Jesus Christ and the civilization of to-day

Front matter

Book E^^LA-

GoipghtN»_

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Prefatory Note

As indicated by the title, the scope of this work is limited to a consideration of the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ in their bearings on the spiritual life of civilization. No account is taken of the external events of Christ's life or of his deeds, except in so far as has seemed necessary to interpret the meaning and application of his teaching. No questions of dogmatic theology are directly considered, nor, on the other hand, does the author mean to imply that there may not be aspects of that life, of deep significance for the individual and the church, that lie beyond the purview of the present work. He is simply concerned here with ideas that seem to him to be of broad and primary significance for the entire moral foundations of western culture. He has felt compelled to take some account of eastern culture, since the two are now meeting in the world-arena. He has done this with diffidence, since his knowledge of the East is purely literary.

The primary aim of the work is practical, and it is addressed to all intelligent persons who are honestly and open-mindedly seeking to determine the relation of the words of the great Master of Life and Rehgion to their own lives and to the

Vm PREFATORY NOTE

complex and confused life of contemporary civilization. Hence, technical discussions in biblical criticism and in philosophy have been, so far as possible, avoided. Philosophical questions have been dealt with as briefly and clearly as possible. If the style of treatment may savour, to the specialist, of dogmatism, the author's reply is that he has threshed out, to the best of his ability, questions at issue in the philosophy of mind in a forthcoming work. To the specialist in New Testament criticism and theology the author would say further that, while he has avoided burdening a work of popular character with references, he has considered in great part the recent literature both German and English.

But the writer's wish will be satisfied if some intelligent seekers after truth in matters of conduct and life are led to a fuller appreciation of the present significance of the teaching of Him whose words are " Spirit and Life."

Geneva, New York, January lo, 1907.

Contents

PAGE

Prefatory Note '^^

CHAPTER I Purpose and Standpoint of the Present Work i CHAPTER n Nature and Human Nature 22

CHAPTER HI The Heart of Man 35

CHAPTER IV The Conduct of the Individual Life ... 56

CHAPTER V The Conduct of the Social Life .... 89

CHAPTER VI The Imperfections of Life 120

CHAPTER VII

(1 ) The Idea of God in General . . • ♦ i39

(2) JesusMdeaofGod .150

(3) The Problem of Evil ^S7

ix

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII

PAGE

The Influence of Jesus' Teaching and of Other

Ethical Systems i66

CHAPTER IX

Jesus Christ and Other Founders of Religions 179 (i) Personality and the History of Religion . . 179 (2) Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha in History . 185

CHAPTER X The Final Significance of the Personality of

Jesus Christ 215

APPENDIX. Ethics and Eschatology . . 225 INDEX TO NAMES AND SUBJECTS . . .243 INDEX TO TEXTS 247

JESUS CHRIST

AND THE

CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY

JESUS CHRIST AND THE CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY : PURPOSE AND STANDPOINT OF THE PRESENT WORK

The aim of the following work is to offer an interpretation of the fundamental ethical principles of Jesus in their bearing on the problems of social life and individual destiny as these present themselves to the men of to-day. In estimating the meaning and value of any historical phenomenon we necessarily begin with the life, experience, and ideas of to-day. The past only gains meaning and worth for us as we bring it into living filiation and continuity with the present. This is even more deeply true of moral and spiritual history than of political and economic history. It seems to the present writer that no better test can be made of the permanent worth of the gospel of Jesus than that of determining how it bears on the moral and spiritual problems of life to-day. For the gospel is life, not theory. Although it involves theoretical propositions, it does not in itself consist primarily of theoretical propositions. The gospel of Jesus is a way of conduct, an

B I attitude oj soul or spirit, and as such it must be judged.

The aim of the present work, then, is twofold. It seeks to discover the fundamental ethical needs of contemporary life, to determine by what principles of conduct the spiritual character of man and of civiKzation may be best preserved and developed. And it seeks to determine the bearings of Jesus* ethical teaching on this spiritual life of to-day.

