The Christ of to-day

Front matter

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Shelf 5

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Preface

This book had its origin in two lectures deliv¬ ered before the Divinity School in Yale Univer¬ sity in January, 1895; and in an essay prepared for the Unitarian Association of Boston, and given before several other clerical bodies in the same city. These three essays, however, consti¬ tute less than a third of the present discussion, and even that third has been entirely transformed through revision and extension of plan. The substance of the first chapter was read, in July last, before the Summer School of Theology at Western Reserve University.

The work has grown out of the reflection of the author upon the theological phenomena of the time, more accessible to the student in cur¬ rent thought than in books. The author is glad to acknowledge the great impulse in the direc¬ tion of his studies derived from Principal Fairbairn’s treatise, “The Place of Christ in Modern

VI

PREFACE.

Theology.” That mine of learning, masterly historical generalization, and rich suggestion has given new strength to the Christian consciousness throughout the English-speaking world; and the longer it is read the more generative of ideas it will he found to be.

Nevertheless, there are questions perplexing the faith of our churches that Dr. Fairbairn’s great work does not meet, — questions of which only one living in open communion in the heart of our American Christianity can fully know. Every nation must work out its own theology. Great Britain and Germany, Reformation and Patristic times, can but supply impulse and guid¬ ance. Importations without naturalization are alike fatal in thought as in life, and naturaliza¬ tion, to be thorough, must equal re-creation. A borrowed theology must signify that, in the high¬ est sphere of human thought, the national mind is either incapable or indifferent; and neither of these terms describes the condition of the Ameri¬ can mind to-day. The advice of Maurice at this point is full of meaning: “New-Englanders who try to substitute Berkeley or Butler, . . . or Kant or Hegel, for Edwards, and to form their minds upon any of them, must be forcing

PREFACE.

vn themselves into an unnatural position, and must suffer from the effort. On the contrary, if they accept the starting-point of their native teacher, and seriously consider what is necessary to make that teacher consistent with himself, — what is necessary that the divine foundation upon which he wished to build may not be too weak and nar¬ row for any human or social life to rest upon it, — we should expect great and fruitful results from their inquiries to the land which they must care for most, and therefore to mankind.” The one foundation upon which Edwards wished to build was the absoluteness of God; and he has left for his followers the principle which, if resolutely employed, will insure both continuity and progress in the thought and life of Ameri¬ can Christianity. The second chapter of the discussion contained in this volume is a fresh attempt to reach the absoluteness of God through the finality for mankind of the mind of Christ; the third chapter employs the mind of Christ as the creative and conservative principle in the¬ ology, and in other intellectual movements of the time; the fourth chapter sees in Christ the supreme instrument of the Spirit in the moral education of the race. A Christological interpre-

PREFACE.

viii

tation becomes a theological principle, and these issue in the great method of the preacher. How¬ ever insignificant, the present discussion is a true continuation of the theological tradition which dates from our greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards. His errors, his weaknesses, his great inconsistencies, and what Prof. A. V. G. Allen calls “his Inferno,” have had altogether too long a history in New England thought. It is time that his original principle — the absoluteness of God — were allowed logical and unreserved ex¬ pression in the faith of our churches. For fur¬ ther explanation of the occasion and motive of this book the author must refer the reader to the introductory chapter.

George A. Gordon.

Old South Paksonage, Boston.

The motive of the discussion that follows

Chapter II. Christ In The Faith Of To-day

I. Views of Christ from without and within 46

II. The ethical Christ. 53

III. The gains manward and godward in current

THOUGHT OF CHRIST.66

IV. The interpretation of the final meaning of

NATURE THROUGH CHRIST. 81

V. The DEFECT IN CURRENT THOUGHT OF CHRIST AN

OVERDONE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY . . .93

VI. The principle of difference in the godhead 101

X

CONTENTS.

