Christian ordinances and social progress

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Preface

The William Belden Noble Lectures were founded, in memory of her husband, by the widow of a young American clergyman of that name, who died early. Their object is best described in the extract from the deed of gift printed on the foregoing page. Only two courses have been previously given : the first by six different lecturers; the second by Professor Palmer, of Harvard University. The course now pubhshed was given in November and December, 1900. Circumstances have not allowed of so close a revision of them as I should have desired, nor of the addition of notes, or of what the French call " pieces justificatives.'' The lectures are pubhshed as they were delivered ; but I have, in this composition, carefully reviewed the documents on which I rely, and I trust that I have made no misstatements of fact or quotation.

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The lectures were delivered in the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard. This house, which was founded in memory of the great Bishop, is in itself an emblem of the width of his sympathy and his teaching. It forms a centre for the religious life of the University. On the ground floor are a library and rooms for social intercourse ; above these are, on one side, the rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, and, on the other, those of a similar society for the Episcopalians ; and on the upper floor a library and reading-room for the Roman Catholics, and the large hall in which these lectures were delivered.

The title of these lectures in the main explains their purpose ; and I hope that the discussion of it may meet some of the religious needs of our time. The system of religious ordinances, which is sometimes, though too exclusively, identified with the Church, seems to need a closer connection with the social progress at which all Christian bodies are in some way aiming. This connection I beheve to have been both helped and hindered by

PREFACE vii

the ideas which have been dominant in Anglo- Saxon Christianity during the last half century. The Oxford Movement^ the effects of which have been felt far beyond the bounds of Anglicanism, was not a High Church movement in the sense of exalting the Church, but in the sense of exalting the system of public worship and its ministers. It encouraged the corporate and social idea of life, and so far was a help to the object aimed at in these lectures ; but it was a hindrance to that object in that it restricted the social idea to the fellowship of those bound together by ordinances ; and it narrowed this fellowship still further by practically imposing the condition of adherence to the ordinances of the Episcopalian church system. This was done on the supposition that that system and its ministers had a special and divine sanction.

It is true that there has been a strong reaction against these ideas ; but the reaction has often taken the form of setting up some other ministry and some other set of ordinances as having a similar sanction. "Old viii PREFACE

Priest " has been " writ large/' not only in presbytery, but in many systems of ordinances. Wherever systems and ordinances are considered to hold an absolute position and to be of primary importance, they become dangerous to the Christian life ; for then a false standard is introduced: men judge themselves and one another, not simply by the standard of Christian righteousness, but, in part at least, by the forms which they profess and the modes of worship which they practice* They do not take Christ and his divine nature as their judge, but another standard, — that of their church system. And thus the church system, when it is not looked upon as plastic, and adaptable to the needs of the time and the promotion of Christian righteousness in the widest sense, becomes a real danger to both religious and social progress. It is imagined to have been imposed at some past time by authority, and men's thoughts about it turn to an unreal and impractical antiquarianism. And since the genuine antiquity is obscure, and the New Testament gives no au-

PREFACE ix

thoritative pronouncement on church forms, " antiquity '^ is apt to mean medisevahsm, and especially the practices of the last two centuries before the Reformation. This, however, is but an extreme case of that which happens generally wherever church forms are regarded as having some absolute authority. An ecclesiastical conscience is a perverted conscience : it is sure to come into conflict at some point with straightforward morality. It is this, probably, more than anything else, which is accountable for the breach (so far as it exists) between rehgious observances and the general conscience. It is not too much to say that men often find more satisfaction for the real needs of their spirits in social circles, in secular pursuits, in the club or the theatre, than in the place of worship.

The idea of a church system of any kind having been imposed by authority appears to be giving way before historical investigation ; and there is, therefore, some danger that men may go by reaction to the opposite extreme, and may think that the whole apparatus of

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religious ordinances is valueless for moral and social purposes. And since they have been accustomed almost to identify religion with these ordinances, they may imagine that religion itself is, as is sometimes said, " played out," and that we must turn away from religion if we would insure moral and social progress. This tendency is often observed in young people, who, at the university, or generally in opening life, are undergoing a reaction from the religious instruction and discipline of home or school. It is felt also in the diminution of candidates for ordination, and in the number of those whom the French call ^^ pratiquants." It is almost a commonplace, in certain quarters, that we must have less of religion, and more of justice and love.