I have attempted to bring out only the fundamental principles of Jesus' teaching, in their relation to contemporary tendencies of conduct and of ethical thought. The application in detail must be left to the reader. And here I believe I am in accord with Jesus' own method. Although he teaches by parables and single instances as well as by explicitly formulated principles, what he conveys is in every case a dynamic principle or spiritual ideal of conduct. The gospel is no system of casuistry, no network of minute and iron-bound prescriptions. Jesus supplies the quickening leaven ; but it is an essential feature of his ethical teaching that the individual shall in each specific and concrete case direct his own actions by conscious and free thought and decision in the light of the principles laid down. The active participation of the whole personality is fundamental to right living as Jesus sees it.

The traditional ethics of Christian civilization are on trial to-day. No doubt the mass of men still assume their validity and pay them the tribute of at least a theoretical recognition. But the conduct of men is in part actually guided by widely different motives and the authority of other than Christian principles begins to be boldly announced in some quarters. When Nietzsche proclaims the absolute supremacy of the stronger and more intelligent, exceptional individual, the " Over-man," over the mass of his fellows ; when he attacks the Christian ideals of s}Tnpathy and service as the most egregious blunders in the matter of conduct that man has ever committed ; when he finds in the assertion of the authority of these principles the conspiracy of the mass of weak men against the few strong; of the ''domesticated human animal" against his natural and rightful lord, the exceptional individual, strong, cunning, and dominant, — Nietzsche is but drawing the correct ethical consequences that follow from the exclusive claim that the Darwinian doctrine of evolution, or the science of biology in general, is able to yield us a new sufficient and scientific ethics. And, in our practical, political, and commercial life, where Nietzsche has never been heard of, the catchwords of biological science are frequently employed to justify political oppression, industrial and civic wrong- doing.

We are told that the conquest, exploitation, and subjection of weaker and less enlightened peoples by the culture-nations of Europe and America is the ''natural," and therefore inevitable, outcome of the "struggle for existence." The fittest survive, and the weaker must go to the wall. So it is in nature, and so it must be in human society, we are told. The ''trust," too, is a product of "evolution" and, if it crushes out competitors here and there by methods which the old-fasliioned Christian moral consciousness revolts against, why all this is " natural " and " inevitable " I The labor union often seeks to justify intimidation and personal violence on the same grounds.

If men in business and in poUtics use lying and corruption, fraud, and "graft," to gain their ends, we are told that the "machine" is a necessary political device or that the "system" which exists must be conformed to and those who do business or go into pohtics must adopt the methods that have been employed and that have actually proved successful. And, in truth, our fundamental principle of ethics threatens to become the universal doctrine "that nothing succeeds Hke success." Now, there is no system of morality to be drawn from the foci of the survival oj the fittest in the struggle for existence. For the fittest means nothing more in nature than the fact that certain species have actually survived. The fitness or goodness which consist simply in the survival value indicated by the power of adjustment to the natural environment have nothing to do with moral worth. Morality does not begin until we leave the realm of mere brute facts and judge in terms of ideal worth or value.

The naturahstic tendencies, to which I have briefly referred, are sufi&ciently symptomatic of our time.

No doubt, traditional Christian ethics, as an inheritance from the mediaeval world, drew too sharp an antithesis between the natural and the spiritual. For example, the assertion of the higher spiritual virtue of cehbacy over the married state was a great error. The separation by mediaeval ethical thought of the higher spiritual realm from the sphere of common human activities and interests in family, community, state, science, and art set up a mistaken dualism that had serious consequences for history, consequences that our ci\dhzation is only beginning to recover from. Some of these consequences were — the vague and negative meanings attached to spirituahty and the spiritual Hfe in many quarters, the tendency to ascribe a magical efhcacy to rites and ceremonies as means of snatching the soul from an evil world, the failure of the churches to make themselves effective forces in the evolution of contemporary civiHzation, their failure to welcome and to sanctify democracy as the direct consequence of the Master's teaching, and gladly to meet science and scholarship as instruments by which the spirit leads men into the truth that makes them free. We are learning better to-day, although we are still prone to identify heathen and mediaeval motives and principles with the ethics of Jesus himself.

