The theology of an evolutionist

Front matter

REFERENCE LIBRARY

DATE

TITLE.

Preface

V rewritten for permanent publication, though in the rewriting free use has been made of the material employed in the extemporaneous addresses in the pulpit and on the platform,

I received not long ago a letter from a stranger containing this significant sentence : —

‘‘ Forty years ago, while a student at the University of Munich, one of our professors, Baron Justus von Liebig, told us, a small circle of students taking extra lectures in toxicology, in a pause when an animated controversy about the bottom cause of life sprang up : . . . ‘ Gentlemen, if the universe and our planet ever came to be governed by a wisdom, science, and penetration on a plan no higher than we mortals are capable of understanding and mastering, then I would most fervently wish to be out of it and in a safer place.’ ”

With that sentence I heartily concur. If I could conceive it possible that this universe were governed by a wisdom no greater than I am able to comprehend, I should not be able to believe in a God of infinite wisdom ; for finite wisdom cannot comprehend infinite wisdom. It is, therefore, no part of my desire, still less of my purpose, to furnish in this book a system vi

PREFACE of scientific or philosophical knowledge which shall explain the mysteries of the universe. It is no part of the desire of evolutionists to furnish such an explanation. Indeed, it would be difficult to find anywhere a nobler statement of the profound mystery of life than is to be found in the writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. The very word “agnostic,” which has been applied by these gentlemen to themselves, and which was, indeed, first employed by Huxley, is an indication of their frank recognition that the universe cannot be comprehended by finite man. The creed of the evolutionist is all embodied in the statement that life is a growth. But growth is itself a mystery ; and the statement that the universe is full of mysteries is not inconsistent with the statement that the history of the universe is a history of growth.

This volume is not, then, offered as a complete or comprehensive treatment of theological problems. It does not profess to furnish any final solution of the themes of which it treats. It endeavors only to indicate the direction in which modern thought is looking and ought to

PREFACE vii

look for the interpretation of spiritual life. It does not profess to add anything to Christian scholarship, but only to indicate how that material which is the common possession of all Christian scholars is to be correlated and interpreted. Its sole and simple aim is so to apply the fundamental principle of evolution to the problems of religious life and thought, that the light which that principle has afforded and the inspiration which it has furnished in the realm of natural science may be made available in the spiritual realm to the non-scholastic and non-professional reader.

LYMAN ABBOTT.

Contents

CHAPTSB PAOB

I. Some Definitions 1

II. Creation by Evolution . . . • 16

Chapter I

That the reader and the writer of this volume may understand each other, it is important to begin with some clear definitions. This is the more important because the terms employed are customarily used with widely different meanings. In order to understand the relation of religion, theology, and evolution, we must first understand what we mean by the terms religion, theology, and evolution.

Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion ; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion ; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion ; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church ; that is, the life precedes men’s thoughts about the life, men’s expression of the life, men’s organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social ; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him ; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse ; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.

Theology is the science of religion. It is the result of an attempt made by men to state in an orderly and systematic manner the facts respecting the life of God in the soul of man. It involves intellectual definition of the various forms of consciousness which constitute the religious life. Its relation to religion is the relation of other sciences to the vital phenomena which they endeavor to explain. With the growth of the human intellect there comes a wiser study of life, a better understanding of it, a new definition of its terms, and a new classification of its phenomena. The life does not change, but man’s understanding of it changes. There is a new astronomy, though the stars are old ; a new botany, though vegetable life is unchanged ; a new chemistry, though the constituent elements of the universe are the same. So there is a new theology, though not a new religion. God, sin, repentance, forgiveness, love, remain essentially unchanged, but the definitions of God, sin, repentance, forgiveness, and love are changed from generation to generation. There is as little danger of undermining religion by new definitions of theology as there is of blotting out the stars from the heavens by a new astronomy. But as religion is the life of God in the soul of man, definitions which give to man a clearer and a more intelligible understanding of that life will promote it, and definitions which are, or seem to be, irrational, will tend to impede or impair it. To this extent theology affects the religious life as other sciences do not affect the life with which they have to deal.

