What is a Christian? A book for the times

Front matter

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Introduction

The war in Europe has caused great searchings of heart among thoughtful people the world over, who are asking if this is all we have to show for nineteen centuries of Christian teaching. Browning's lines come to mind, of the Christ

"Whose sad face on the cross sees only this, After the passion of a thousand years."

President Eliot declares the Christian ethics a failure. John Galsworthy announces the death of mystical Christianity. A writer in the Century discusses the collapse of the church. The man in the street is asking, "Is the Christian ideal indeed practicable, or must the world go back in the end to the ancient doctrine that Might makes Right ?"

The magazines in particular have been filled with discussions of this sort. It is true that as the first shock of the great catastrophe viii INTRODUCTION

has passed away and men have begun little by little to find themselves and to think more or less clearly, the problem is seen to be less acute than was at first supposed.

The great war is seen to be no isolated phenomenon, but merely the culmination of a long period of incubation.

The brutality of militarism appears on second thought to be not much worse than the brutality of industrialism.

Nevertheless the twentieth century has been rudely startled out of its complacency, and the world has been driven to look to the foundations of its thinking ; to ask the meaning of its ultimate ideals, its fundamental principles.

While the discussion concerning the breakdown of Christianity was at its height, one of the popular magazines in a moment of unusual insight propounded the far-reaching query, "What is a Christian?" How far may one lag behind his Master in thought and practice without forfeiting his right to the title ?

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It is true the magazine in question lightheartedly desired an answer in five hundred words. Nevertheless the question struck at the root of the matter, and gave rise to some real thinking.

The answers received by the magazine revealed a surprising degree of popular spiritual insight. Coming from laymen rather than ministers, from men more than women, from the plain people, not the professional classes, and being fairly distributed over the whole country, they constitute perhaps the most comprehensive plebiscite on religious questions ever taken in America.

In the main these letters show that the common religious thought has progressed greatly in thirty years.

There was little mention of orthodoxy, little emphasis on details of doctrine, little confusion of thought over problems of scholarship. Neither the doctrine of Evolution nor the dust which filled the air a few years ago from the critical disintegration of the Scriptures seemed to worry the writers in the least.

x INTRODUCTION

This was not the complacent dogmatism which ignores the problem, but the steadfast conviction that the results of critical scholarship have not affected the main question. Evidently the world has moved since Robert Elsmere and The Reign of Law.

Christianity was defined in terms of the spirit rather than the letter, — even as regards the teachings of Jesus himself.

Moreover the distinction between a religion and a system of ethics was not lost sight of. The heart of the whole matter was found in personal loyalty to Jesus Christ, and the desire to embody his Spirit in the common life.

None the less, in spite of the high degree of insight displayed by these popular letters, the confusion of tongues which arose with the outbreak of the war, and no less the vagueness of outline more or less characteristic of the letters themselves, suggest the desirability of undertaking a more definite and comprehensive answer to the fundamental question — though it may require much more than five hundred words.

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The papers which follow represent a series of discussions before a congregation of average folk, who seemed to find them enlightening.

It is needless to say that they do not pretend to be exhaustive. They do undertake, however, to be comprehensive.

They are the outgrowth of a fairly wide acquaintance with theological scholarship. There are many works of popular theology which deal with single phases of the theme, but the author knows of no other single book which attempts to survey the whole field for the general reader.

The aim has been to keep the matter within the range of the utmost brevity compatible with any degree of clearness, and to present the so-called modern standpoint in untechnical language with a view to helping the man in the street to clear up his thinking.

Any reader who cares to follow up the various phases of the subject in works of popular religious teaching is referred to the bibliography which is appended to this introduction. Not all the writers therein referred xii INTRODUCTION

to agree in all points with each other, nor with the viewpoint set forth in these pages. The author ventures to believe, however, that in the main the conclusions he has advocated will be generally recognized as essential Christianity.

If some would add thereto, few, he believes, would subtract from his conclusions, nor would any deny the name Christian to one who should embody in a fair and growing degree the spirit and ideals for which he contends.

It would not be difficult to answer the main question in a single sentence.

Jesus himself virtually defined a Christian as one who loves God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself.

John Wesley wrote a tract on "The Character of a Methodist/ 5 in which he adopted this definition, simply expanding it in terms of eighteenth century thought.