But, under the influence of biological philosophy, used as a tool to justify the selfish and power-lo\dng ruthless instincts of the natural man, modern society swings toward the other extreme. Our civilization is threatened by an ethical materialism, for wliich there are no limits of acquisition and indulgence except those of cunning and power. The ethical antithesis now stands between biological egoism and Christian altruism. Shall individual or national success be constituted the sole warrant of right, or are there universal ethical principles of righteousness? Shall the individual obey without stint his own selfish desires, shall he follow without limit his own immediate interests regardless of the well-being of others? What is the relation of the individual's action to social welfare and social righteousness? And back of this antithesis lies the more fundamental question, wherein consists the true essence of the individual ? Has he a spiritual being or is he but a fleshly tissue, warmed by feeling, lighted up by consciousness, and aided in the struggle to gain mere life, by the auxihary instrument of reason? Is reason but a tool for the increase of sensuous pleasure, and the diminution of pain?

The fundamental problems of ethics and reHgion are, in a final analysis, those of the real nature and destiny of the individual man. Our ethical principles must in the last resort depend upon our convictions as to the relation of the human self to the natural order or cosmos, and upon its relation to the world of spiritual values and ideals wliich have been built up in the course of civilization through the teachings and activities of moral and religious leaders.

If the ethics of traditional Christianity are on trial, this means that the most important spiritual constituents in the personal and social Hfe of our civihzation are on trial, too. And in this critical juncture we must, in order to determine anew what is permanent and pertinent in Christianity as a civilizing and ethical force, go back of the traditional Christian ethics, which is intermingled with many other elements, to the ethics of the founder. For the ethical conceptions that began to prevail in the church from the second and third centuries onward (indeed, one might say to some extent from the latter part of the first century), that held sway during the Middle Ages, and are still by many identified with the gospel, are really a compound of Jesus' teaching with that oriental dualism which had its several manifestations in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mithraism, etc. ;^

* On the relations of Zoroastrianism and Primitive Christianity see two articles by James Moffatt, in the Hibbert Journal, Vol. I., No. 4, and Vol. II., No. 2 ; on Mithraism see the little work by Franz Cmnont, The Mysteries of Mithra, a resume of his larger work on the same subject ; on the general subject see A. Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I. (English translation), and the same writer's The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. On the subject of Persian influence on Jewish religion in New Testament times see W. Bousset, Die Religion des Jtuienthums im Neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, Zweite Aufiage, 1906. Of course, as one leaves Apostolic Christianity behind and goes forward through the history of thought and practice in the second, third, and fourth centuries, the influence of this oriental dualism becomes more pronounced in Christian thought and practice. Indeed, the same is true of purely Hellenic thought. How much more dualistic in both speculative theory and in prac-

8 JESUS CHRIST AXD CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY

and which filtered into Greek thought through the mysteries and through later Neoplatonism, spread over the Roman Empire, cropped out even in the teachings of St. Paul, and, through the influence of St. Augustine and his successors, left its powerful and morbid heritage to modem theology, and even gained a speculative outcrop in Descartes' philosophy of mind and body.

The absolute metaphysical duahsm of mind and body, the absolute ethical duahsm of flesh and spirit, the absolute theological dualism of God and the denl, has been in principle overcome by modem thought. WTiat remains then of the supremacy of the spirit ? Is the latter but a product of natural forces ? The same question in philosophical form becomes this — is the mind a function of the bodily organism? And in theological guise — is God simply the order of physical nature ?

