Christianity in the new age

Front matter

, BY

E> HERMAN

Author of " The Meaning and Value of Mysticism," etc.

Chapter I

Every great crisis in history appears to those who pass through it as a cleaving sword severing the past from the present. Yesterday recedes into antiquity ; to-morrow is seen as the first chapter in an entirely new book of life. In the shaking of things that can be shaken, things that cannot be shaken vanish from view. The law of evolution seems no longer to operate ; the idea of continuity appears untenable. From the narrow island of the present we gaze across to the continent of the past, and find it hard to realise that only a little while ago the strip we stand on was part of that mainland which already seems so strange and shadowy in the haze of distance. When we are told that our insulation must spell impoverishment, we reply with an incredulous smile. Things have happened overnighty as it were, which our arm-chair philosophers and antiquarians little reck of. New and unfamiliar problems have arisen such as the past never knew, and therefore cannot help to solve. A new vision and a new demand have created a new mind that cannot work with the old tools. This sense of sudden and forcible detachment from the past has been characteristic of all great historic revolutions, but perhaps it has never been so widespread or so acute as at the present juncture. True, it does not emerge with equal sharpness in all classes and types of men. In the case of what is conveniently termed " the man in the street," it has not wrought so palpable a change, for ''the man in the street" has never been distinguished by an historical mind. On the contrary, his lack of imagination has caused him to hold tradition in unmitigated contempt. For him the dead were always in the wrong, or rather they did not exist at all, for his conception of human solidarity is limited by the circle of the living. Nor does this sense of cleavage emerge most strikingly in quarters more or less dominated by scientific ideas. For the scientist the past is certainly of great value. He freely uses its discoveries and achievements, and takes its struggles and aspirations into full account. He does not, however, attribute any binding authority to it ; his attitude is completely free and critical. He rejects the findings of the past whenever the facts of the case demand it without the ghost of a regret, let alone a scruple ;

and while he may admire and even reverence its achievements, he never does so on the ground of their venerable antiquity. It is indeed only when we turn to the Christian community and to the circle of those who are, often unconsciously, influenced by Christian teaching that we see the full effect of an upheaval that has cut time in two.

For Christian thought has always gloried in its historical continuity. The Church has lived and moved in an atmosphere of tradition and symbolism. Theologians have ever been distinguished by a strong and sensitive historical instinct. When the mind of the age challenged theology with being inadequate to the demands of the time, they contended that such inadequacy, where it existed, was due, not to an exaggerated reverence for the past, but to a failure to grasp and interpret it aright. Similarly, when critics of the traditional Church organisation emphasised its utter failure to attract the masses of men, they invariably attributed that failure, not to a vicious adherence to the old forms, but to an inability to enter into their spirit and thus adapt them to modern needs.

But within the last three or four years this attitude has received a rude shock. War has revealed a situation it can no longer meet. In being brought face to face with '' Tommy,'* we have made the disconcerting discovery of a whole nation radically estranged from traditional forms of Christianity. The comforting reflection that, after all, soldiers are abnormal and ephemeral appearances, destined to vanish into thin air at the first touch of peace, did not bear a moment's scrutiny ; for Tommy was not a soldier in the old sense of the term : he was simply a student, a clerk, or a mechanic, in khaki. He existed before the war, and will continue to exist afterwards. He represents, in fact, the great public whose temper and needs we had studied for so long from a distance, and now at last have been given an opportunity of seeing at close range. Our contact with him has flung a shrewd and searching light into dark places. It has revealed a soul of goodness in the most unlikely men, and also an uncompromising opposition to conventional ideals of saintliness ; an astounding ignorance of elementary religious truths, and an almost uncannily sure instinct for vital reality ; a wistful longing for a truer life, and a humiliating contempt for conventional religion. And, most disconcerting of all, it has revealed, together with a new kinship and ease of approach along all simple human ways, a cleavage in deeper things between us who represent the Church and the men who in some respects are so near to the Kingdom, which no amount of mere explanation can bridge. It is easy to account for this cleavage in an historical fashion, but that does not lessen its sheer intractability. After one has succeeded in tracing its origin and following its development through the long series of blunders which stain the history of the Church, one is still confronted with the facts in their unmitigated grimness, and not a whit nearer the solution of the problem. One is still face to face with a de-Christianised England which none the less retains an instinct for Christianity, but an instinct to which our religious conceptions and the way in which we express them utterly fail to appeal.

