The Christian life

Preface

This study aims to be a help to sincerity and naturalness in religion by clearing up some of the confusions of popular religious thought and speech. We all feel that in religion, of all matters, we should be supremely real and sincere ; and yet, owing to an ambiguous and misleading terminology and the illusions thence resulting, an uncomfortable air of artificiality a7id unreality often seems to pervade the subject. This is not commonly due to insincerity, but rather to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the conventional thought and language in this field. This condition of things, however, is an evil, and is one of the sources of religious weakness to-day. We grope in the dark of unwarranted expecta- 3

4 Preface

tions and misdirected effort. And the only way out seems to be to clear up our thought and speech , so that we may know what we wish and what we mean, thus enabling the religious life to grow unhindered and undistorted by illusion and misdirection.

BORDEN P. BOWNE.

The Christian Life A Study

My purpose in writing, and the scope of the discussion, will best appear from some facts of experience :

Not long ago a most worthy minister of my acquaintance, one who had been preaching more than fifty years and who was a model of saintly living, came to another minister, also a friend of mine, to talk about the witness of the Spirit. And his trouble was that he could not feel sure that he had ever had this witness. The expectation awakened by the phrase had never been satisfied. And the good man's heart was disturbed, and he sought counsel of his brother.

My professional life has largely been spent in contact with thoughtful young men and women ; and I have frequently observed an uneasy feeling on their part that the traditional phrases of religious speech do not set forth with unstrained naturalness and transparent sincerity the facts of their religious life. Often they have formed a conception of what the religious life should be by reflection on the customary and inherited phrases ; and thus they have been led to entertain unwarranted expectations. Then the failure to realize them has led to an uncomfortable sense of artificiality and unreality in all religious experience.

Some years ago one of our best and wisest men told me that he had felt the dangers in this direction so keenly that, when his children were growing toward the point where the conscious religious life should begin, lie had had himself appointed class-leader to his own family, in order to preserve them from the confusion and danger of popular religious speech until they should have acquired sufficient mental and spiritual maturity to grasp the truth for themselves.

In addition, I may say that I have been listening intelligently to preaching for over thirty years. Of course I have heard a great many good sermons, but in all that time I have heard very few sermons on conversion and the beginnings of the religious life, whether in our own Church or in others, which were not both confused and confusing. Theological expositions have been plentiful enough; vague verbal exhortations have abounded ; but there has been a grievous lack of clear statement of what the seeking soul is to expect, or of what is expected from it.

Such facts suggest, what every thoughtful and observant person must recognize, that there is need of revising popular religious phraseology, and also of clarifying popular conceptions concerning the religious life itself, and especially concerning its beginnings in conversion. This study is intended as a contribution to this desirable end.

The popular confusion on this subject in our individualistic Churches has several leading sources, and our first work must be to indicate them. The first is the confounding the language of theology with the languge of experience. The second is the mistaking of the abstract classifications of theological discussion for concrete classifications of living men.

The third is an exaggerated individualism. We consider them in their order.

The Language of Theology and the Language of Experience

On this point we must note that a great many things may be theologically true which are not psychologically true. We may express and explain the experience in terms of doctrine, and in so doing we may have the truth ; nevertheless, the doctrine is not a fact of consciousness, but a theory about the fact.

Thus, when some brother of picturesque habit of speech says in the social meeting, "The devil told me not to come here to-night, " we are not to think that he has had an infernal interview. The fact of experience is, that he was disinclined to come, and this disinclination he attributes to the io The Christian Life

devil. But however correct this may be as a theory of the hidden source of the temptation, it would be highly infelicitous to suppose that anything of the sort occurred within the consciousness of the individual himself. The experience as he states it is not the experience as lying within the range of consciousness, but rather the experience as theologized or, more properly, diabolized by this infernal reference.

A less distasteful illustration of the difference between the language of theology and that of conscious experience may be found in our speech concerning the Divine providence in our lives. We believe and teach that our times are in God's hand ; but this does not imply that we have any perception of the Divine presence, or even that we can clearly trace the way in which

A Study II

God is working out his will concerning us.