It has, therefore, seemed to me that it might be well for one who, during a long life and ministry, has worked upon the conviction that no one form or system is binding upon Christian believers, and that, as St. Stephen and St. Paul taught, following Christ himself, all

PREFACE xi

ordinances are essentially secondary and mutable, to show that ordinances have still a perfectly valid ground, and that they may be made to serve powerfully the ends of social righteousness. It is admitted that Christianity, which is faith and righteousness, is in its essence independent of ordinances. Christ said but a few words about the Church and the sacraments; nothing at all about public worship. But, on the other hand, experience shows that, human nature being what it is, both faith and righteousness are in a large measure dependent for their support upon worship and sacraments. While we admit, therefore, that these are not to be placed on the same level with moral and social goodness, but as subservient and mutable, it is of the utmost importance to show how they may be adapted to the needs of our time, and especially to that social progress on which the mind of all the more advanced sections of the Christian Church is set.

In attempting to show this, I have made no distinction between the various sections into xii PREFACE

which Christians are divided. The question I have raised affects them all aHke, if not equally ; and I am not without hope that the consideration of it may tend to draw us all together, since all have the same needs. Our differences have arisen mainly from the idea that Christian ordinances have an absolute, not a relative position, and that consequently any deviation from the absolute standard, as we conceive and adopt it, must cause separation. When we come to the behef that they are of secondary, not primary importance, and that their value consists mainly in their power to build up the Christian life of the community in faith and righteousness, we cannot but feel that the matters which divide us are far less than the great objects of the Christian life. And when we engage in the attempt to adapt our ordinances freely to the needs of a new time, this attempt, being common to us all, must draw out our sympathies towards one another ; for there is nothing so unifying as a common work. It is not so important that we should worship

PREFACE xiil

together as that we should feel and work together. Our forms may remain as diverse as before, and yet we may feel our object to be identical, and may interpret our ordinances — both to ourselves and to each other — in a sense congenial to our great and common purpose of building up a righteous society.

It may be well to summarize very shortly the teaching of these lectures.

1. The Church is the body of faithful men banded together for the establishment of Christ's righteousness in the world, and freely organizing themselves in societies for that purpose. It is distinguished, on the one hand, from the Kingdom of God, which is the dominion of God and his righteousness generally in the development of mankind ; and, on the other hand, from the church system, the system of ordinances, which is the special subject of these lectures.

2. The Bible is the history of the divine society growing up amongst men, and must be used in the system of church ordinances xlv PREFACE

in such a way as to promote and strengthen Christian and social righteousness.

3. The Sacraments are federal acts, intended to bind the members o£ the societytogether in loving and just relations to God and to one another ; and they should be used so as to strengthen all these relations and hallow all the bonds by which men are united together in society,

4. The Creeds, confessions, doctrinal forms, and other means by which expression is given to our common faith, are sjrmbols or rallying points to make us understand each other, and should be framed or accepted, changed or interpreted, with a view to the furtherance of a brotherhood of Christian righteousness.

5. Our Public Worship and Preaching must have in them the element of universality, and must be so conducted as to build up Christian relations, not in the congregation only, but also in the general community.

6. The Pastorate should not be that of the individual minister alone. He should be the leader in a pastoral energy pervading the

PREFACE XV

community. The pastorate should be understood to inckide : first, all members of the worshiping body, who are not to be passive, but active workers; secondly, all who have the care of the young, the ignorant, and the poor ; thirdly, all who, as rulers or men of influence, are, in the Biblical sense, shepherds of the people.

I cannot conclude this Preface without a word of thanks to those who honored me with the invitation to give these lectures, and for the kind hospitality with which they welcomed me in my short visit to America. They have given me the assurance that a previous work of mine, on " The World as the Subject of Eedemption," into which the thought and experience of a life were concentrated, but which has had Kttle effect in England, has been a help to many in America, who in their turn are teachers of others ; and the hope that it may not be without influence in the life of the greatest Christian community the world has yet seen. May the great xvi PREFACE

commonwealth become more and more conscious of its mission to the world, and capable of doing, with ever clearer purpose, the work of a Christian Church in furtherance of the Kingdom of God.

Contents

PAGE

I. The Church System 1

II. The Bible 43

II

What, then, is the Church ? It is the society in which the name of Christ is confessed as supreme over the whole organism. It cannot be identified with the kingdom, because the empire of the divine Spirit, though constantly striving to realize itself, and gaining its realization in a greater or less degree, is not bound up with any organization, and is often to be seen in men and communities to which Christ as manifested in the flesh has not been made known. The Word is the light of every man, and whenever it is recognized and its power admitted to rule, there is the kingdom of God. But where Christ is known and acknowledged as supreme in the common life, there is the Church.