We find no difficulty in believing that it took decades of preaching and teaching before a people such'' as the Chinese could be brought to anything like an intelligent grasp of the simplest Christian conceptions, but since the war we have also come to suspect that those who will address themselves in the near future to the task of evangeUsing England must be prepared for almost as long a period of sowing the seed. The popular superstition that generations of Sunday-school teaching and an hereditary reverence for the Scriptures put the average Englishman into a position to grasp the Gospel and its implications almost instinctively has been finally exploded, and we have come to realise that the evangelisation of a nominally Christian country is perhaps an even longer and harder business than pioneer missionary work in heathen lands.

Chaplains of all denominations confirm this diagnosis. True, not a few of them find it easy to appeal to the nlen in frank, unconventional talk about the great realities, but it almost seems that the short-cut to success in talking to the men is to forget one's theological and ecclesiastical antecedents ; and this is full of grave augury for the future. The time is at hand when men in whom a new spirit has been kindled by the homely and untrammelled ministrations of their chaplains will return to the routine of ordinary life, and will need to be urged to seek connection with some religious body or congregation. They cannot be allowed to remain unconnected units ; nor can such an organisation as the Y.M.C.A. take the place of Church fellowship, for man is destined to worship in families, and to put an association intended only for men in the place of the Church is to create in the end a circumscribed and distorted outlook. But will these men find a type of life that appeals to them — a type of life, even, that they can understand — ^in the average congregation ? Many a chaplain is filled with misgiving as he looks into the near future. He realises that no amount of interpretation and adaptation can make the man he has learned to know in the trenches fit into the framework of the Church he knows so well. He thinks of those who, baptised in the cloud of fire and in the sea of blood, have come to the Lord and Redeemer of their life : how would they regard the average respectable congregation repeating the old formulae and working along the old lines, and how would that congregation regard them ? He sees that not adaptation but reconstruction covering the whole range of the Church's Ufe and thought is needed ; but alas ! those who clamour for reconstruction are mostly without her gates, while those inside are either blindly complacent or waste their energies in a pathetic effort to put new patches on an old garment. They do not realise that a new task demands new tools, and many of them still refuse to admit that the task is new. Said a young chaplain on his return home, '* When I met my congregation again and realised with what trivial and irrelevant things they were occupied, and how little they understood of the big, vital things we had been up against in the trenches, it turned my heart sick within me."

These words are representative. They express a feeling which is increasingly prevalent among men of vision. There is a growing sense of the imperative need for reconstruction — the consciousness of a demand which goes far deeper than questions of organisation or method, and whose central challenge is to the spirit of the Church rather than to her institutions — and there seems little chance of that demand being responded to by its membership. Potentially the future is full of hope. There is a new wistfulness abroad which is surely God's opportunity, a new instinct for what is genuinely spiritual among those who are ignorant of the current spiritual vocabulary, and a new appreciation of the humility, the self-giving love, that are the essence of Christianity. But over against that there is a tragic failure on the part of the average Church member to realise this state of things. The stirring and pulsing of a new life outside the Church seems to have no correlative within.

II

But while this attitude of self-criticism on the part of thoughtful Churchmen, with its demand for radical reconstruction, holds the promise of a golden future, it has its peculiar perils. Born of that sense of cleavage between the past and the present which so revolutionary an experience as our-s inevitably creates, it easily slides into the assumption that the present situation is entirely new; not with the newness of summer fruit consummating a continuous process of growth from the first green shoots to the leafy crown gemmed with blossoms, but rather with the newness of an unclassiiiable meteor flashing suddenly into the sky, whose genesis and relation to the ascertained astronomical system no scientist can trace. And it is inevitable that such an assumption, coupled with the growing conviction of the Church's inadequacy, should breed qualities which, if unchecked, must in the long run cripple constructive thought and actionimpatience with the past and pessimism with regard to the future.

lO

The times are new — of that there can be no doubt. History does not repeat itself in any literal and detailed fashion, no matter what the old adage says. And if each age, however naturally it seems to have sprung out of the preceding one, includes an element of originality, how much more this startling day of ours, which has brought the collapse of long-established systems and the emergence of ideals that are changing the face of the world before our eyes ? Yet it, like its predecessors, is not in its essence a negation and refutation of the past. Its reaction against tradition owes its very strength to the educative pressure of that which it antagonises, and not a few of its most novel features strike hidden roots into a past remoter than the age we have just left behind us. It must be remembered also that movements and tendencies which, at first sight, seem to mark a new departure in a direction opposite to that of the past, are not seldom seen, on closer examination, to be a new departure, indeed, but not at all in the direction to which they seemed to point.