An aged and saintly minister of the Baptist church was once asked, "What is a Bap-

INTRODUCTION xiii

tist?" He replied, "A Baptist is one who believes that no form of worship, nor book, nor creed, nor priest, can come between any man and his Lord. 55

Such definitions are infinitely suggestive. Our difficulties begin when we ask what they mean.

If the Christian ideal could be clearly defined or perfectly realized, it would cease to interest us, for the simple reason that it would no longer be an ideal.

It is the greatness of Christianity that no age has been able to exhaust it; that each succeeding generation has found new light to break forth from it, has grown by it, and has found it in turn to grow in significance and power.

It is by this that it has challenged the ages, and has given men reason to regard it as the supreme and ultimate revelation of God.

Every age has had its own answer to the question, What is a Christian? The spiritual ideal of the twentieth century is quite xiv INTRODUCTION

other than that of the seventeenth, which in turn differed from the viewpoint of the twelfth as that from the faith of the first century.

In the beginning it was enough that a man should follow Jesus.

After his death, two questions were asked by the apostles of those who would unite in their fellowship : Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah of whom the prophets spake? and, Do you believe that God raised him from the dead?

There were many other things which were believed and taught by the apostolic church. To charge, with some recent writers, that Peter and Paul corrupted the simplicity of the primitive ideal by concessions to the demands of the world, by reason of their ambitious desire to transform the growing church into a world-power, is to beg the whole question of the essential character of the Christian teaching.

Nevertheless, it is evident that the theological interpretation of the Christian message

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was second in order of time if not of importance.

The fundamental question concerned the Messiahship of Jesus as witnessed by his resurrection: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord (i.e., Messiah or Christ), and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."

It was regarded as desirable, — in some sense essential, — that the believer should receive the gift of the Holy Spirit ; but those disciples of Apollos whom Paul found at Ephesus were accepted though they had "not so much as heard whether the Holy Spirit were given."

Social workers have often pointed to the community of goods practiced by the infant church at Jerusalem as an essential part of New Testament Christianity; but there is not a shred of evidence that such communism was observed anywhere outside of Jerusalem, whether at Rome, or Ephesus, or Corinth, or Antioch, or any other of the apostolic churches.

xvi INTRODUCTION

It was simply such communism as was practiced during the early months of the War in Brussels or Antwerp, where the common distress induced those who had means to share with their less fortunate brethren. Blockaded communities on the Dakota prairies in frontier days often resorted to the same method of meeting the situation.

When Ananias kept back part of the money which he and his wife received for the sale of their land, Peter rebuked him not for keeping the money, which the apostle declared was their own to do with as they saw fit, but for lying to the Holy Spirit.

Three hundred years later new conditions confronted the growing church, and new definitions of discipleship became necessary.

Various attempts had been made to interpret the faith in terms of the prevailing philosophy. Two questions in particular, both of them utterly foreign to both the language and the spirit of the New Testament, exercised men's minds.

The first was whether Christ's essential

INTRODUCTION xvii

nature was of the same or only of similar substance to that of God — whether one should say homo-ousion or homoi-ousion. The other was whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, or from both the Father and the Son.

Both questions, it is manifest, were concerned with the central dignity and worth of the person of Christ. The present generation is concerned with the same issue, though the form of the discussion is greatly changed.

So great was the popular interest in these questions that we are told one could not ask for a fish at the market, or desire the attentions of the barber at the bath, without being met with a volley of theological reasoning.

Finally the church, in council at Nicea in 325, voted in effect that a Christian was one who accepted the statement of faith championed by Athanasius, namely, that the Son was of the same substance, homo-ousion, with the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son.

xviii INTRODUCTION

We have nothing to do at this point with the validity of these distinctions. It suffices merely to point out that the determining mark of a Christian in the fourth century differed widely from that of the apostolic age.

During the Middle Ages a Christian was one who was obedient to the church.

This involved the acceptance of the standards of belief, but the essential thing was obedience. King John of England was excommunicated, not for his crimes, nor because he was a heretic, but because he refused to abide by the judgment of the Pope.

With the coming of the Reformation the matter became yet more confused. The Roman Church still declined to recognize as Christian any who refused to obey her will. In the Protestant churches orthodoxy became once more the test, but there was much dispute as to the essentials of the orthodox faith.

This controversy still echoes in ecclesiastical circles, as witness the exclusion of Ed-

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ward Everett Hale from the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America a few years ago.