VII. The deity of christ the expression of this

DIFFERENCE IN HUMANITY. 112

VIII. The meaning of this difference, the moral

PERFECTION OF CHRIST. 122

Chapter III. The Significance To-day Of A Supreme Christology

I. In relation to the higher criticism . . 149

II. In reference to new theological theory . 166

III. In its bearing upon the social problem . . 206

IV. As a force against materialism . . . 226

V. The fortune of humanity bound up with the

DEITY OF CHRIST. 234

Chapter IV. The Place Of Christ In The Pulpit Of To-day

I. The value of the prophetic office in the

light of Christ’s career. 256

II. The relation of the preacher’s message to

THE MULTITUDES UNDER MORAL DEFEAT . . 275

III. Christ and Christianity inseparable . . 283

IV. Christ the source of our civilization . . 287

V. The psychological aspect of the question . 295

VI. Christ the supreme person in time, and there¬ fore THE MEDIATOR OF THE SUPREME PERSON

BEYOND TIME

. 304

Chapter I Introductory

“ And the house, when it was in building-, was built of stone made ready at the quarry : and there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in build¬ ing.” — 1 Kings vi. 7.

“ About every great Christian truth there is a debatable ground. A definition is to be given ; the bond of connection be¬ tween the truth supposed and other related Christian truths is to he sought; a place is to he found for it in the general sum of our knowledge. All this work of accurate conception and explana¬ tion constitutes an open field for differences to arise among those who concur in the main thing. Two maps of the same country will seldom, if ever, exactly agree.” — Dr. George P. Fisher, Faith and nationalism , p. 42.

‘ ‘ If we looked on the conceptions formed by us of God as fully coincident with reality, if we imputed to Him the infirmi¬ ties inseparable from a finite mind, and regarded our operations of thought as an exact representation of his, we might he charged with an offensive anthropomorphism. But this charge does not hold against the assumption that He is a Spirit.” — Dr. George P. Fisher, Faith and nationalism , p. 103.

“Pity is love and something more: love at its utmost.” — T. T. Hunger, The Freedom of Faith, p. 182.

THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

I.

Revolutions in human affairs are of two kinds, the gradual and unconscious, and the sud¬ den and violent. In our own history we have had two examples of the latter, the Civil War and that which resulted in the independence of the United States. French history furnishes many examples of this type of revolution; the Protes¬ tant Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and the ultimate disaster to the Roman Empire must be put in the same class. So, too, must one think of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, and of many of the great crises through which Israel passed, back to the Exodus. On the other hand, instances of grad¬ ual and peaceful changes of a fundamental na¬ ture are likewise numerous. The Reformation in England, the revolution that followed the revival of learning in mediaeval Europe, the transforma-

INTRODUCTORY.

tions wrought by the invention of printing, the discoveries of navigators, and the steady progress of science have been largely of this character. And in the history of Israel, so full of violent changes, there are not wanting illustrations of movements of a contrasted order. Before the temple of Solomon was built, a new and mighty turn had come in the fortunes of the people over whom he reigned. The wilderness wanderings were far behind. The nomadic days of the early settlement of the new country were long ago out¬ grown. The time of the city had arrived, with its notes of fellowship, order, and stability; with its concentration of population, interests, influ¬ ence, and power. The outward sign of this na¬ tional change was the building of the temple. It was a large undertaking, it marked a revolu¬ tion in the life of the people, it was costly in the extreme; and yet so ripe were the times for the magnificent enterprise, that it went forward to its completion as if by magic. The sacrifice, the labor, the skill, the new ideas and adjustments necessary for it, all came with the ease of perfect spontaneity. Out of the consciousness of the splendid king at his best, representing as he did the consciousness of the people, came the great building for God, which marked an epoch in Israel’s history, and recorded a silent but mighty revolution in the thought and feeling of the na¬ tion. This is the profounder meaning of the

THE NEW WORLD OF FAITH.

beautiful description: “And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready at the quarry: and there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.” The times were ripe, and the nation moved out of the old narrow, out¬ grown world, and into the new world of breadth and hope, with the magnificent unconsciousness of healthy expanding life.