I know that it has been the custom to confine the word church to a company of persons bound together mainly for purposes of common worship ; and it may seem an impracticable piece of purism to refuse to use the common terminology ; as if any one should decline to speak of charity and charitable institutions because we know that charity or love means much more than kind ofi&ces for the poor, or as if a man should refuse in America to apply the word democracy to a particular political party because it has in other countries a wider significance. But the case is not similar, for no one here would deny the wider sense of the political term ; whereas the use made of the word church implies not merely that the society organized for worship is a home of God's Spirit, but that it is the only home of it ; that it is the specially chosen form (established by Christ Himself, as is often maintained) in which God has willed that those who are faithful to Him should be bound together, and that all other forms of social life a?e forever to be looked upon as profane ground outside the sanctuary. This view of things appears to me fundamentally unchristian, unhistorical, and calculated to subvert the purpose of God as stated above, and ultimately to sterilize the worship itself for social purposes.

It is unchristian, for it is of the essence of heathenism to make this distinction of the sacred and profane. " Procul, procul, este profani " and '' Odi profanum vulgus et arceo " are sayings wholly abhorrent to the spirit of Christ. No doubt in the Old Testament dispensation — that is, in the ceremonial part — we have the idea of holiness as that of outward separation. Place, day, nation, land, persons, are marked off as holy. But this was but for a time — a shadow of things to come. In Christ there is no such distinction. He is the Saviour of all men, Jew or Gentile.

His moral teaching is absolutely universal. From the time of his appearance among men, the world itself is holy. In our weakness we may feel it necessary to consecrate special days or places or persons ; but we know that this is done either as a mere distinction of service, or else as giving a type which all others are to follow (let Sunday serve as an illustration for both these distinctions). The moment we begin to say, " This is holy and the rest unholy/' we stand on the ground of heathenism or Judaism, not of Christianity. And why should the case be different with societies of men ? Would any one dare to say that the society of worshipers is Christ's, and is holy, but the society of legislators or of medical men was not Christ's, and unholy ? It is supposed that the function of public worship is specially Christian in contrast with all other forms of social union. Are we to follow Christ? or tradition? It is certain that our Lord said nothing to encourage his disciples to hold assemblies of public worship. Not a word in the Gospels can be quoted to that effect. He made use of the synagogue worship to proclaim the kingdom : and we may certainly infer from this that He in no sense disapproved of it, and that it may profitably be used for Christian purposes, as may every other part of human life. But from this to the idea that it may be isolated from the rest as specially Christian, or made the special mark of a man's Christianity, is a very long step, and one which has proved most disastrous. It is not too much to say that it would be possible for a Christian society to exist in which there was no public worship. Eichard Eothe, whose work on theological ethics has reigned for fifty years in Germany with almost undisputed supremacy, believed that this was the proper tendency of religious life ; that is, that instead of going to church Christians would realize that they are the Church, and that they would not have to come together to say to each other, '' Know the Lord," because they would feel God everywhere present. Is not this, indeed, the ideal of the Apocalypse — no Temple, but a God-inhabited society ?

I say further, the conception which makes public worship and ordinances the exclusive or special function of the Church is unhistorical. We must take the words of the New Testament according to their use in the Old.

The word ecclesia^ which we translate church, was the word which in the Old Testament was used as an equivalent for "the whole congregation of Israel ; '' that is, not, as has sometimes been supposed, a number of people called out from their natural occupations (which are God's ordinance and service) and assembled together for public worship, but the whole body of the people called out from their homes to do the business of the nation. It is a word of Greek origin, and had this signification in the Greek cities. As used in the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, which was in the hands of St. Paul if not of Christ Himself, it was practically synonymous with the word synagogue, which means a gathering of men together, and, in the local communities, was as far as was possible the governing power of a fraction of the nation. And in these senses our Lord used it in the only two passages in which he speaks of an ecclesia. In one of these he bids his followers take every means for the private settlement of a quarrel ; but if this does not succeed, the aggrieved party is to tell it to the ecclesia, that is, the local parish board who governed the assembly with the ruler of the synagogue at its head. All we can infer from this (and it is inference, not direct command) is that, in Christian times, believers should endeavor not to be judges in their own cause, but to get other faithful men to arbitrate between them, or, in the last resort, to get the whole public body of Christians, or their representatives who are appointed as judges, to determine the dispute.