Evolution is described by John Fiske as

God’s way of doing things.” Theology also may be described as an attempt to explain God’s way of doing things. Thus, to a certain extent the science of evolution and the science of theology have the same ultimate end. Both attempt to furnish an orderly, rational, and self-consistent account of phenomena. The supposed inconsistency between science and religion is really an inconsistency between two sciences. The theologian and the scientist have given different, and to some extent inconsistent, accounts of God’s way of doing things. It is important for us to know which account is correct. It is even religiously desirable that we should know, since our understanding of God’s influence upon the human soul affects that influence.

The current theology is Roman in its origin. It assumes as an axiom a God apart from the universe and ruling over it, as the Roman Emperor was apart from the Roman Empire and ruled over it. It conceives of His government as a series of successive interventions. He creates the world out of nothing in the space of six days, and then rests. Man sins, and lest he should become immortal and so independent of his sin, God intervenes and drives him from the garden. His sin grows greater; God intervenes again, sweeps the human race from the globe, and makes a new beginning. Man has no natural capacity to know God. God compassionately intervenes once more, and makes to man special revelations ; outside the race to which these revelations are made there is no possibility of the knowledge of God, — that is, no possibility of true religion. To attest this revelation which God has made of Himself, interventions in the law^s of nature which He has ordained are necessary. These interventions, called miracles, are essential to revelation, and revelation is essential to the knowledge of God, — that is, to true religion. Thus theology assumes that God’s way of doing things in the material world is the way of a mechanic operating upon a machine ; His way of doing things in the spiritual world is the way of a king ruling over an empire. God is some one outside of nature and outside of men, operating upon nature and upon men.

This conception of the universe as set in operation by a Great First Cause, but operated continuously by secondary causes, occasionally modified in their action by the original Creator, is one which I formerly entertained, and there is no inherent inconsistency or irrationality in it. It is certainly quite consonant with faith in a living God, in revelation, in incarnation, in atonement, in immortality. But it is rejected to-day by the great mass of scientific thinkers, and by an increasing number of philosophical thinkers. They have seen more and more reason to believe that all forces are one force, and that events formerly attributed to interventions of an apparently arbitrary will are really due to the operation of this one force. They have seen one supposed intervention after another eliminated, and they have come to believe that when the universe is fully understood it will appear that there are no such interventions. We are all agreed that there are fewer than our ancestors thought there were ; the scientist of to-day thinks it probable that there are none. It is not my object to show that the scientist is right, but to show that, if he is rights he may still hold to spiritual faith in God, Bible, Christ, Sacrifice. This volume is addressed not to disbelievers in evolution to prove that they are mistaken, but to believers in evolution to show them that their belief is not inconsistent with the Christian faith; it is inconsistent with much in the old theology^ but not with anything in the faith.

It is true that I am an evolutionist, and inclined to be a radical evolutionist. It is perhaps proper to indicate in a paragraph the reasons for my change of opinion, — a change which has taken place gradually and almost unconsciously.

In the first place, all biologists are evolutionists, probably without a single exception. They are not all Darwinians, — that is, they do not all regard ‘‘ struggle for existence and survival of the fittest ” as an adequate statement of the process of evolution. Indeed, it may be said tbat this is no longer by any one regarded as a complete summary of the process, even if it were so regarded by Darwin himself, which is doubtful. I am not an expert biologist; few ministers are. We are not competent to pass any independent judgment of value on the question, What is the process of life in its earlier forms ? We have not the scientific habit of mind which enables us to sift the evidence and reach a conclusion. How many of those who read this chapter could pass a creditable examination on the question at issue between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories of astronomy, or the atomic and undulatory theory of light ? Probably but few. We accept the testimony of the experts when they have reached a conclusion. This is my first reason for being an evolutionist. Practically all scientists, I believe absolutely all biologists, are evolutionists. They have proved themselves careful, painstaking, assiduous students of life. I assume the correctness of their conclusion. I have studied, it is true, the writings of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Tyndall, and the later epitomes of Le Conte, Drummond, and Tyler, and have read the more important of the criticisms on the other side, — enough to see that the hypothesis of evolution has a groundwork of fact and reason. But I accept evolution, as a statement of the process of physical life, not from a personal scientific investigation, which I have not the training to conduct, but upon the substantially unanimous testimony of those who have such training.