Of course, in no age was the matter as simple as this brief outline of ecclesiastical history would indicate. Every age has had its standards of belief, its forms of ecclesiastical discipline, as well as its notions of Christian morals.

Two tendencies are noteworthy, however, particularly in the mediaeval period.

The first is a growing danger that the demands of the moral life be obscured by emphasis on orthodoxy and conformity. Browning's bishop of St. Praxed's is fairly typical of the mediaeval ecclesiastic.

A good example of the religious standards of the time is found in Benvenuto Cellini, as arrant an old reprobate as ever flourished in the world, a boastful swashbuckler who thought little of killing a man before breakfast, and whose moral standards in general were, to say the least, somewhat informal.

He records that after his unjust imprisonxx INTRODUCTION

ment by Pope Paul (another of the signs of the times), during which period he enjoyed the utmost spiritual consolation from his devotions, his sanctity was evidenced by an actual halo which surrounded his head, and which was plainly seen by his friends — after he had called their attention to it — though it was more clearly visible in the twilight, and flourished better in the moist atmosphere of Italy than in the drier climate of France !

The second tendency is that of a double moral standard, one for the ordinary man and another for the saint.

The Catholic Church has long distinguished between "precepts" and "counsels of perfection." The former are commands of Jesus which are absolute and binding upon every one. The latter are special virtues suggested by the New Testament, the practice of which is not obligatory, but which may be chosen by any one who desires to follow the higher path and to acquire special merit. Such are the practice of celibacy, or the monastic withdrawal from the world.

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The Protestant churches reject this distinction, but the spirit of it persists to this day in the feeling that the ordinary citizen is not bound by as lofty a moral standard as the church member, who in turn is entitled to a certain measure of indulgence unbecoming in the minister.

Underneath these tendencies, however, and beneath the particular emphasis on special phases of the Christian teaching peculiar to each age, the world has never failed to recognize a way of thinking about life, a spirit and a moral ideal, which are essentially Christian. The question, What is a Christian? is concerned with the understanding of these deeper essentials.

What is the common denominator of the Christian centuries, of theological parties and religious sects ?

What is there which in every age has underlain its particular type of religious teaching, and which has broadened and deepened in its influence upon mankind until it has overshadowed all other forms of religious speculaxxii INTRODUCTION

tion, and to-day challenges humanity with its claim to universal supremacy?

If the Christian ideal must be set aside, if the Christian thought is too restricted to interpret reality as the modern world perceives it, just what precisely is the ideal, what is the philosophy which must be given up ?

The question presents several distinct phases, none of which must be overlooked if our answer is to be completely satisfying.

There is a Christian way of thinking about things, of interpreting the world in which we live.

There is a Christian type of moral life, a Christian ethical ideal.

There is a Christian spirit ; a form of emotional experience based on the acceptance of the Christian philosophy and the attempt to carry it out in practice.

There is a Christian type of society, a Christian program for the working out of human relations.

There is a Christian hope for the destiny of the individual and of the race.

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Finally, there is a Christian organism in which the whole movement finds embodiment and expression.

To regard any single one of these elements as the whole of Christianity is to miss the significance of them all, for they bear a close relation with each other.

We may consent to regard certain of them as of more fundamental importance than the rest; we may regard as Christian any man who measurably conforms to any of them. But we have not answered the question with which we began in a way which can ultimately satisfy any one unless we take all of them into account.

All these phases of the Christian teaching and life have their root, not in pure speculation, not merely in certain forms of logical reasoning, but also in the history of more than nineteen centuries. Our judgment of them must rest, therefore, not alone on the logic of rigor and vigor, but on the logic of experience as well. Certain events and characters of which history is the judge xxiv INTRODUCTION

must enter into our understanding of the whole.

From this discussion it is evident what must be the standpoint from which our understanding of the whole matter begins, as well as the natural divisions into which the subject must fall.

That the outcome will not be final and conclusive goes without saying. Life is fragmentary, tentative, developing, in this as in every age. No man can see it as a whole. No man can exhaust the significance of its factors, no man can see the end from the beginning.

One can only declare the truth that is in him, in the hope that his vision may help his brother on the road to Enlightenment, and in the faith that in the fulness of time every lover of the truth shall have a part in that

"Far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

John Walker Powell.

Minneapolis,

August, Nineteen Fifteen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A few of the more or less popular discussions of religious problems are listed here.