I am comanced that true and permanently valid answers to these questions, in so far as they touch the fundamental problems of conduct or ethics, will be found in the teachings of Jesus ; and it is in the light of this con\dction that I shall herein attempt to set forth the ethical principles of the Master in their bearing on the ethical or spiritual problems of contemporary civilization, and more especially, of the

tical matters is the philosophy of Plotinns than that of his master Plato, or of Aristotle and the Stoics ! Ancient thought dies out with the opposition of soul and body, good and evil, God and the world.

individual life. For, in the nature and destiny of the human person centre all the fundamental problems of ethics, metaphysics, and theology ; and the fundamental contribution of Jesus to our practical thought and to our conceptions of things lies in his teaching concerning the ultimate nature and vocation of the human person.

Some readers will doubtless be surprised that I have not entered into a discussion of the date and authorship of the historic records or sources on which I have freely drawn for my materials, and have advanced no hypothesis as to the relative priority and historicity of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I may as well say at once that I do not consider such a preliminary inquiry vital to the fulfilment of the aim set before me in this work. Furthermore, in my own opinion, apart from the external evidences of contemporary records, some systematic conception of Jesus' teaching and activity is the indispensable prerequisite to any sane and sober-minded discussion of the dates and historicity of the four gospels. The internal constitutions and relations of these works cannot be determined apart from such a conception. This attitude will doubtless seem to many of the ''higher critics" of the New Testament a varepov Trporepov, a putting of the cart before the horse. I will therefore proceed to explain and defend the position.

In the case of Jesus, as of any other great historical figure, we are dealing with a personality who has exerted a continuous historical influence lO JESUS CHRIST AND CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY

do^^TL to the present time. Great personalities are true historical causes. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon I., started political movements whose effects continue and can be traced backward from the present time. So it is in the realm of science with Aristotle, Archimedes, Bacon, Newton, Kant, etc.; in art with Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Beethoven, etc. These individuals have been true historical causes, i.e. they have continued to exercise influence in the development of humanity. The lives, thoughts, and activities of the mass of lesser individuals have been moulded by countless streams of mental and moral influences whose fountain heads are the characters, thoughts, and deeds of great persons, and whose channels are marked out in the change and continuity of the historical Hfe and social institutions of mankind. These streams of mental influence, welling up from the mysterious fountain heads of human personality, have marked out their channels and beds in the evolution of social institutions — in the political state with its manifold forms ; in the various genera and schools of art ; in the commercial and industrial systems of the ages ; in the systematic conceptions of science as these are added to and modified from age to age, etc.

Great personahties are the supreme interpreting and rationally directing forces in the historical evolution of man, and in any stage or phase of human evolution that we may select, will be found embedded the countless streams of tendencies that have issued

PURPOSE OF THE PRESENT WORK II

from the creative individuals who have originated new movements in civilization or at least have altered the direction of old ones.

Now Jesus is a preeminent historical force in the thoughts and lives of the members of our western ci\dlization to-day as well as in the spirit and workings of a great historical institution, — the church. It may be said that his influence is on the wane. This has often been said before. But it cannot be denied that his personahty is still a potent factor in the moral and spiritual life, both individual and social.

The primary witnesses to the reality of Jesus as a great historical force or originating centre of spiritual life are: i. The existence and experiences of disciples to-day acting under his leadership and striving to live in accordance with his spirit. 2. The continuity of the Hfe and tradition of discipleship in the Christian church. However much the church in its various branches may have grievously erred in falling away from the ethical spirit of the Master, however much it may in time past have forgotten rehgion in ecclesiasticism, ethics in dogmatic theology, the lowly spirit of love in the passion for authority and wealth; nevertheless, the continuous existence and development of the church is an abiding historical witness to the reahty and perennial power of Jesus' personahty and influence in the movement of ci\dhzation. Here, then, we have the actual evidences in personal experience, discipleship, and in institutional continuity, of Jesus as a personal historical force.