A notable instance of our current misreading of contemporary movements is seen in the case of the alleged revival of interest in the future life. Before the war, it might have been said of the great mass of men that they were totally indifferent to the question of a life to come. Preachers found it difficult to interest their congregations in the subject ; books on immortality

II had only a lukewarm reception ; novels dealing with the whole gamut of theological questions had little or nothing to say about it. But with the sacrifice of so many young lives, the subject once more became of vital interest, and to-day it looms large in the popular mind. Men who sneered before are now stretching wistful hands towards the Unseen; women whose practical creed was a dainty materialism are seeking the Land that is very far off. Wherever a home has its empty chair, there the sorrow-laden air is murmurous with eager, inarticulate questionings. There must be a future life, cry a thousand stricken hearts ; for this life is too short and narrow to hold the treasure of our love. There must be golden streets up yonder ; no meaner pavement would be worthy of the golden lads who loved not their lives unto death.

But beautiful and ennobling as all this is, and precious in the sight of God, it does not in itself constitute a religious interest in immortality ; and it is with the religious interest we are concerned. Even a cursory glance at current books on the subject goes to reveal this. Take Sir Oliver Lodge's '* Raymond," for instance, as the book that may claim to be typical of its class. It is not concerned with the life beyond in any deeply spiritual sense. It enshrines no prophetic vision of our eternal destiny ; it deals with no spacious and dynamic conception of the Divine purpose. Its object is solely to establish the validity of certain messages purporting to come from the dead. The motive is not primarily religious but scientific, or quasi-scientific ; and the weight of interest does not fall upon the future at all, but upon the present. " Does my boy live ? Can he communicate with me ? Do those messages which I receive really come from him?'' These questions — ^heart-cries welling up from the pure depths of sorrowing love, and therefore demanding our most reverent sympathy — are not in themselves religious questions at all ; nor are the answers supplied by Sir Oliver Lodge and others religious answers. How far removed, indeed, such inquiries are from a genuinely religious interest in immortality may be seen by comparing the temper and outlook of a book like ''Raymond" with those of the Apocalypse.

The Apocalypse is one of those books which, obscure, and, in one sense, remote from our day, yet speaks to us with no uncertain voice. It was written for communities which had precious memories of their martyred dead, and it came to them at a time when the first passionate exaltation of the age of martyrdom had given place to declension and questioning, and '' doubts would come if God had kept his promises to men.'' " Where are our martyred dead ? " one can hear aged mothers crying from out the dim past. *'Are they indeed before the throne of God, wearing the amaranthine crown of victory ? Did they indeed die for an everlasting kingdom ? Will they soon return with their Lord ? " Such questions doubtless stirred the ageless motherheart and troubled the mind of manhood then as now. But though they too found their answer in the Apocalyptic vision, they were not central to its interest in the life beyond. The Apocalyptic vision is not conceived of in the manner of a spiritualistic experiment ; it is a large prophetic vision of the purposes of God with the world. Its symbolism was that of its age, but it is used to convey an ethical and spiritual message for all times. In it the dead speak, not of earth's trivialities, but of the noblest strivings and aspirations of mankind. They appear as witnesses, not to their own existence, but to the grace and truth that are at the heart of the Universe. Nothing, then, could be wider of the mark than to identify the present-day anxiety concerning the dead with the Christian hope. So long as man is human, so long will bereaved love ask for tidings of its dear ones beyond the veil. The attitude is neither new nor in itself religious ; it has merely reappeared to-day in a new form. Whereas formerly a materialistic science poured scorn upon '' supernatural '' phenomena, and spiritualism was at the mercy of superstition and fraud, science has now recovered from its materialistic debauch, and is investigating spiritualistic phenomena with open and even reverent mind. That is greatly to the good ; but as we have seen, it does not mean that spiritualistic inquiry is dominated by religious motives. It is, on the whole, a hopeful sign of the times ; but it does not point in the direction many optimists imagine.

