The Christian reconstruction of modern life

Preface

The object of this book is the spiritualizing of the social passion. The undertaking has grown from the conviction that this mightiest force of our time can attain its reconstructive purpose only as it is conscious of its own implicit spiritual quality, and becomes The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life.

Experienced readers will perceive my obligations to prominent scholars and thinkers. Lest the relatively inexperienced should suppose that positions familiar to progressive scholarship are eccentricities of the author, special obligation is acknowledged to Eucken and Bergson, and to pragmatism in the ideal and spiritual apprehension learned, however imperfectly, from the lips of its most acute interpreter, John Edward Russell, beloved teacher, revered friend. The conceptions concerning the Old and New Testaments are those derived from the reverently fearless scholarship of which the regnant example is Heinrich Julius Holtzmann: upon his new grave Christian learning has laid its wreath of immortelle and passion flower. To the leaders of the brotherhood and sisterviii PREFACE

hood of the social passion who shall compute the indebtedness of us all!

I trust the book will reach those to whom its purpose is most congenial: not scholars alone, as the studious of my own vocation, but also the like of those whose eager faces have kindled the inspiration of the preacher's message. Among these are illiterate men and women, to whom dreary shibboleths would have meant nothing, being nothing, but to whom the spiritual depths of the social Gospel were translucent; and disciplined minds, whose faith, long outraged by traditionalism, acknowledged a Christianity given back to thought and heart and life; and flaming eyes of youth in glad amazement at what Jesus would have their lives be. It is a cause of regret that in a few passages it has been necessary to employ allusions not familiar to all, in order to avoid wearisome episodes that would be much more confusing. Yet even in these infrequent paragraphs regard has been kept for those who entreated, "Write the spiritualizing of the social Gospel in words not too hard for us." Not by technical learning are vitalities understood, but by breadth of interest, and intensity of purpose, and enthusiasm of aspiring service.

Calhoun, Alabama, June 14, 1913.

PART I The Radical Division in Modern Life Chapter

I. The Two Inheritances 3

II. The Two Obligations 14

III. The Source of Our Civilization 25

IV. Modern Hellenism 38

V. The Rights of Our Civilization as against Christianity 58 VI. The Right of Christianity as against Our Civilization 74

PART II Jesus and Modern Life

I. The Two World-Conquests 107

II. The Historic Realization of the Semitic Principle. . 125

III. The Separateness of Jesus from Aryan Civilization 162

IV. The Task of Civilization 185

V. The Task of Jesus 214

VI. Jesus' Accomplishment of His Task 242

VII. The Reconstructive Energies 277

VIII. The Spiritualizing of the Social Passion 291

Index 317

IX

PART 1 THE RADICAL DIVISION IN MODERN LIFE

THE

CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION

OF MODERN LIFE

Chapter I

The modern world's divergences from the Christian religion are results of an original and fundamental difference between our civilization and Christianity. The reason of these estrangements cannot be that science has opened a new universe, unknown to the ages of faith, and that processes of thought and tests of reality have suffered change. Nor are radical departures from our religious consciousness caused by the awakening of new personal and social interests, and by the establishment of different standards of value from those which directed unsophisticated desires to their celestial goal; for belief in the infinite is not unfavorably influenced by the enlarging knowledge of the finite, and life in God is not hostile to normal unfoldings of thought and action in any realm.

But the patent separations express the unyielding fact that Christianity is not a development of the civilization which is our Hellenic inheritance, but came to it from without. And this fact is not an historic accident, but the manifestation of a difference between our religion and our civilization for which there is no superficial synthesis. The agreeable phrase, Christian civilization, juxtaposes terms unfused. Civilization is not Christian by virtue of acknowledging contributions, however great, from Christianity and its revered founder, and least of all can Christianity pronounce it such unless it has accepted the universal dominance of the fundamental Christian principle. The Semitic Jesus has no original part in the Hellenic culture, which, transforming the contributions of previous civilizations, and absorbing in its progress every potency it encounters except His, is to-day unprecedentedly stimulated by forces new, but most germane to its developments. Ever more dissonant to its conquering march through the world and the times, sounds His voice, never to be silenced: Change your estimates, desires, purposes, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

Beside our religious and our cultural inheritance, there are our racial descents, various, uncertain. But these became significant only when our religion or our civilization found them material to work upon, disposition to mould. We express Athens and Galilee according to our heredity, but of Athens and Galilee we are expressions.

