is a perspective, beyond mere flat sequence, in the revelation faith receives. The Divine Word is one, as the Divine Soul is. There are many voices and not one of them is outside the divine signification.

xviii INTRODUCTION

Who is equal to these things ? No one man. To grasp the true wealth of the One Word a whole Church is needful. And the Church must understand all these things, if not distributively and particularly, yet in a fullness and a hierarchy round a throne. It must listen with many ears, and imbibe by many senses at once. In justice to the central theme, it is not allowed to fix attention upon either one chord alone, or one movement or one air alone, nor to give false accent or expression to one number or theme. The one Word of the one manifold God is not only the sum total but the organic whole ; and to grasp it the manifold Church, the many Churches as members and complements of each other, must understand all these things at once as an individual cannot do. Love, Holy Love, which is that total Word, is a thing of infinite wealth and fullness as well as eternal power. And it radiates from a central personality and His everlasting act. Only a Church can fully respond here, not the single soul. The Church, not the individual, is the correlate of Christian truth. The great music needs orchestra and chorus round a conductor and round a theme.

To grasp all things in the way of scientific

INTRODUCTION xix

knowledge is beyond us. Science is never complete nor final; though it strives to be so by filling out the gap with hypothesis and speculation. But we can apprehend all things implicit in God by Faith, by the religious insight which apprehends reality at its source as the whole saving counsel of God. For the purpose of salvation is the scheme of things. We reach by religion an infinity science cannot give us. And the crown of unity is then not simply order but fullness and Blessedness, which is our communion of the Holy, of the absolute whole in the absolute soul.

^Vhen the disciples were asked, " Have ye understood all these things ? " and they answered rashly but not falsely, ardently if not quite truly, " Yea," Christ regarded the truth in their reply, and ignored its bold inadequacy. They had some real sense of what we call the gist of them, the dogma. He replies with an appreciation, and says that that is the principle of the spiritual teacher, the scribe of the kingdom. " It is by such insight, penetrative though not exhaustive, comprehensive if not complete " (he would say), " that every tiTie tencher is equipped for his work." And

XX INTRODUCTION

his power is the constant sacramental gift of going behind the obvious, the traditional, to the core ; of turning mere events into history, history into revelation, and revelation into salvation ; of reading between the lines, of piercing below the surface, of seeing the eternal in the temporal, the new bursting out of the gift of the old, the old living on in the discovery of the new. He perceives the eternal co-efficient in all time. The world of experience is a treasure-house of long accumulations, to which he has a master-key, and from which he is constantly drawing forth old jewels, cutting them anew, and setting them anew to sparkle in the new light.

We need not be surprised at the high respect paid by Jesus to the scribe, or what would now be called the scholar, the academic, the theologian. There were scribes and scribes, some but pedants, some the seers of a historic grace or a mystic ideal. There were scribes who put their learning at the service of Pharisaic orthodoxy, clever dull men, able ordinary men, smart stupid men, masters of the obvious, caterers to the hour and servants of its tables, who used their mind for the buttress of the popular creed old or new. " Woe unto

INTRODUCTION xxi

you, Scribes and Pharisees." There were such scribes. But there were scribes also, whose learning was the servant of a spiritual and prophetic idea, men who took time to learn before they took heart to teach, whose acquirements had not got the better of their thought, whose souls were fed by books and not buried beneath them, nor was their heart smothered in their great tradition, who were versed in the Fathers but had their conversation in the kingdom of the Son. Some of them felt Christ, and came to Him. " Behold I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them ye shall kill and crucify." It is possible for even a scribe to be also a scholar, and being a scholar to be a great witness, reformer, and even martyr. And martyr he is not unlikely to be, if his be the competent mind, forward genius, and sacred insight of the kingdom amid an ignorant people who love to have it easy and will pay him much who makes it so. He knows the traditions but makes them serve the promises. He is full of memories which are flushed with greater hopes. He has gone to school not only with criticism but r, ith the Kingdom of Heaven. In those days (as in our own) there xxii INTRODUCTION

were scribes, learned and authorized expositors of the Word, who were all but prophets, and who from the lovers of pious sophists got the prophet's reward of neglect. But there were scribes also who were pedants without vision, capable dunces, shrewd dullards, masters of popular rococo, or retailers of popular blague, devoid of prophetic grasp even of the novelty, or else enslaved by precedent and scripturalism, where pious fancy took the place of faith's fiair and historic tact.