And, when we go to the earliest documentary records to get the details of his life, or the principles of his teaching, we must not forget that we have to do with a living personality — with an individual spiritual cause. We must treat this person reverently and sympathetically in the integrity of his Hfe and views. No one who is imable sympathetically to appreciate the many-sided and rich Hfe of a great personal leader, who may be influential in society to-day, is competent to reconstruct the hves of great historical individuals. The historian himself must be a man of personal caliber and the weakness of much so-called "higher criticism" consists in the lack on the part of its authors of a vital and historical appreciation of the significance of personahty.

In regard to our special subject of inquiry, it is not of first-rate importance whether Mark was written before or after 70 a.d., Luke and Matthew before or after 80 a.d., etc. The supremely important point is this — do we get from these first records of Jesus the impress of a powerful spiritual individuahty and a coherent and comprehensive ethical and spiritual attitude toward hfe. We have, as I have said, in individual disciples and the continuous existence of the church as a factor m society our n\dng witnesses to the continuing personal influence of Jesus. This personahty has been a powerful historical cause, and is therefore real. And if, for our purpose, we can find in the earliest records even the bare outline and suggestion of any system of principles of conduct, constituting an integral and vital whole, then these records must be trustworthy sources for the life and teaching of this preeminent historical personage with whom we are concerned as a great causal factor in the moral evolution of humanity. *'In observing the Uneaments of Jesus, the right focus was given not by his death nor even by his departure, but in the subsequent discipline of memory and obedience among his followers. Their increasing distance from , the object tended in some degree to correct earlier mistakes of judgment in the direction of exaggeration or of undervaluing ; by remoAing certain obscurities, the very lapse of time helped to purify and widen in the Christian community the powers of accurate appreciation. Hence the character and date of our extant gospels. Just as the full significance of thq traits and issues bound up in the faith of Jesus could not be grasped by his original disciples until he ceased to move beside them, — he left them and they knew him, — so it proved practically an impossibility for them, even after their subsequent experience of reflection and reminiscence, to achieve the task of creating a final and adequate record. For that they could merely supply materials. It was enough in this for the disciples to be as their Master. Like Socrates and Epictetus, he was no author. He wrote once — and that upon the dust. His real epistles were to be found in the character and experience of his followers (2 Cor. 3:3). Nor was it otherwise with them. For other hands than theirs the work of evangeHc composition was reserved. It was completed, as perhaps it only could have been, by the epigoni. Even those who had received the tradition of the historical Jesus, Kara a-dpKa, from his personal companions, found that his Ufe in subsequent years opened out for them (John 12:16; 14:26; 16:13); it

' Orbed into the perfect star They knew not, when they moved therein.'

But this insight of a second generation was not necessarily inferior at all points. On the contrary, it had some invaluable advantages. In the strict sense of the word, the gospels are not contemporary records. Even the earliest of them implies an interval between the facts and their record — bridged though that interval may be by continuous tradition and surviving witnesses. But so far from this distance being an altogether regrettable defect, it is in some aspects a profit. Until development has reached a certain stage, analysis will always remain inadequate; indeed, it is hardly possible for it to exist. Lapse of time is essential to a real conception of this as of any other history, for it is only after such an interval of experience and reflection that the meaning and bearings of the life in question come out in their true and sure significance. Interpretation is not bound fast to the contemporary standpoint. It requires facts, but it requires them in perspective. The gospels in reahty do more for us, written between 65 and 105, than they would have done if composed before 35. Drawn up after at least one generation had passed away, and written in a world rich with religious passion, speculation, and achievement, these writings give a wider and deeper account of their subject than any that would have been afforded by records composed in the morning of the Christian religion. During the actual hfetime of Jesus, or even immediately after his death, the vital principle of the Life was not to be grasped in its real unity and relationships. Paul understood the secret of Jesus more thoroughly than many who had trodden the roads of GaUlee in his company, and Ustened to his arguments and teaching in the synagogues ; and the writers of the Christian biography were not necessarily placed at any serious disadvantage for their task and mission by the fact that their vision was one not of sight but of insight, not of memory but of sympathy."^ ''The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is always excepted, and a generation passes before we can insure accuracy." "Their raison d^etre lay in the authoritative and binding power exercised by the words of Jesus over the primitive community from the very beginning, as well as in need, stirred by exigencies of time and place, for possessing that standard in an accessible and fairly uniform shape,