The opposite natures of these forces were detected from the beginning of their contact with one another, by noblest representatives of the classic culture. The ethical statesmanship of Aurelius and the spiritual aspiration of Plotinus opposed Christianity as an unassimilable intrusion. To them especially the Christ is he who casts upon the earth the sword of destruction against every purpose but his own. The victory of the Galilean seemed to defeat the obligation of the Hellenic-Roman civilization to renew itself from its sources, for the transforming of new peoples and the reconstruction of ancient nations. The adoption of Christianity was to them the betrayal of humanity; as it always is, in very truth, for any other aim than Jesus' transcendent ideal.

Every rebirth of our civilization has involved strained relations with Christian beliefs, sentiments, institutions, and aims. Familiar instances are the medieval anticipation of the renaissance, the renaissance itself, the era of the enlightenment, the movements which we connect with the French revolution, the awakening of any young soul to the world and life in it. It is not merely that at such times certain ecclesiastical tyrannies must be shaken off and superstitions cleared away, and that new arrangements have to be concerted between the expanded secular life and the faith which it revises; but the cleavage appears between our two inheritances. And this notwithstanding faith's advantage from the advance of culture, and civilization's gain from the energizings of faith. For the enlivening of any element in man's nature stimulates the whole. The enfranchisement of any power, with its openings of new realms, necessitates ethical interests and problems, which, by an unfailing historic law, become conscious of their spiritual implications. In epochs of secular advance religious interests need not wait the pendulum's backward swing. The inevitable sequence of an age of idealism from a period of realism is not by the force of reaction, however exclusive may have appeared the dominance of the secular. If in our own time religion seems covered, it lies deep. Therefore the futility of stimulating the religious by repressing the secular. It is no less evident that upheavals of the great spiritual deep fling tidal waves of human mastery upon every shore. Yet these interworking arousements bring to light the sharper contrasts, in the clarified self-consciousness of both Christianity and our civilization. The differences become ever more acute with the mightier self-assertions of powers that have not yet found their synthesis, which these rivalries reveal as humanity's inevitable task.

The mutual oppositions of our two inheritances are manifest in the turbulent history of our religious thought. Its movement has been only partially the unfolding of the powers of a self-consistent spiritual life, continually surmounting stages of incomplete self-consciousness, — a process whose grapplings with avowed enemies, or whose resistances to inertia, retrogression, foreign intrusions, like Gnosticism, are elements of the development. But the record is, in large part, the attempt to unite Christianity with thoughts which belong to our civilization. Touched by criticism the unstable compound explodes.

The toil has not been profitless. It has demonstrated the necessity of a faith unencumbered by such theology. It has gained some apprehensions of the spiritual heritage, which has indeed been its chief concern; the untheological work of the great theologians survives: we repeat the creeds for that in them which is not dogmatically credal. The misguided labor has yet maintained a confidence in the ultimate synthesis of all life and thought. But faith has been distorted in attempts to blend it with the philosophies which are outgrowths of our culture, while philosophy has been so degraded that genuine thinking has repudiated its historic ministries to faith. As faith's handmaid, ancilla fidei, philosophy is a menial. When physical science became dominant, attempts to express Christianity in its terms failed to amuse men long. When social interests are supreme, a Christianity of the social consciousness is possible only when the social consciousness of our civilization is transcended. In vain does the conservative direct us back to the historic creeds and their theologies. Those attempts to mediate between our Christianity and civilization are not one whit more congenial to Christianity because alien to modern thinking. Yet the nobler demand for the uniting of Christian faith with present conceptions is essentially the same as that of the antiquated dogmatist, and advances to a new stage of failure to bind together our different inheritances.