Through this ancient parallel one may see what has already taken place in the Christian church. A revolution has already been accomplished — for the most part peacefully, beautifully — in the fundamental thoughts of intelligent believers; the church has already moved, almost unconsciously, but still truly, out of the old narrow world into the new and vast world of our modern intelli¬ gence. All reflective disciples of Christ have been moving into a new realm of thought and feeling, and, like men on an ocean voyage, they hardly know how far they have come. The same sun and moon and stars and sea seem to make the fact of progress insignificant; but the day arrives when a new territory is sighted, and the reality of advance can no longer be doubted. The abiding facts in Christian faith, the perma¬ nent forces in Christian experience, the everlast¬ ing lights in the firmament of Christian truth, and the changeless element of feeling in which all genuine disciples of the Master live and move,

INTRODUCTORY.

tend not infrequently to obscure the reality of movement from less to more. But there come hours of inevitable comparison, when the work of time for the Christian consciousness stands out in unmistakable greatness, when new thoughts, wider purposes, vaster enterprises, make the fact of emergence into a new world no longer deniable. And it needs repeated emphasis that the move¬ ment in our time out into the larger thought has taken place in an astonishingly spontaneous way. Little violence has been experienced any¬ where. The first temple went up without the sound of hammers, and the new and magnificent edifice of Christian faith is rising as by a selfcreative process.

II.

The first great expansion of the human mind in modern times began with the Copernican as¬ tronomy. The universe of the ancient thinker was insignificant, almost petty, compared with that of the intelligent man of to-day. The first impression that one gets upon entering that su¬ perseded universe is its narrowness, its want of range and room. One is surprised at its meagre¬ ness, as one might fancy a millionaire from Fifth Avenue, New York, to be over the insignificant, dingy quarters of certain mediaeval kings. Our planet was the centre in the old astronomy, the biggest of all the heavenly bodies, the most im-

NARROWNESS OF THE OLD WORLD. 7 portant from all points of view, and the whole stellar world had its final cause of being in min¬ istering to the welfare of the earth. The unpar¬ alleled creation hymn with which the Book of Genesis opens is based upon that old astronomy. It could have been based upon no other, for there was then no other. And the fact that it rests upon superseded science no more discredits its imperishable moral and spiritual worth than the immense mass of outgrown opinion in Dante’s great poem discredits the enduring splendor of that production, and its permanent value for mankind. Still, the fact is obvious that the ma¬ terial universe of the sublime singer in Genesis was exceedingly limited: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made also the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness .” 1 Here the conception is that the whole stellar world has its existence simply as an attendant upon this globe. Under i Gen. i. 14-18.

INTRODUCTORY.

similar conceptions the race lived until far down into modern times. The sense of vastness was largely absent from their universe as extended in space; it was small, and necessarily so. It is matter of common history that the shock expe¬ rienced by faith, upon the publication of the Copernican astronomy, was very great. A wise Catholic scholar tried to allay the anxiety con¬ cerning the inspiration of the Bible, as it stood in contradiction to the new science, with the remark that the Bible was given, not to teach how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven. It has been of the utmost comfort to Christian thinkers to remember how swiftly, and on the whole how quietly, the faith of the church adjusted itself to the stupendous revolution in man’s thought of the material universe inaugurated by the Co¬ pernican astronomy. The new astronomy has given grandeur to the idea of creation, — has in¬ directly attested the dignity of man, as being the creation that he has discovered, the orders and worlds that he has explored. And even when man comes to the limit of thought, having swept within the field of vision empire upon empire, system upon system, and universe upon uni¬ verse, and stands upon the widest circumference of science and looks beyond into the infinite, the infinite is still his conception, the boundless spaces are yet in a way subject to him. The modern astronomy, in giving such immeasurable