In the other place he says : " Upon this rock (whether the rock of faith, or Peter, as the faithful man) I will build my ecclesia." But, as Hort says, we must beware of bringing into our interpretation the developments or associations of later times. There were many such ecclesias or synagogues at that time, representing particular sets of persons, as we read in the Acts of the synagogues of the Cyrenians or of the Libertini ; and each of them attempted, so far as circumstances allowed, to enforce the law of Moses, and to train their members in the national discipline. Our Lord, then, using a word which was perfectly familiar to those who heard Him, says that the ecclesia which He will form will be grounded upon faith in Him like that of Peter; that is to be its principle. It is to enforce the law and discipline (for He did not come to destroy but to fulfill), only that it will be a spiritualized law, a spiritualized discipline ; faith will interpret it, as Christ Himself interpreted the law in the Sermon on the Mount. Now, it may be admitted freely that, for want of sovereign power, the Jewish ecclesia could not go far beyond excommunication or putting men out of the synagogue and the forty stripes save one, which were all in operation in the time of our Lord and St. Paul, in the enforcement of the law ; and that, being hemmed in more and more on this side, it naturally developed more largely in the direction of instruction and prayer ; yet we must remember that in the Old Testament, which was read continually (Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogue every Sabbath day), no sanction was given to separate assemblies for worship : life and its conduct were the theme of the law. And thus, in the view of our Lord when He spoke of building his ecclesia, the thought, and the meaning of his words to his auditors, would be not exclusively or even primarily an assembly of persons praying and exhorting, but a fraction of the nation which acknowledged God, who were seeking to regulate their lives according to his will.

It is unnecessary to trace this out historically, which, indeed, I have done elsewhere,^ showing how the Church was cooped up during the era of persecution and unable to lay hold fully on human life ; and that, when the time of freedom came, the limited view had become so habitual that the best minds were occupied almost wholly with matters relating to worship and doctrine ; how then the monastic system drew men away from the proper calling of the Church, namely, the winning of the world to Christian righteousness, and the supremacy of the clergy in the Middle Ages again tended to give ritual and ordinance an undue place ; and how, even after the Reformation, the Church turned to controversies on similar subjects : yet how, on the other hand, the high aim of claiming the world for Christ was never completely lost sight of, whether in the covenant by which Theodosius and Gratian accepted the supremacy of Christ over the Empire, of which Professor Allen has

1 The World as the Subject of Redemption (Longmans). Lectures iv. to vi.

said, '' This was the social compact by which . . . the Empire became Christian, or was only another name for the Catholic Church ; " or in the attempt of Hildebrand and his successors to make the clerical power as representing Christ supreme over all spheres and persons; or in the system of the Church of England, which recognizes no distinction of church and state, but consecrates the sovereign and all the public powers to be ministers of God as fully as the clergy ; or in the attempts made at Geneva, or in the Puritan communities of New England, to bring the whole range of human life under the rule of Christ.

This does not imply necessarily that matters of public worship should be under the control of the nation as they are in England. In a country hke the United States, even if men should be persuaded that Christ's Church, the body which represents Him on earth, is more truly to be found in the whole Christian nation than in the worshiping bodies, it is quite possible that the business of public worship should be left as it is now to the management of the various worshiping communities ; they would be in that case private associations, like those which carry on the press or the higher education, or, Hke the family life, working within the larger church-body of the nation, and fulfilling independently one of its chief functions.

But the great question on which we are bound to be clear is one which is seldom touched upon, namely, this : What is the object for which the Church exists? The assumption that it exists primarily for public worship with some adjuncts of beneficence is usually accepted without question, and I have given reasons why it should be rejected. The thesis which I would maintain in contrast to it is this : that the Church is a company of men banded together to establish Christ's righteousness in the world. This is the Church of the prophets, who bent all their powers to establish righteousness, and looked upon the ordinances of worship as only of use as bearing upon this. Their object was also that of our Lord, who never spoke of ordinances of worship, — even the sacraments, as we shall see, being rather ordinances of life than of worship, — but was Himself the Eighteous One, whose whole life was spent in the cause of righteousness. This object is all-comprehensive, and therefore the society which is grounded upon it, which has for its object to hve out a complete hfe of Christian righteousness in its largest range, is alone worthy to be called " the body of Christ, the fullness of him who filleth all in all/' No society but one which is thus complete can secure, in all their range, our true relations with God and with one another, or realize the promise that God, who is righteousness and love, shall dwell in his people.