These considerations do not necessarily bring our faith into hostility to any normal human power or legitimate impulse of man's self-realization; but they accept the importance of the fact that our religion and our civilization have different sources. They arouse a more active hope of that unity of the human spirit in all its powers which can be vital, permanent, and implicitly universal when every element of life is set free to develop itself to its utmost. Human powers "meet at their summits/' and each must have free course that all may be glorified together. Nor is there involved even a provisional antagonism. Each power of humanity in the measure of its coming to itself apprehends its relations with its fellows, and becomes confident of the ultimate attainment of the unity progressively realized.

No less significant of the different origin and nature of each inheritance is the inveterate conflict between the Christian spirit and ecclesiastical organizations borrowed from political institutions. These secularizations result in rivalries between the church and the state, the school, society generally. Modern studies of the New Testament, with their reverent purpose to separate Jesus from whatever in the tradition is none of His, find in Him no intimations of such constructions. Power of the keys, for one apostle or for all, prescriptions of church discipline, rite of baptism or eucharist, the very name church or any equivalent word, we find to have been thrust back upon the Master by the supposed necessities of a later generation. Nor are these things legitimate unfoldings of His purpose, or supplies of His omissions. It is not the fact that Jesus, whether io THE CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION

because He expected the immediate destruction of the world or for any other reason, left His fellowship of divine love with no recourse but to copy secular institutions. Celestial principles of ministry and mutual sacrifice are sufficient to organize this fellowship, if only His followers had grace and wit to use them, and these excellencies can direct their own concretions for life in the world, that the world by the united task of this fellowship may be saved. Subjections of service avail more for the building up of the body of Christ than do assertions of quasi-political authority. The writer of the Fourth Gospel, amid the swift secularizations of the church within a century after Jesus' ministry, looked back wistfully, for all his churchmanship, to an ideal of Christian organization caught from the more spiritual of his apprehensions of his Lord, and truly imagined that Jesus washed the disciples' feet and wiped them with the towel wherewith He was girded, and then translated His deed into the organizing of His disciples in a love to one another like His love to His own.

What forms of organization might have been unfolded in that spirit of Jesus it is idle to speculate: what effective unity may be brought to pass by following out His leadings is our pressing business. Incalculable has been the historic service of the church,

THE TWO INHERITANCES n

and incalculable its mischief, and the separate sources of benefit and injury are evident. Great promise of the normal unfolding of the Christian fellowship in unity of love, and aggressiveness of the meekness which makes no secular claim, is in the inevitable separation of church and state, the breaking of ecclesiastical shackles, the rebuffs of ecclesiastical interferences, the impatience, both within the church and without, of its polities, the dislike of the very word church because of its unspiritual connotations, the futile outcomes of efforts to unite competitive Christian bodies by arrangements of polity or creed which have no effectiveness for spiritual union, the disregard of her self-assertions, the condemnation passed upon her that she is not a servant to wash the feet of humanity. In these animosities and disorganizations is evident the world's longing for the truly spiritual brotherhood, to be life and source and direction for all that men have to do.

In oriental civilizations the process is beginning, to express in their own terms the Christianity which is invading them. By these efforts also will appear profounder conceptions of Jesus and His Gospel. And there will be demonstrated no less clearly that Christianity is not of Japan and China, even as it is not of Italy and Germany. If ever the world's civilizations, the new and the renewed, fuse into one magnificent efficiency, presumably under the leadership of our own culture, then the different source and nature of the religion of Jesus will be still more evident, and the problem of reconciliation and unity even more imperative.

The clearing away from Christianity of the dogmatisms and ecclesiasticisms resulting from our inheritance of culture, involves the issue between the Christian religion in its clearest attainable self-consciousness and our civilization. Upon this issue depends the maintenance, not of religion, but of Christianity. Religion of some sort must ever hold the leadership of humanity: the dominance of the spiritual is in the very nature of human action. For religion means ultimate aims, basilar principles, quickening spirit. Religion signifies that wholeness of life to which every special development, however assertive of its autonomy, tends at length. Even the denial that life can find unity, direction, and permanent energy, is a religious denial; nor can it ever be final, since it is pronounced by no other impulse than that which must ever continue the search. But whether the religion to which our civilization can give itself shall be a religion of different source and nature, a religion which therefore demands to revolutionize the inmost heart of it, and to reconstruct every outworking of it, or a religion developed from our civilization's own implications, — this alternative, not to be avoided or compromised, requires a candor, solemnity, and earnestness no less courageous than when one stood between the Roman emperor's altar and the lions.