On the other hand, the minister ought to be a special student of the moral life. He ought to know man as a moral actor, literature as the expression of his moral consciousness, history as the record of his moral progress, society as a moral organism. He ought to be able to pass something approximating an expert judgment on the question whether and how far evolution explains the history of the process ” by which the individual man, his literature, his history, his social and political organisms, have come to be what they are. To this subject I have given years of study, sometimes systematic, sometimes desultory, sometimes in theoretical investigations, sometimes in practical applications. The result of this study has been a conclusion, very gradually formed, that the history of that process is best expressed by the word evolution,” — that is, that the process has been one of continuous progressive growth, from a lower to a higher, from a simpler to a more complex organization, under the influence of resident forces, and in accordance with law. And this opinion has been confirmed by Bible study. It appears to me to harmonize better with the general spirit of Biblical teaching than does the anti-evolutionary conception of life. These two reasons, the substantially unanimous judgment of experts in a department with which I am not familiar, and my own independent judgment in a department with which I have some familiarity, have led me to accept evolution as a history of the process of life, or as God’s way of doing things.”

I acknowledge myself, then, a radical evolutionist, — it is hardly necessary to say a theistic evolutionist. I reverently and heartily accept the axiom of theology that a personal God is the foundation of all life ; but I also believe that God has but one way of doing things ; that His way may be described in one word as the way of growth, or development, or evolution, terms which are substantially synonymous ; that He resides in the world of nature and in the world of men ; that there are no laws of nature which are not the laws of God’s own being ; that there are no forces of nature, that there is only one divine, infinite force, always proceeding from, always subject to the will of God ; that there are not occasional or exceptional theophanies, but that all nature and all life is one great theophany ; that there are not occasional interventions in the order of life which bear witness to the presence of God, but that life is itself a perpetual witness to His presence ; that He transcends all phenomena, and yet is the creative, controlling, directing force in all phenomena. In so far as the theologian and the evolutionist differ in their interpretation of the history of life — that is, upon the question whether God’s way of doing things is a way of successive interventions or a continuous and unbroken progress — I agree with the evolutionist, not with the theologian. My object in this volume is to show that religion — that is, the life of God in the soul of man — is better comprehended, and will better be promoted, by the philosophy which regards all life as divine, and God’s way of doing things as the way of a continuous, progressive change, according to certain laws and by means of one resident force, than by the philosophy which supposes that some things are done by natural forces and according to natural laws, and others by special interventions of a Divine Will, acting from without, for the purpose of correcting errors or filling gaps.

The affirmation that all growth is due to “ resident forces,” or a “ resident force,” requires, perhaps, some additional explanation, for it is to this affirmation that the critics of evolution chiefly object. They generally agree that the interventions from without are fewer than we used to think ; but they still believe that there must be or have been some interventions : as in the passage from the inorganic to the organic, and again from the vegetable to the animal, and yet again from the animal to the human. ‘‘That phrase,” says Professor W. Douglass MacKenzie in the “ Bibliotheca Sacra,” ^ ‘ by

means of resident forces,’ is one to which exception of the most serious kind must be taken. . . . In that definition of evolution no man of science would understand by the phrase ‘ by means of resident forces,’ this, that God is continually pouring the energies of his Divine will into created forms, and carrying them forward to their further development. Any man of science would understand that definition to mean, that the evolution of any form of life takes place wholly by means of the forces already resident in the forms of existence which had been realized in the preceding stages of history.” I think that as matter of literary interpretation Dr. Mac- Kenzie is mistaken, and that Professor Le Conte and Professor Drummond, both of them men of science, do clearly understand substantially what Dr. MacKenzie says no man of science would understand by the phrase “ resident forces,” and that even Professor Tyndall implies that understanding as a probable opinion, though not as a

1 Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897 ; “ Evolution and Christian Doctrine.”