The vital question for any Church is this question of its scribes, " Are your teachers pedants or prophets ? Are they immersed in their documents or versed in their Word ? Are they taught in their Torah, deep in their pandects, masters of apparatus and ridden by the ologies old or new, or are they instructed in the Kingdom of Heaven ? Do they worship the letter or the spirit ? Do they merely know the past, or do they discern its providence and interpret its cipher by a divine teleology ? Do they repeat their lesson old or new, or do they voice the living Word and creative Grace ? " What a calamity it was in the seventeenth century when the dogmatician swallowed up the apostle, when the dogma

INTRODUCTION xxiii

of system killed the dogmatism of love ! At any one age of a Church, the majority of its teachers might be pedants either of antiquity or of novelty, without the gleam of the idea on the one hand, or with nothing but ideas on the other, with nothing between a stale word and the last cry. Yet the city of God remains, if there be in it but a powerful remnant, an influential minority of the very elect, who have true unction to inspire all their deep knowledge, real knowledge as matter for their insight, and the true art to find in their old Scripture the living key for the living age, the dogma of the Eternal. The ideal scribe, the instructed teacher who is properly equipped, is the man who knows the old, knows it scientifically, but knows it also for its perennial principle, saving purpose, and central dogma ; who has power to find the new in the old, the future in the past, destiny in precedent, unity in a manifold liberty, and the treasures which are eternal in the earthen vessel of Time. It is a heavy load for a Church when its scribes are but pundits of rite, science, or culture, and its preachers are less than prophets, when they are parched with logic, sodden with sentiment, or pinched with poverty of soul.

xxiv INTRODUCTION

hanging by the Targums of the past, or the zealots of the present, instead of by Time's inner burthen, uttered Word, and vital creed. They may have religion and a certain fanciful simplicity but they have not intuition, they handle history but they have not its soul, and are neither prophets nor apostles. Their Bible is a code or a curiosity, laid out in topiary schemes, and cut into beds of elaborate fancy. The Garden of the Lord is bedded out. Or at the other extreme their Bible is but a historic document and no sacrament. They do not reach its historic core. There are those who read in from pious feeling more than they read out from historic faith. They are not instructed in the great Kingdom of Heaven, because they are neither versed in past history nor deep in the present age. They are real denizens neither of yesterday nor of to-day. But the masters of the past — not merely its students, but the masters of the past — are the lawful masters of the present and the creators of the future. The Bible loses the age if Christians lose the true, concrete, historic, positive, creative Bible, if they repeat it more than they understand it, if they do not prolong it. It is he who best fulfils (but not repeats) the finality of the past

INTRODUCTION

XXV that best secures the" progress cf the future.

And the great instance of that power is Christ Himself, whose incarnation of the Eternal Kingdom made Him speak with authority, not as the scribes. It gave Him the statesman's power, the thinker's, the prophet's, and not the mere politician's, the power to seize the present, and to mould the ages to come. And it is the Church, as His temple and organ, as the vehicle of His unsearchable riches, as the trustee of the dogma which He is — it is such a Church that has the command of the long future and the reversion of the social career. It is a Church high, deep, and free that is the only due hierophant of the manifold wealth of God's grace. It is the company of the saints that shall judge the civihzations of the world, fixed in faith's everlasting seat, and sure in the re-creative Word.

The great problem of the Christian hour is to combine variety and certainty, fulbiess and faith ; to command liberty by dogma and enrich dogma by liberty ; amid our wide operations to keep open and active communications with our evangelical base ; to trace as the grand continuity of the past the principle which carries the present and is the xxvi INTRODUCTION

divine goal of the long future ; to establish Church and State on the common rock of the Kingdom of God, and that upon the deep foundations of a racial and eternal redemption.

PART I

Chapter I

Reference has been made sometimes to the possibihty of a Church of one article, and to the facihties offered by certain free forms of Church organization for leading the way to a federate Church on such a base. And it is a great theme, with a prospect one ripe day of a great catholic confession of the faith in its fullness, to meet the largest thought of the world. But that is far off. It could only come when the Churches are organized in the sole interest of the one Gospel from which they and their confession spring. And the present question is one rather of terms of communion than of the plerophory of belief, of the Church's dogma rather than its confession, of the dogma that makes it rather than the confession it makes. It is a question that concerns some statement with a relation to the full mind of the Church similar to that which the Apostles' Creed holds to the Athanasian or a baptismal formula to a Church's symbol. The larger the confession, of course, the more revisable it should be in due time.