The Philosophical Background

The Problem of Human Life; The Truth of Religion, Rudolph Eucken.

Pragmatism; The Meaning of Truth, William James. What Can I Know ? George Trumbull Ladd.

Works on General Theology

Outlines of Theology, William N. Clarke. System of Christian Doctrine, Henry C. Sheldon.

The Modern Viewpoint

The New Theology, R. J. Campbell.

Can We Still Be Christians ? Rudolph Eucken.

The Finality of the Christian Religion, Geo. B. Foster.

What is Christianity ? Adolph Harnack.

xxvi BIBLIOGRAPHY

Things Fundamental, Charles E. Jefferson. Reconstruction in Theology, Henry Churchill King. What Ought I to Believe ? George Trumbull Ladd. Religious Certainty, Francis J. McConnell. Religions of Authority, A. Sabatier. The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, Henry van Dyke.

The Bible

Sixty Years with the Bible, Wm. N. Clarke. Verbum Dei, Robert F. Horton. Beacon Lights of Prophecy, A. C. Knudson. The Problem of the Old Testament, James Orr. Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, George Adam Smith.

Teaching of Jesus

The Kingdom of God, A. B. Bruce.

The Ideal of Jesus, Wm. N. Clarke.

Jesus and the Gospel, James Denny.

The Teaching of Jesus, Robert F. Horton.

The Ethics of Jesus, Henry Churchill King.

The Message of Jesus (Outline Studies), Shailer Mathews.

The Ethic of Jesus, James Stalker.

The Mind of the Master, John Watson (Ian Mac- Laren).

Social Problems

The New Crusade, Charles E. Jefferson.

The Church and the Changing Order, Shailer Mathews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY xxvii

Jesus Christ and the Social Question; Approach to the Social Question, Francis G. Peabody.

Christianity and the Social Crisis; Christianizing the Social Order, Walter Rauschenbusch.

Sin and Society, Edward A. Ross.

My Religion, Leo Tolstoi.

The Call of the Carpenter; The Carpenter and the Rich Man, Bouck White.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Faith of a Christian .... 1

II. The Ethics of Jesus 22

II

Christianity likewise pins its faith to the dignity and worth of humanity, and lays the foundation for its ethical teaching in the doctrine of universal brotherhood. It insists on a measure of moral freedom in human nature. It refuses to interpret humanity by its brute origin; it measures man rather by his spiritual kinship with his Creator.

There is nothing especially distinctive in this, as compared with other forms of religious faith. The stoic philosophy in particular was akin to the Christian ethics in the lofty dignity of its conception of human values. Christianity simply represents the completest development of the spiritual interpretation of humanity, finding the basis for its conception of human dignity in its doctrine of God.

The point, however, to be kept in mind in this connection is that Christianity has actually superseded all other forms of religion in the thought life of the modern world ; and the question is not between Christianity's conception of humanity and that set forth by other faiths, but between Christianity and the scientific doctrine which regards mankind as nothing more than a by-product of evolution, being in reality nothing but an exceedingly intricate automaton, whose conscious processes are nothing more than chemical reactions — in Spencer's phrase, "motor excitations in the ganglia."

Christianity refuses to be bound by this doctrine of mechanism.

It insists that such a theory of existence leaves out all the most important elements of the problem and simply abandons all attempt to interpret reality.

Claiming the right to believe that the Universe itself is personal rather than mechanical in its deepest ground, Christianity looks upon the human personality as akin to the divine, and hence vested with all the dignity and infinite value of sonship to God.

Finding this worth in man as man, it refuses to be bound by caste and class distinctions; to regard any race, however backward or degraded, as alien or outcast.

It declares that the strong and the weak, the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured and the ignorant, are bound together by ties which cannot be broken and which it is perilous to ignore.

Thus it finds in the essential character of mankind the ground for its personal ethics and no less for its social theory. It bids the strong bear the burdens of the weak, and to use the advantages given them by their larger opportunities in the interest of the common good, that the whole level of humanity may be lifted and the path of spiritual attainment be opened to the weakest and most ignorant.

No way of looking at humanity less comprehensive than this or with a less resolute faith in the essential worth and dignity of human nature and the possibilities hidden beneath the most unpromising exterior can be regarded as Christian.

III

Christianity is more, however, than a system of metaphysics or of ethics.