positive faith. The theology and the science of the past have agreed in assuming what I think the theology and the science of the future will agree in denying, that God sits apart from nature, and that there are natural forces and natural laws which operate independently of Him. Starting from this assumption, of course theology has resisted bitterly every attempt to lessen the number of interventions in the order of nature, because the inevitable result was to lessen the evidence of a Divine presence in the world. Nevertheless, both the religious and the scientific world have come to believe in a greatly lessened number of interventions, until now science has reached with practical unanimity these three conclusions : first, there is but one force, manifesting itself in different forms; second, that this force is never increased or diminished in amount, only varied in form ; and third, that this force, if we believe it to be directed to intelligent ends, is sufficient to account for all the phenomena of nature and life, so that there is no reason to believe in any interventions from without. I believe that the theology of the future will frankly and gladly accept these conclusions, instead of resisting them and endeavoring to discover some evidences of interventions constantly lessening in number if not in magnitude. It, too, will affirm that there is only one force, the ‘‘ Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.” It will affirm that this Infinite and Eternal Energy is never increased or diminished ; that, in other words, God, who varies infinitely in His manifestations, varies in no whit in His real life. It will affirm that there are and can be no interventions in this resident force, this Infinite and Eternal Energy, for if there were there would be a second God, superior to the God who resides in the universe and controlling Him. And finally, it will affirm that this Infinite and Eternal Energy is itself intelligent and beneficent, — an infinitely wise and holy Spirit, dwelling within the universe and shaping it from within, much as the human spirit dwells within the human body and forms and controls it from within. Scientifically this is the affirmation that the forces of nature are one vital force ; theologically it is the affirmation that God is an Immanent God. “ Resident forces ” and Divine Immanence ” are different forms of the same statement. According to this view, it is not correct to say that God, the one Force, did somehow bring into being the earliest forms of matter with resident forces.” 1 It is correct to say that from the earliest time we know anything about, God, the one Resident Force, has been shaping matter 1 Dr. W. D. MacKenzie. Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897.

into its various forms. It is not correct to say that the interactions of the various portions of this primeval matter did, by continuous and progressive changes, result in the production of all later forms of existence, including life and consciousness, reason and conscience.” ^ It is correct to say that all later forms of existence, including life and consciousness, reason and conscience, are the manifestations of His power, and the revelations of His presence who is God, “ the all in all.” ^ Nor is this inconsistent with the belief that the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. The Divine Spirit which resides in Nature transcends Nature, as the human spirit which resides in the body transcends the body. The Divine Spirit which is manifested in all phenomena is more than the sum of all phenomena, as the human spirit which is manifested in all the activities of a life is more than the sum of those activities. The belief that the Divine Spirit resides in the universe is no more pantheism than belief that the human spirit resides in the body is materialism. This faith in the Divine Immanence, in an Intelligent and Beneficent Will working in the so-called forces of Nature, is neither atheistic nor pantheistic. Belief that all energies are vital is not belief

1 Dr. W. D. MacKenzie. Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897.

that there are no vital energies. Belief that all resident forces are Divine is not belief that there is no true Divinity.

It seemed necessary to make this explanation to guard, if possible, against the common misapprehension of the evolutionist’s position, as that of one whose faith in ‘‘ resident forces ” implies no faith in God. The theistic evolutionist believes that God is the one Resident Force, that He is in His world ; that His method of work in His world is the method of growth ; and that the history of the world, whether it be the history of creation, of providence, or of redemption, whether the history of redemption in the race or of redemption in the individual soul, is the history of a growth in accordance with the great law interpreted and uttered in that one word evolution.

Chapter II

When man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechanical process, — and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground ; out of the seed there emerges a stalk ; and out of the stalk, branches ; and on these branches, buds ; and out of these buds roses unfold ; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man’s method is the method of manufacture ; God’s method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product, — death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product, — life. What man makes has no reproductive power within itself. What God makes goes on reproducing itself, with ever new forms and in ever new vitality. The doctrine of evolution, in its radical form, is the doctrine that all God’s processes are processes of growth, — not processes of manufacture.

Evolution is the history of a process, not the explanation of a cause. The doctrine of evolution is an attempt on the part of scientific men to state what is the process of life; not an attempt to state what is the cause of life. When Isaac Newton discovered and announced the doctrine of attraction and gravitation, he did not ^undertake to explain why the apple falls from the bough to the earth, nor why the earth revolves around the sun in its orbit; he simply stated what he had seen, — that all matter acts as if its bodies were attracted to one another inversely as the square of the distance. So the evolutionist does not attempt to explain the cause of phenomena; he simply recites their history.