Chapter II

All but unique in history is our double inheritance. Civilization and religion develop generally as one, out of savagery and barbarism incapable of fundamental distinctions. No radical separation of the spiritual from the secular was attained by the increasing differentiations, with resultant rivalries, as between king and priest, for wealth and power. As human activities unfold a presiding deity is inseparable from each. As these pursuits become organized the gods of them acquire their several degrees of dignity, and their mutual relations in the enlarging realms of art and thought and statecraft. Only the religious realm, lacking distinct self-consciousness, has no deity of its own. The tendency to monotheism is to the god of the nation. This stage reappears in contemporary reversions to barbarism. The divinity fervently invoked by a modern nation in war time, is not discriminated from the nation in its military obsession: murder, lust, and rapine are very properly consecrated to this deity, and to it descend the victorious Te Deums. What is now anomalous was of old normal. In this temper Asshur is both nation and god.

If a permanent confederacy or empire is formed, or if several peoples find themselves in possession of a common civilization, the deity expands to occupy the larger field. The completion of the process is the identification of God and the world. If the development is interrupted by the acceptance of a foreign religion, the new faith comes undifferentiated from its civilization; therefore the Mohammedan conquests did not produce a parallel to our situation. Buddhism in its mission fields has been too pliant to the culture it encountered, and also too remote from life, in its own essential negation, to inflict a stress like ours. Nearly everywhere except in Christendom there is the growth of an apparently single inheritance.

National catastrophes, disintegrations of empire, downfalls Or exhaustions of civilization, and infectious disillusions with the world drag down religion and culture indiscriminately into hopeless demoralizations. Yet at such epochs the two strain apart. Religion may flee from the bankrupt world and from the desires, evaluations, and aims of life in the world : its deity is then the god of the religious life, or rather is the religious consciousness itself, since all else is renounced and denied. But this escape from the world is no recourse to those whom conditions or inner limitations force to acknowledge the actual. Their spiritual inheritance, which had been undistinguished from secular interests now degenerating, is proven insufficient. Then, if no other civilization with its religion imposes itself, the expatriated soul is open to a foreign gospel, which, however originally involved in a different culture, appeals as relatively unmingled spiritual, for the distinct spiritual need.

Such a religion the Roman decadence sought, and Christianity was the richest of the spiritual goods accessible. The Northern barbarians indeed received their culture and their faith as one, but they were twain, and must at length declare their difference. The ancient civilization asserted itself with increasing power, all the more vitally because not as an imitation of the past, except in a transient phase of the renewal, but with new energies and original resources productive of other forms. The complications and conflicts of our double inheritance are upon us. This strangely inevitable path Christendom has trodden almost alone.

Yet along this path the whole world must be led, and guides of humanity are we. Whatever the results of the contact of East and West, it is evident that from the vast development of the secular, the whole world over, the religious is falling away, the fundamental differentiation has arrived.

Delusive is the conception of Christian missions as the imparting of an alleged Christian civilization. The inner contradictions of that phrase are more evident to those for whom it is a novelty, and who regard our culture from outside. The hope of the triumph of Christianity in non-Christian lands depends upon our ability to distinguish its spiritual nature from our secular heritage. When the Oriental scornfully alleges the defects, oppressions, and abominations of Western civilization, even in contrast with his own, the Christian answer is not extenuation, or attempt at refutation, but, "Not of our civilization are we ambassadors." It must indeed be a Christianity that uses all attainments of Western culture for its ministry of divine love to body, mind, soul, and social regeneration, but it need not claim that these tools are of its own forging, and it must use them for a purpose transcendent of their nature. It must actively trust the power of the spiritual to subdue all things to itself, but what the forms of these things may be in the secular realm, it leaves for other forces to determine.