Ill

But of all tendencies which hide the true significance of present-day movements from us, none is more disabling than that impatience with the past which is the besetting sin of prophetic spirits. It is not merely that these movements cannot be justly estimated, or even recognised for what they are, without constant reference to the past ; the interpretative and illuminating function of the past is, after all, not its*most momentous function, and its exclusive use as a medium of elucidation may, in fact, militate against the more vital interpretation from the standpoint of present insight and experience. Life is not ruled by precedent, and it is more important that I should be able to read the signs of the times by the light of the Spirit guiding us here and now than merely by the reflected beam that streams from the past. That reflection will surely serve to clarify my vision and correct my judgment, but it must never be allowed to usurp the place of immediate apprehension and present insight.

The past, however, is far more than a key or an interpreter. It is itself not yet wholly elucidated. It is waiting for us to elicit its more vital meaning, its fuller content. Like the Bible, which since the war has become a new book to so many, it awaits our slow discovery. We are - — and rightly so- — impatient of traditionalism. Why should we go back to Nicaea for our theology, and to the Middle Ages for our ecclesiastical institutions ? But this is not a question of theology or of Church organisation ; it is something far more primary that we are concerned with. Is there nothing in the past history of the Church — ^in the clash of theological controversies, the shaping of religious ideals, the history of classic institutions, the action and reaction of tendencies that have gone to create rival schools of thought and to rend the unity of the Church Catholic — is there nothing in all this that was wrought and written, not for its time, but for ours ? Is there nothing in Clement and Origen, in Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, that they themselves perceived but dimly in the totality of its implications, and is waiting to yield its hidden treasure to us and to our children ?

The question suggests the endless labour of historical investigation, and we, who are not historical experts, and upon whom the shortness of the time and the urgency of immediate tasks press heavily, shrink from such slow processes. But here, if anywhere, the warning of '' more haste, less speed" applies, and our instinct for

i6 immediacy and short-cuts has already too often wasted the precious time we thought to save. Years ago we used to quote approvingly the Oxford rhyme which informed us that

Greek flesh-worship, Roman luxury and sty of Epicurus^ They will kill us ere Professor Caird's philosophy can cure us.

But we are learning at last that Christianity, like all vital 'processes, is a slow cure, and that its slowness is its efficacy. We are still too much under the sway of an ideal of quick efficiency which is typified in the Student Volunteer motto, '' The evangelization of the world in this generation.'' A renewed study of the Church's history — a study not pedantic or antiquarian, yet as deep as mental candour, imagination and humility can make it — ^will not only illuminate the present with revealing light ; it will — what is far more to the point — make that original, long-delayed contribution to the present which is the justification, as it is the glory, bf such study. Suddenly, as we trace the growth of some dominating idea, or read the deathless words of some masterspirit, it will be as the swinging back of longclosed doors, and we shall enter into the inheritance that has waited for us through long years.

An age of democracy should be the last to show any contempt for the past. We claim communion with all men ; shall we draw the line at death ? We appreciate the humorous aspect of the self-contained eighteenth-century individual, '' author of himself and knowing no other kin '' ; shall we contemplate a self-contained and isolated age that refuses affiliation to other ages without a smile ? We have scant patience with the pale contemplative, who cuts himself off from the society of Tom, Dick, and Harry, and retires into a select brotherhood ; but why are we so tolerant, of the robust and healthy present-day citizen, who cultivates the acquaintance of his barber and his billiard-marker, but refuses to keep company with Plato or St. Augustine ? A democratic instinct which embraces only its contemporaries is a strangely limited and exclusive thing. It is perfectly true that preoccupation with the great ones of the past may blind us to the existence of present greatness walking incognito among us ; but it is truer still that a wise acquaintance with the past will make us less likely to allow greatness to pass us unnoticed, for it will teach us how easy it is to pass Socrates in the street and take him for a bottle-washer, and how often we have derided our dreamers and stoned our prophets.

We may fairly claim for this age of ours that it has freed itself from all superstitious reverence for tradition, and is not likely to relapse into the cramping cult of antiquity. All the more should we take the lessons of history deeply to heart. The sobriety of vision which enables us to see the mistakes of the past with a perhaps unprece-

i8 dented clearness, ought surely also to put us into an unparalleled position for appropriating its most precious legacies. What will it avail that we view the past to-day unblinded by a superstitious reverence, if the same penetration does not serve us to elicit its hidden significance as the uncritical devotees of antiquity could not do ? We think we are entering upon a great period of reconstruction. If that is so, how can we justify our failure to avail ourselves of the critical and path-breaking work of past ages, which are a God-given preparation for such a period, and find their only vindication therein ? If we resolved to devote ^at least part of the time which we now give to the often futile discussion of purely ephemeral problems to the patient study of some great historic movement or system of thought germane to present difficulties, we would gain a depth of insight and a capacity for the effective handling of current questions that would astonish us. We need hardly repeat that such study cannot take the place of that direct, experimental approach to our problems from which nothing can absolve us ; but it ought to take the place of a good deal of disputation about these problems, which at best is but ''the honourable trifling of the conquered/*