A correspondent recently wrote me a letter saying in substance, I am sorry that you have taken up with that dangerous doctrine of evolution. Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall tell us that matter somehow or other once upon a time began to create itself.” He is mistaken. He would find it difficult to point to page or paragraph in any scientific writer as authority for any such notion of evolution. Evolution does not undertake to give the cause of phenomena at all ; it simply recites their processes. A man may be an atheistic evolutionist — that is, he may believe that there is no intelligent cause lying back of phenomena. Haeckel is an atheistic evolutionist. Or he may be a theistic evolutionist, — that is, he may believe that the cause lying back of all phenomena is a divine, intelligent, loving Person ; Dr. McCosh of Princeton was a theistic evolutionist. The evolutionist is simply one who understands the history of life to be a history of growth. “ Evolution,” says Mr. Huxley, ‘‘ or development, is at present employed in biology as a general name for the history of the steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and physiological characters which distinguish it ; ” and on that Mr. Henry Drummond, an eminent evolutionist, comments as follows : —

“ Evolution is simply history, a history of steps, a general name for the history of the steps by which the world has come to what it is. According to this general definition, the story of evolution is narrative. It may be wrongly told ; it may be colored, exaggerated, over or under stated, like the record of any other set of facts ; it may be told with a theological bias, or with an anti-theological bias ; theories of the process may be added by this thinker or by that, but these are not of the substance of the story. Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a Green, the facts remain ; and whether evolution be told by a Haeckel or a Wallace, we accept the narrative so far as it is a rendering of nature, and no more. It is true, before this story can be fully told, centuries still must pass. At present there is not a chapter of the record that is wholly finished. The manuscript is already worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, the very language is uncouth and strange. Yet even now the outline of a continuous story is beginning to appear, — a story whose chief credential lies in the fact that no imagination of man could have designed a spectacle so wonderful, or worked out a plot at once so intricate and so transcendently simple.”

Evolution, then, — let us understand this at the outset, — is the history of a process, not the explanation of a cause. The evolutionist believes that God’s processes are the processes of growth, not of manufacture.

We are all partial evolutionists. Every man believes that to a large extent the divine processes are processes of growth. He believes that the rose grows from a seed or a cutting ; that all the vegetable matter in the world has come to its present condition by growth from earlier forms. He believes that this principle of growth applies to the animal as well as to the vegetable kingdom. He believes that every horse was once a colt, and every man was once a babe. He believes, too, in growth as a principle of history : that the American nation has grown from colonial to national greatness; that literature has grown from primitive to sublime forms. He thus believes that most of the processes of God are processes of growth.

The radical evolutionist believes that all divine processes, so far as we are able to understand them, are processes of growth ; that as God makes the oak out of the acorn, and the rose out of the cutting, and the man out of the babe, and the nation out of the colony, and the literature out of the alphabet, so God has made all things by the development of higher from lower forms. He believes that, so far as he can see, God is never a manufacturer, but always does His work by growth processes. The best simple definition of this process that I have ever seen is Le Conte’s : Evolution is continuous progressive change, according to certain laws and by means of resident forces.”

It is, first, continuous progressive change. The rose the man makes does not go through continuous progressive change. He makes a little to-day, leaves it, begins again to-morrow, leaves it a year, comes back next year. He finds that he is making it wrong, changes his mind, makes it over again. There is no necessary continuity in his work. The work that man does is not done according to certain laws. It is often arbitrary. He makes the rose in one way to-day, in another way to-morrow, simply because the notion so takes him. His work is done by force external to the thing that is made ; not by force operating from within, but by force applied from without. God’s work, on the contrary, we evolutionists believe, is the work of progressive change, — a change from a lower to a higher condition ; ^ from a simpler to a more complex condition. It is a change wrought according to certain laws which are capable of study. It is never arbitrary. Finally, this process of growth is produced by forces that lie within the phenomena themselves. The tools that God uses are in the structure that is being formed, or in its environment. The force that makes the rose what it is inheres in the plant, in the soil, in the sunlight. God dwells in nature, fashioning it according to His will by vital processes from within, not by mechanical processes from without. The former theory of creation was of creation by manufacture. It was that God said to himself one day, six, eight, or ten thousand years ago, ‘‘ I will make a world ; ” that He proceeded to make it, in six successive days ; and that