For the sake of its imperative missionary obligation

Christianity must become conscious, in the regions it calls its home, of its innermost nature, its unmingled spirituality. The work of the Christian thinker to penetrate our religion's deepest being, where its relations to all else are discovered, the toil of the scholar into the origins of Christianity, to strip them of every intrusion and misleading tradition, are the urgent obligation of the fullness of Christianity's missionary era. And because religion and secular life must be made one, it is for us to learn, both in the recesses of the soul and in devoted service especially to the old new lands, the final synthesis which can be attained only by fathoming the depths and testing the conquering energies of the spiritual life, that our two inheritances, now open to the world's appropriation, may be fused in the unity of the spirit. Ancient Israel presents a significant parallel. That is to say, similar conditions are to be evaluated in the two stages of our religion. The legend of the covenant on Mount Sinai between Jahveh as name previously unknown and therefore deity before unworshiped, and Israel to whom Jahveh then first disclosed Himself, may not establish a foreign source for the historic origin of the faith of the chosen people: other ancient lore of theirs contradicts the kernel of this tradition. But the indubitable import of the story is that Israel's religious inheritance was found to be in contrast with the Canaanitish influence, which might else have made this people rudest of the rude exemplars of the Babylonian- Phenician culture and religion in one. Through the centuries following the settlement in Palestine, the God of a distant Arabian desert contended with the undifferentiated civilization and worship of Southern Syria. Jahveh was in the deepest sense a war-god, leading the spiritual potencies of His people against mightier enemies than chariots and horsemen. It was this double inheritance that came to fiercest disruption with the great prophets. Their signal failure to create a civilization of their own — for their attainments were in the religious realm — was the greatest advance possible at that stage. Through all Pharisaic scholasticisms and against all pagan intrusions their achievement remained entire: the vindication, for Jesus' fulfillment, of a religion distinct from any form of secular progress, and therefore competent to rule the uttermost developments of culture, to which it is ever transcendent.

Our situation, so anomalous and perplexing, may awaken in us a certain envy of other times and climes, which have kept a comparatively undifferentiated simplicity of life, — as for instance the Hellenic harmony and symmetry. When we are called to weep over the miseries of humanity in its less complex stages, we may be reminded that the relative absence of this misery of ours left larger scope for natural buoyancy. Thus the sorrows of our own time assume a deepened pathos. Upon the wealths that have descended to us is imposed, as a heavy inheritance tax, a double burden to all life and thought. It is inconvenient to be heir of all the ages. We are tempted to surrender a part; and in that choice the necessity of living at all compels the alienation of the religious bequest. So multitudes unify life; often to find intenser strifes outbreaking in the sections retained, with terrible avengings from the excluded realm.

Yet the situation presents the fundamental, inevitable duality, come to its clearest expression thus far. From the beginnings of humanity two natures have striven within us: thus the human comes into being. From the beginning of human thought there have been inflowings from sense beneath, and from the ideal above. Two masters have always demanded to be served, the importunate body and the inexorable soul. To ignore this internal division is to relapse to the brute; to accept the ever increasing complication, not merely as between body and soul, but along all ranges of thought and life, is progress manward. To gain the unity beyond possibility of disruption is self-realization. We are distracted between brain process and thought process never in contact, ever parallel; between mind and matter, all the more opposed to one another when matter is conceived to be in mind, and thought itself is dissevered between the organizations of sense impressions and the organizing power. We are perplexed by materialism always confuted by an idealism never able to make its own claim secure; by science excluding consideration of the superphenomenal without whose postulates it cannot say its first word. We demand that God shall be uncontaminate by the visible and tangible and we find the universe a void except as God is its fullness. The aspirations without which life has no meaning are mocked by the grim and trivial necessity of daily bread. The soul that strains to escape sense is dependent upon that intractable beast to carry it up the heights. That which one is all but compelled to call the dualism of the modern consciousness has its roots in our nature and grows with our growth. Thanks to Galilee and Athens, the profound cleavage of humanity's inner life has come to a manifestation clear enough for patience and courage to face. The separateness of Christianity from the other inheritance fulfills at least one condition of reality, as our bewildered minds have always encountered it. The variance unto the uttermost may perhaps disclose the secret of all harmony and worth and joy.