Moreover, the past is not something external to us, which we may ignore if we please ; it is woven into the texture of our own thought and life. Its mistakes, which we see so clearly to-day, have determined our own bent to an extent we can hardly estimate ; its fallacies and superstitions have more foothold in us than we know, their expression in us differing too widely from their original form to be readily recognised. Its achievements and discoveries have entered into our blood, giving us that grasp and sagacity, that insight and perception, which we so seldom trace to their true source. Like Moliere's peasant, who talked prose without knowing it, we constantly reproduce — and often in tragic manner — the very past we so glibly criticise. We speak of Bergson with an Aristotelian or Platonic accent, as the case might be. We discuss Grace under the tyrannous shadow of Augustine, and where we violently repudiate the term and substitute for it the Indwelling of God, we still remain under the spell of the ancients ; for we seldom use the words without falling into the old Greek vice of failing to distinguish between metaphor and reality, illustration and argument, being deceived by spatial and physical analogies. It is not a question of whether we shall be influenced by th'C past or not. We are influenced by it in the most intimate and inescapable way. What remains to be settled is whether we shall allow ourselves to be blindly or intelligently influenced : whether we prefer the dead hand of the past to gird and lead us unbeknown to ourselves, or whether we choose to lay the living hand of the present upon the past in appropriation and discrimination. These questions surely admit of only one answer. We cannot escape from the past, and the only way of ceasing to be its blind, unconscious slaves and becoming its free, intelligent heirs is, first of all, to study it, not necessarily with the minuteness of the historical expert — a process which, needless to say, is open only to the very few — ^but with the teachable mind of those who would discern the way of God in the broad movements of the Church's history.

A great discovery awaits such students, for it is one of the functions of the past to reveal Him in whom all the ages live. If the history of the Apostolic Church reveals His educative and inspiring touch, can we deny it of any later period, or of the history of religious thought outside the Church altogether ? The truths of history are not *' accidental ''; they have a spiritual authority, a timelessness, a particularity, a dynamic and creative power that belong to life. They are not alien to us. In them Jesus appears in ** yet another form,'' and our most intimate experiences are confirmed, interpreted and enlarged by contact with them. We hear His voice saying, ''Have I been solong time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me ?" And our fragmentary and incoherent experiences are unified by being related to the larger whole. One wonders how much of our slowness to discern in the movements of our time Him who leads all the generations on is due to our failure to give heed to

" the voice behind/' To confine the living word of Christ for the hour to the intuitions of that hour is as narrowing as to confine it within the boards of the Bible.

IV

We are all agreed that the times call for theological reconstruction. Of theological restatement, i.e. the translation of traditional conceptions into modern language, we have had enough; what we need is the creation of new conceptions corresponding to our new experience of God. And in approaching this great task, much will depend upon our attitude to the past.

There are two classes of people, other than the upholders of traditionalism, who invariably oppose theological reconstruction. There are those who make war upon theology in the name of religion, and those who make war upon what they call traditional theology in the name of theological freedom — by which is generally meant the right to ignore the past. The first tell us that it is not theology that matters but the soul's vital communion with God, and that theology, so far from promoting that converse, has always obscured and hindered it. The second contend that what is wanted is not theological r^-construction, but construction de novo. They are not merely impatient but positively intolerant of the past ; they demand that the theological slate be wiped clean before they consent to set chalk to it.

The first type is a belated sufferer from that vicious opposition between religion and theology which a generation ago produced some of the most futile discussions upon which strong men ever wasted brain and breath. Theology, while entirely distinct from religious experience, is inseparable from it ; and we have coupled our need for a new vision of God with the demand for theological reconstruction because there can be no authentic theological reconstruction except in the light of a present vision. It is not enough to say that theology is the description, the intellectual formulation and interpretation, of religious experience ; * it is itself largely, though not entirely, created and conditioned by that experience. In other words, every authentic religious experience involves a living theology, and the experience of each successive generation carries within itself the demand for theological reconstruction. If it is true that experience is the vital part of the subject-matter of theology, it is also true that theology is part of religious experience ; for experience, where it is something more than a mere devotional feeling or mystic