THE EXPANSION OF THE NEW. 9

expansion to the outward world, has resulted indirectly in a new consciousness of the dignity of man. For the greater the universe becomes, the more illustriously does it display the marvel¬ ousness of the human intellect. The universe is man’s universe; and the bigger it is, the more honor does it reflect upon him. Infinitely more faith than unbelief has come from the Copernican conception. In discovering how petty this earth is in the total limitless reach of the stellar uni¬ verse, man has rediscovered himself as superior to all environments, as of more worth than the birds of heaven and the heavens themselves. The indi¬ rect result of the new astronomy in building the consciousness of man into the sense of dignity needs to have fresh emphasis laid upon it to-day.

But the deepest reason for this reference to the greater world in space in which men are now living is that the sense of vastness in their sur¬ roundings has elicited a corresponding mental trait. For the intelligent modern man, living in the sense of a measureless universe, triviality of conception has wellnigh become an impossibility. Among the greatest educators of our time, a fore¬ most place must be given to the consciousness of living under an infinite outward order. It has put the imagination under a fresh and diviner spell. It has given new volume and form to the feeling of awe in the presence of the sublime. It has translated the sweet illusion of vision into a

INTRODUCTORY.

boundless universe of amazing orders and splen¬ dors, and made men aware that the symbolism of sight, with reference to the contents of space, is but the merest hint of the infinite and overwhelm¬ ing reality. It has taxed the mind with a new ob¬ ject, and imparted to it an amplitude that has told for much. This large-mindedness has affected the interpretation of man’s relations to God, and the significance of the career of Christ. It has not driven thinkers back to the daring conception of Origen, of an infinite stairway of worlds up which the hosts of mankind are made to march, as the sublime discipline through which sin is to be overcome and annihilated, and the final con¬ summation of which is that God may be all in all. There has been no such venturesomeness as the result of the sense of the exceeding greatness of the universe in which we live. But there is evident, I think, as the direct outcome of life under the shadow of an immeasurable material order, a new and large way of treating our whole human problem, and the parallel mission of Christ. An immense library of theological liter¬ ature has thus been quietly outgrown. Its logic has not been considered and refuted; its narrow premises have been entirely transcended. Vener¬ ation for human aspiration and heroism, and for the essential that always appears in all genuine forms of faith, however crude these forms may be, still makes it pleasant and even profitable to

TRADITIONAL OPINION OUTGROWN. 11 explore the worlds of the schoolmen, the reform¬ ers, and the puritans; but the most sympathetic student must feel that these former things have passed away. Without the denial of any one of their greater beliefs, this feeling is fixed. The thing that makes them obsolete is the pettiness of their world, the narrowness of their outlook, the want of breadth and range of mind. Through the discipline of the world in which we live, im¬ measurably extended in space as it is, we have quietly transcended the habits of thought of a former age. It was no disrespect for the past, or want of veneration for the intellectual power of his predecessors, least of all any deficiency of appreciation of the nobleness of philosophy and theology as callings, that led Hegel to say, in answer to an invitation to give instruction in logic and traditional theological opinion, that that would be to become “ white washer and chim¬ ney-sweep ” at the same time. His conception of the human mind, and of God in history, utterly transcended, and rendered obsolete for him, the traditional German thought in which he was bred. Our universe is a vast, an infinite uni¬ verse, and our conceptions in the realm of Chris¬ tian faith must have this vast and infinite char¬ acter.

III.