It is an historical system of faith, of worship, and of practice, which traces its origin to the life and teachings of a single man whose character it regards as the embodiment of its loftiest ideals, and to whose personality it pays the utmost reverence, both offering to him and demanding in his name the highest allegiance.

No type of thought and life which ignores this history can consistently be called Christian. We may not settle in advance the problems of historical research, nor insist that spiritual truth can be absolutely bound up with any happening in time or space ; but we have a right to insist that the history of Christianity shall receive adequate explanation.

Sober thought refuses to believe that a great and creative personality can be the product of imagination.

The greatest characters of fiction and mythology are when all is said the product of manufacture, of the synthesis of traits and characteristics found in the experience of humanity itself. Such products of the imagination always bear the mark of the tool. They share the weakness and limitation of their creators. No one imagines that Jupiter or Hercules, that Don Quixote or Jean Valjean, ever existed. We know plainly that the former were the product of the collective imagination of the Greeks, as the latter of the creative genius of their authors.

It is far otherwise with the characters of Confucius or Gautama or Socrates. Little as we know of the actual history of these men, whose images have come down to us colored by the imagination of their disciples, no serious student of history has the slightest doubt not only that they existed, but that they made upon the mind and heart of their time essentially the impression that is handed down to us.

If the character of Jesus Christ transcends

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN IS

them all, so that by common consent it is impossible to sum him up under the categories of ordinary humanity, it is the more unbelievable that he was the product of the crude imaginations and narrow prejudices of a group of Jewish peasants and rabbis. Christianity does not stand or fall with any particular attempt to understand or interpret the person of Christ; nevertheless in a real and abiding sense Christianity is Christ.

The only God it knows is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is to say, it believes in God as Jesus revealed Him by precept and example, and can think of God in no other terms. When it wants to know what God is like, it turns to Jesus Christ for the answer to this question.

It acknowledges Jesus as the ethical Master of mankind. It believes that he revealed the possibilities of manhood; that he embodied in his own character the loftiest ideals in a way that cannot be transcended; that every succeeding generation may understand him more perfectly, may more completely incarnate his ideal in its ethical life, but that it cannot outgrow him or leave him behind.

There is one element in the Christian interpretation of Jesus which is largely overlooked in the religious thinking of the present day, but which has nevertheless played an extremely important part in the history of the Christian faith. That is the conception of Jesus as in some sense the Redeemer and Savior of mankind.

Christian thought has from the beginning looked on Jesus as something more than a spiritual teacher, or even as the incarnation of the moral and spiritual ideal. It has found in him the supreme spiritual dynamic.

His death has been regarded as the central moral tragedy of history, in some strange fashion involving the character of God Himself in a hand-to-hand conflict with the powers of evil; so that it holds a unique relation to the spiritual history of the race, and is a fountain of healing power wherein the ceaseless tragedy of human experience shall find its solution and the moral weakness of mankind be strengthened for ultimate victory.

Once more we are not concerned to defend this doctrine, or even to define it in detail, but only to point out its central place in historic Christianity. If it is ever to be set aside as of no essential importance, the burden of proof is upon those who would reject it. It may have been subject to many grossly crude and imperfect interpretations, but that it has hitherto held the central place in the Christian philosophy of the spiritual life there can be no doubt.

In the Christian way of thinking about things Jesus Christ is more than an ideal. He is the unfailing fountain of spiritual power; and he holds that place in virtue of the totality of his human experience, whereby he can enter sympathetically into the struggles and passions of the weakest of his brethren and can enable them to be more than conquerors in life's battle.

It is evident that the essential thing in the Christian attitude toward Jesus is not intellectual interpretation but ethical loyalty. It does not ask of any man that he shall understand Jesus; it does insist that he shall obey him.

The modern world has grown weary of theological discussions, and it resents the attitude of orthodoxy in denying the name Christian to any who bear the spirit of the Master though they may not interpret him under the traditional forms. The attitude of Jesus himself to the men and women about him furnishes ample precedent for the broadest spirit of tolerance. But no man in the first century or the twentieth is entitled to be called a Christian who does not offer to Jesus Christ the most heartfelt loyalty. Richard Watson Gilder expressed the heart of the matter in his well-known lines :

"If Jesus Christ be man, (And only a man), I say That of all mankind I will cleave to him, And to him I will cleave alway.

" If Jesus Christ be God,

(And the only God), I swear I will follow him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air."