I know that no theological term rouses more irritation at the present moment than dogma. To multitudes of people religion is the region of the most unchartered freedom, the most wavward subjectivity. The word liberty is dear to them, the word authority is hateful — by a fatal inversion of values. They resent like a personal insult the idea of any limitation in the spiritual sphere (where yet they are Christ's and not their own). And especially do they repel it coming from the past — where yet the source of Christianity is. In the present temper of the public mind on religion there is a possibility of a state of things in which the minister may preach anything religious if only he can fill his Church, and secure the public and the press. It is the hour of the tangential mind.

One of the most serious perversions in current Christianity is the idea that a Church is no more than a congenial brotherhood or sympathetic group instead of a household of faith ; that it can have a base humanely religious instead of religiously theological ; that it can be ideal without being positive, and rest on affinity rather than creation ; that it can be founded on what is called fellowship, and live on the sympathies, instead of being rooted and grounded on the creative and apostolic faith which stands in truth and blossoms in love. This means in practice a fatal transfer of the centre of gravity from an objective gospel to a subjective piety ; from a faith filled with God to a religion preoccupied with man ; from Evangelical Theism to a Christianized Humanism where no Church can live. No Church unity is possible on any subjective base, such as " the spirit of Christ," understood as a frame of mind instead of a new gift of indwelling life, and the incoming of a new power with a new creation. The only unity of a Church is in its objective, in the faith that lays hold of that, or rather is seized by it. Anything less than tliat gives us but a fraternity more or less friable. Church and Dogma are as inseparable as Church and Kingdom.

Is the aversion to dogma just ? Is dogma a spiritual curse or a divine boon ? Does it blast or create ? Is it a mere relic or is it a great j ewel ?

The first remark to be made in this connexion is that the prime necessity of dogma, whatever is meant by it, is not for the individual but for the Church. The connexion of the individual with dogma as such is indirect. Dogma belongs to a Church's existence and a world-redemption rather than to individual salvation. And thus our sense of the value of dogma will be according to our sense of the value of a Church for Christianity and for Humanity. The Church sense and the sense for dogma rise or fall together.

It is, therefore, irrelevant for individuals or groups to say that they can get on perfectly well without anything like dogma. And far more irrelevant is it from people who stand outside a Church altogether. No doubt they can get on in this destitution ; but is that quite the point ? Many citizens, some senators, can get on without either politics or economics. A great many, who claim to be Christians, can get on comfortably enough without a Bible, so far as its personal use goes ; some without private prayer ; some

DOGMA T

others without definite personal rehgion at all. It might be asked what is meant by getting on in this religious connexion. There is only one sense in which the phrase fits Christian faith. It is not possible just to rub on in a religion like Christianity. Do such people get on toward God, grow nearer a saving God ? Does their communion with Him grow deeper, their repentance more searching, their life more humble, practicable, and beneficent ? With all their intelligent getting do they get rich toward God ? Does their intimacy with God grow at once more sure, more close, more ethical, more commanding, more subduing, more adoring ? Does their interest in the world grow more unworldly and yet more loving ? Is their life more and more hidden with Christ in God ? Do they grow into Christ and into God ? If not, does it matter what such people mean by dogma ?

We need not argue with those to whom theology is but clotted superstition or crystallized mythology. But, turning to those who take it more worthily, is it something thrown out by man about God, or something conveyed from God to man ? Is it a tentative scheme projected by man or a germinal, fertile, yet final gift presented by God ? To which conception do they demur ? Is its essence for them the result of thought achieved or of revelation received, of intuition or inspiration, of hypothesis or authority, of man's discovery or God's donation ? Is it the summit of man's natural knowledge and spiritual science ; or is it God's basement of all supernatural certainty, spiritual security and mental command of things ? Is Christian dogma on the same footing as philosophic system ? Is it philosophy turned pious by being turned on God ? Is it the best reasoned account we can give of God ? Or is it the substantial account God gives of Himself, the " written reason" of His spiritual world ?