But far more important than the indefinite enlargement in space is the enormous extension

INTRODUCTORY.

in time that our human world has undergone. A new idea of history, almost bewildering in its greatness, has taken possession of the mind of this century. Instead of a race with a career running only for six thousand years, we have a humanity with a probable history of a hundred thousand years. The birth and growth of the very idea of humanity, and the expanse of time over which it must be carried and made good, is perplexing in the extreme. The burden of the world was heavy upon the prophetic heart in the ancient age, but it is incalculably heavier to-day. It is a picture of great scope and impressiveness that Carlyle paints in his French Revolution, his Frederick the Great, and his Oliver Cromwell, but the picture gives only a hint of the life of three modern nations in the two centuries pre¬ ceding our own, — the French nation and the Prussian in the eighteenth century, and the English in the seventeenth; the historic vista extends no farther. It is a wonderful pageant that Gibbon causes to pass before the eye of the student in his Decline and Fall of Rome, but the more than a thousand years through which he carries his work, measured against historic time, are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night. It is a marvelous drama that Grote develops in his great History of Greece, and the action and the characters and the tragic issues have an abiding and wonderful

NEW CONCEPTION OF HISTORY. 13

meaning; still the twelve volumes deal with a very small part of the race, and a very brief period of time. Rawlinson puts before us a vast and dim world in his Five Ancient Monarchies; and we feel the spell of great antiquity as we read his pages, and are touched with the sense of the dark and stormy morning of our humanity. But when we have passed from Carlyle to Gib¬ bon, from Gibbon to Grote, from Grote to Raw¬ linson, we have come only to the beginning of the new conception of history. The countless silent centuries that lie behind recorded history are to-day one of the most touching, fascinating, and bewildering objects of thought. They have at last risen from their long sleep; they have finally found recognition; their labor and sorrow in preparing the way for historic man is no longer ignored; the tears and the blood by which they wrought out the physical forms from which our better life has come, and the beginnings of civili¬ zation that they were able to hand on to their more fortunate successors, are becoming part of the sympathetic and grateful recollection of man¬ kind. It is indeed strange, this resurrection of a dead world, this emancipation from oblivion of a forgotten humanity, this return to recognition and brotherhood with the later generations of the millions that lived in the dust behind the records of history, and looked “with dumb eyes to the silence of the skies.” It is a speaking symbol

INTRODUCTORY.

of the possible reach of human imagination and sympathy, of the essential unity of the race, of the general sublime memorial of all the serving and aspiring ages that shall at last be erected in the grateful and venerative memory of mankind.

Here, then, is the second call for the new habit of thought. Here is the second cause of the revolution that has already taken place in the nobler mind of the church. The problem is our problem, and the old mental mood is totally in¬ adequate to cope with it. The Hebrew form of the problem, the apostolic form of the problem, the mediaeval and puritan forms of it, are not large enough for that which confronts the believer to-day. The Hebrew prophet was for the most part satisfied with the salvation of the remnant of Israel, while the hostile contemporaneous Gen¬ tile world was under doom. The universalism of the Old Testament seer concerns the golden ages of the future, and has nothing to do with the multitudinous populations of the past. The apos¬ tle Paul has indeed a magnificent sense of history, and a profound philosophy of it, as is abun¬ dantly attested by his speech to the Athenians, and by passages of the greatest moment in the letters to the Galatians and Romans. But the ideal of a Christ for humanity, ultimate as a form of thought although it is, and capable of infinite expansion in answer to the developments of time and the facts of the case, could not have

RESTRICTED SALVATION INCREDIBLE. 15 meant for him what it must mean for the believer to-day. The restricted conception of salvation inaugurated under the apparent appalling com¬ pulsion of facts by Augustine, cherished through the Middle Ages, revitalized by the reformers, and descending with the puritan inheritance to the present generation, is possible to those only who shut their eyes to the vastness of human history. The consciousness of history as of unmeasured extent, and as embracing countless multitudes of the human race, inferior doubtless in every way to the men of to-day, but upon whose sacrifices and rude civilizations, representing worlds of struggle and suffering, the modern age has built, and without which even genius itself would be comparatively helpless, is one of the great forces that are calling for a new conception of salvation. It is impossible to believe that the unmeasured worlds of prehistoric man that at the present time are rolling into the vision of the nobler spirits, and whose wonderful contributions in the way of brain and muscle and rude inventions, of the indispensable preliminaries of civilization, are receiving wider and more reverent recognition, do not stand in the eternal loving thought of God in Christ. The idea that confines salvation to the remnant, whether that be the remnant of the Hebrew prophet, or that of the mediaeval saint, or of the puritan, is to-day incredible. If cher¬ ished, it can have but one issue, — atheism.