Now, it may be said that this righteousness is the aim of all the worshiping bodies, that they all seek to train their members in righteousness. But this is the case only to a limited extent. They represent one function and set it before men as the whole. The balance is upset, the truth denaturalized. First, the habit of fixing the mind constantly upon religious ordinances makes us judge by a wrong standard. We judge life by ordinances or doctrines, instead of judging ordinances and doctrines by life. Next, we do not get the advice of the whole community but of a part, whereas the whole body of God's children is that in which alone the Eternal can dwell. Thirdly, we are constantly (though now less than formerly) divided from one another on unreal grounds ; so that the worshiping Church presents no united fronts and it has often been a hindrance, through its disputes and its narrowness, to the progress of good. It is very difficult for the earnest members of the worshiping bodies to rid themselves of the special tenets and special interests of their own body in judging of social questions ; and consequently their action, which ought to command confidence as the representation of God's will (for the Church is the pillar and ground of the truth) constantly creates mistrust.

But there is more than this. The body which claims to represent the kingdom of God must do it not in word, but in deed. Preaching and prayer are good for those who can attend upon them. But they will never by themselves convince the world. It is action and example, a full life fully hved out, that has power over mankind. And a body restricted to a particular class of actions can never give the scope needed for the Spirit of God. It cultivates unduly one side of human nature, and leaves the rest almost untouched.

The pursuit of science, art, politics, medicine, commerce, literature, are all parts of the humanity which Christ has redeemed : and the natural endowments by which these are cultivated become, through Christian faith, xapio"- fiara, gifts of the Spirit. To insist that they must always remain outside the sphere of church life is to do despite to the Spirit of God, to deprive the holders of them of half their force. Yet, if their spiritual capacity is acknowledged, how can we reckon them as anything less than ministers of God and of his Church ?

The doctrine of the Universal Priesthood of believers is held with the lips and the pen, but denied at every turn in practice. In the sphere of public worship, which is claimed exclusively as the Church, it can never have full scope ; for in that sphere the minister of the Word and sacraments must necessarily be supreme. Even in what laymen might be able to do in that sphere, they are constantly thwarted, sometimes by the mistrust of the leader, sometimes through the technical and unreal modes of speech and action which pervade the atmosphere of an exclusive body. But what is wanted most is the frank recognition of the secular employments as a spiritual service. It is a noble prayer which is offered on Good Friday in the Protestant Episcopal Church, that every member of the Church in his vocation and ministry may truly and godly serve the Lord. The Church which that collect speaks of cannot be one which is organized, wholly or mainly, for pubhe worship.

In taking this larger view of the Church we are perhaps haunted by the idea that others than those who are strictly Christians would belong to it. But we have learnt in these later years to dwell on the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. And the confession of these is of primary importance for the social work of the Church. No doubt, in any system, notorious evil Hvers and notorious blasphemers would be incapable of doing the work of the Church ; but these will always be kept away, without definite rules, by the laws of a Christian country which undertakes a large part of the discipline once exerted through excommunication, by their own lack of interest in the subject, and by the sound pubhc opinion of the community. It is, meanwhile, of great importance to keep the door open for the return of the prodigal. If the Church is the limited body which is defined by ordinances of worship, then all kinds of exclusion may seem justified, and the present state of narrowness and disunion may be perpetuated. But if it be, as has been here maintained, a comprehensive community engaged in the practical establishment of Christian righteousness, then we may justly take in all who are willing to cooperate in the great task, as St. Paul did at Corinth, where he did not exclude even those who denied the resurrection. There is many a man who seems to himself and to others an unbeliever, who yet is full of the Christian spirit, and by whose exclusion the Church would be the poorer. It has seemed hitherto as if the sole danger were the admission of unfit members. But the danger in our day is much greater that we should exclude, either on theological or ecclesiastical grounds, those who are dear to God. The Church is a vast company which St. Paul likens to a great house, containing not only vessels of gold and silver, but of wood and brass, and some to honor and some to dishonor. There the imperfect may be trained, the babes in Christ may be educated, the erring reformed, the prodigal be accounted as still a son and won back to the Father's open arms.