Christian theology has obscured this inner contradiction by another, sin; so deriving life's fundamental task from a radical perversion. But the appearance of a superior moral earnestness here is illusive. For the consciousness of the abnormality of sin is weak and formal except when sin is perceived to be divergence from the normal task; and patience and fortitude to unite the bases of life depend upon accepting this obligation as the supreme moral endeavor. This task in its intensity was the redemptive mission of the holy Jesus. The supreme moral good can be nothing less than the complete manhood, maintaining, fulfilling and uniting all potencies of our nature. To refuse the task is the fundamental sin against one's own soul and humanity and whatever divineness possesses them.

To accuse our nature of irreconcilable dualism is a blasphemy against oneself which denies itself in its very conception. Only the unity of a man can pronounce him what he is, and cannot pronounce him radically dual. The attempt at such utterance sets the contrasted elements into a fundamental relation and indissoluble wholeness. Let not life attempt that which rational thought repudiates, the practical denial of either hemisphere. Nor can there be division of life into separate compartments to be occupied alternately. Then the man is not at home in either. He loses both; for then the secular loses significance and the religious loses content. A religion which is apart from anything to be thought or felt or achieved denies itself and disappears.

Yet any superficial reconciliation the depths of life convulse and rend asunder. Here are religious interpretations of science that is not science, and scientific formulations of religion that is not religion. Here are reductions of the ethical to an intellectual of no worth, and reductions of reason to an ethic that has lost its place in a rational universe. Here are those transferences from realm to realm, by which the power transferred loses the citizenship of its essential nature; the spiritual becomes superstition, retrogression, savagery, idiocy, or aims alien to religion corrupt it into the hypocrisies which aroused Jesus' supreme scorn.

To live soberly and achievingly is to accept the two inclusive essentials of life, distinguishing each in its own function, yet determining that the higher shall give to the lower in its still untrammeled action, perennial energy, ultimate significance, and direction to the supreme goal. If Christianity proves thus sufficient for life, Christians we will continue to be: the Christian is the man who realizes such power in the Christian faith. No easy task is appointed him: its arduousness is its inspiration.

Chapter III

The assertion of the rights of both our civilization and Christianity does not necessarily involve mutual antagonism. It may be a friendly suit to test the claims of each, for common advantage. The process seems to go steadily against our faith. Its ancient claims, asserted by the church as volunteer solicitor, to eminent domain over every realm of human conduct, are disallowed. Hence unseemly arrogance of the successful litigant, and on the other side resentments of defeat. Yet it is not improbable that the very liberation of secular forces may awaken in them a more conscious need of an energy deeper, and an aspiration higher than are in themselves; while loss of the world to tyrannize may open the spiritual vision to celestial expanses, which shed rain and sunshine upon all that has been given to the children of men.

Other powers have experienced loss of ancient

privilege with gain of influence. Philosophy has been

driven from her insolent limitations of psychology

and the other sciences, to become the science that tests, estimates, and unites the unprescribed discoveries of them all. Economics, pushed into its place by insurgent social disciplines, is consulted in social questions beyond its former purview. The sphere of the state, restricted by individual rights, is regulative of vast new fields. Much of the energy of our time is remuneratively expended upon the mutual limitations of the departments of human activity, with the result of relating them more fundamentally, for the increased effectiveness of each. So it may be with this task, in which the other discriminations culminate. The work can be better done without exultations, rages, or panics on either side.

In their unprejudiced delimitations of nature and function, Christianity and civilization find their respective possessions exposed to a common enemy. The foe is barbarism, equally hostile to religion and culture, hypocritically masking its opposition, and bringing to each gifts pregnant with destruction. It is inveterate antagonist of all man's higher faculties. An apostle of culture has named its champions after enemies of our religious inheritance: "This uncircumcised Philistine that defieth the armies of the living God."