INTRODUCTORY.

The church is on trial. The humanity that she must include in her faith and prayer and sympathy has multiplied itself like the sand of the sea, and crowds the expanded spaces of time with hosts that no man can number. The think¬ ing world of to-day will insist upon an answer to the question whether the Christ of the modern preacher has any relation to this recovered and piteously needy humanity. A great many, who are afraid of breadth, are looking favorably upon the scientific solution, the survival of the fittest. Among the lower animals, from countless multi¬ tudes that cannot succeed, and that are born to fail, a few strong specimens are found that pre¬ vail over the hard conditions and live on. From these come swarms of offspring, the overwhelm¬ ing majority of which are under certain doom, and from whose doomed multitudes a second selection of the strong is made, to carry onward the torch of life. Nature, according to this con¬ ception, produces more than she wants, more than can by any possibility live, in order that from this excess of numbers she may have a better pick. Her procedure is perfectly frank and undisguised. She wants a few fine speci¬ mens, with which to carry the race higher, and she thinks that she will succeed better if she shall have a larger number from which to choose. Care for the unfit she has none, regard for the perishing is utterly foreign to her heart. She

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 17

multiplies to inconceivable excess the forms of life, in order that the chances for selection of the fit may be indefinitely improved. The unfit are her blunder, the piteous witnesses of her inca¬ pacity and heartlessness. This is the way in which science disposes of the abortive life in the lower animal kingdoms. The question is, whether it is safe for the church to look with favor upon this scientific method. It may be well enough in the non-moral sphere, but what shall be said of it when it stands as the self-disclosure of the moral head of the universe, and the law accord¬ ing to which he deals with mankind? If only the morally fit survive, — if the creation of man¬ kind is purposely excessive in order that from the wider reprobation a larger election may be made, — the old theology is indeed safe, but the religion of Christ is gone. If the method of God with humanity is but another aspect of the scientific doctrine of the salvation of the strong, if his government is grounded upon a necessary reprobation and election, then He who came to seek and to save the lost is not his Son. For the method of Jesus is in absolute contradiction to that procedure, and his Spirit is the eternal arraign¬ ment and condemnation of irresponsible Almightiness. Fools should never handle dangerous tools, and those who, in the name of conserva¬ tism, are courting the scientific doctrine of the survival of the fittest, are sadly in need of this

INTRODUCTORY.

admonition. The voices which seem so sweet to the theologian who is afraid of the breadth of the modern time, and who is anxious to conserve venerable theological traditions, are the songs of sirens, and “near by is a great heap of rotting human bones; fragments of skin are shriveled on them. Therefore sail on .” 1 On this basis the old theology is safe, but the Christian religion and the mighty conception of a divine humanity are doomed. The new consciousness of history, the expansion of our human world in time, is the opportunity of the Christian religion, its fresh and ampler vindication, and it is the hour of trial for the church of to-day. If the present reach of the nobler imagination, the rich increase of historic sense and sympathy, and the consciousness of a human communion that is indefinably and mysteriously great, does not result in conceptions worthier Christ, more in accord with that which in the soul is likest God, the Christian thinkers, and all those who are responsible for the forms of faith for this generation, will miss an amazing chance to serve the kingdom of God. One feels that, if out of the profounder and better life of the time religious conceptions should arise, they would be so close an approximation to the mind of Christ as to possess a power almost elemental. The truth in its true form is the mightiest thing on earth: it does not need eloquence or skill or 1 Odyssey, book xii., Professor Palmer’s translation.