^ Moffatt, The Historical New Testament, pp. 13-14.

for the purpose of personal conduct, missionary enterprise, and religious nourishment. The gospels, in fact, are the first Christian creed; they are the naive expression of the creed in history." ^

I gladly quote these passages, since they seem to me admirably to indicate the right point of view from which to consider the problems of New Testament criticism and to be in harmony with the conception I have above outHned of the convincing evidence for the historical integrity of Jesus the Teacher as portrayed and reported in the four canonical gospels.

It seems to me an entirely wrong-headed procedure to lay down in advance some preconceived canon for testing the genuineness of Jesus' utterances, as that, for instance, he could not have called himself the Son of God or the Son of Man in any unique sense. Let us first endeavour to get from the records, taken in their historical setting, a living impression of his personaHty and teaching as a whole before we proceed to strike out as unauthentic passage after passage of utterances accredited to Jesus and to wrest others from their obvious meanings.

One finds among representatives of the ultracritical school of New Testament interpreters to-day a dogmatic bias almost as strong and perhaps as detrimental to a full appreciation of Jesus' personality and teaching as the bias of ultraconservatives who tended to sacrifice the humanity of Jesus to ^ Moffatt, op. cit., p. 27.

his divinity and, accordingly, conducted the exegesis with the presuppositions that he was omniscient on all matters, that every word of the New Testament was equally inspired, and that, therefore, the most conflicting stories and sayings must be harmonized in violence to reason and all historical probabihty. For example, one critic, impressed by the eschatological character of much of Jesus' preaching concerning the Kingdom of God as reported in the EvangeHsts, concludes that these parts of the gospels must be of later origin, since Jesus could not have at once held that the Kingdom was both present and immanent and future and transcendent. Another critic from the same premises concludes that Jesus was mistaken concerning the coming of the Kingdom. Why, I ask, could not a supreme religious genius, taking up the current eschatological notions of the Messianic Kingdom, have spiritualized them and taught that the Kingdom was at once present in its beginnings, immanent in its development, and future and transcendent in its completion?

Again, another critical school, beginning with the assumption that Jesus must have regarded himself simply as an ethical teacher, since he was nothing more and could not have been deceived about himself, goes the length of denying that he ever referred to himself as the Son of Man in a unique or individual sense or claimed to be the Messiah ; and argues that wherever he used the term "Son c of Man" he meant simply ''Man" in the generic sense. Such utterances as, "The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day" (Matt. 12:8), etc., can be made to square with this interpretation ; but it is surely doing utter violence to such utterances as "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20) to say that here he means man in general. This is simply not the case, and Jesus could hardly have uttered such a nonsensical notion. Passage after passage, such as "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," etc. (Matt. 20:28), and "The Son of Man goeth as it is written of him," etc. (Matt. 26 : 24), are struck out as later additions or glosses to his words, by critics of this type, in order to establish their presupposition, viz. that Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah, and hence never referred to himself in a unique sense as Son of Man or Son of God. The latest critic who is of this way of thinking ^ even argues with much ingenuity that, although we have no Aramaic record of Jesus' sayings, nor (he admits) any absolute proof that he might not have used some other Aramaic expression or even a Greek expression, nevertheless, since the expression in Aramaic, so far as we have literary remains of this language, is har nasha^ which means not this Son of Man but "Son of Man," i.e. man in the generic sense, therefore Jesus must have used