The life of experience is the familiar life of question, uncertainty, forethought, calculation, and venture, in all of which, moreover, we commonly seem left, at our own risk, to find the way ; and not infrequently we miss it, and go astray. We still retain the doctrine as an article of faith ; but we see that we must work out our own salvation nevertheless. The doctrine expresses a theory of life rather than a conscious experience ; and unless we bear this distinction in mind, it is more likely to be a source of doubt than of comfort.

This is self-evident to every thoughtful person; but what is not so plain to every one is, that there is a vast amount of language concerning the inner life which is of the same sort. It is not the language of experience, but of theological theory. A great many things are said about the work of the Lord in the soul; the operations of the Spirit, his presence with us, — and all this may be true theologically, but it is not true psychologically. Moreover, a person who holds the theology in question may very naturally use it for expressing his experience; yet even that does not make it a fact of experience. It is an object of belief, not a fact of consciousness ; an accepted doctrine, not a conscious datum. Nevertheless, this language of theory is put forward as the language of experience, and then confusion arises. By consequence a great many try to experience theology instead of experiencing religion. Two classes of persons escape this confusion. The first class consists of those persons, unskilled in reflection, whose language has only an accidental connection with their ideas. They hear and inherit phrases, and they have a measure of religious life. They also use the phrases upon occasion ; but no one could ever discover from a reflection on the phrases, and the ordinary secular use of language, what the corresponding experience might be. One must gather this from an acquaintance with the subject matter, and with the peculiar forms of speech in this field. Here, again, we find illustration in the brother who says the devil tells him to do this or that. No exegesis of the utterance, according to the recognized usage of secular speech, would ever reveal that this means only that the person feels an inclination to some evil deed, and ascribes it to the devil as its source. Persons in this stage of development are not harmed by speech which would be misleading to one who sought to understand it in the ordinary way. They do not get any ideas from language, but they express the ideas they have in the phrases which have become conventional upon the subject.

The second class of persons who suffer no harm from such language consists of those who have learned to take the language, not for what it seems to say, but for what they know it means. They understand the picturesque phrase, or discount the extravagant metaphor, or penetrate to the meaning behind some grotesque or distasteful image, and thus escape the illusion which might otherwise arise.

But there is a third class less fortunate. This consists of persons who have attained to some measure of reflective consciousness, but who have not learned to distinguish the language of theology from the language of experience. By consequence they seek to tell what the religious fact should be by reflecting on the language they hear used to describe it. Only such or such an experience would come up to the demands of the language , and then they seek to have the experience. But somehow or other the appropriate experience does not come ; and then comes either an attempt to believe the actual experience is the one desired or else a suspicion that the whole matter is fictitious. Not a few good Christions have lived on uneasy terms with their religious experience on this account. They have taken the language of theology for the language of consciousness, and thus have been led to form unwarranted expectations. My friend, who was troubled about the witness of the Spirit, had the root of his difficulty right here. The phrase had led him to expect some sort of celestial manifestation, a testimony from without, and standing so clearly apart from the ordinary laws of mental movement as to be undeniably produced by the manifest God. In lack of any such experience, he doubted whether he had had the witness of the Spirit. This class comprises the great mass of thoughtful young persons in the Churches. And for this class the religious teacher needs to bear in mind the distinction between theology and consciousness, in order to escape misleading and dangerous confusion.

The language of theology must often be used, indeed, but it should be used in such a way as not to mislead the inexperienced hearer or reader into an attempt to experience theology. And, in general, we must remember that all ianguage about the inner life must be misleading to any one who interprets it only by the dictionary. Commonly the language is a metaphor, or it has a fixity and definiteness which do not belong to the fact. Or it may express an ideal toward which we strive, but which we never fully attain. There is much religious speech of this sort. It indicates a direction or sets forth an ideal, to which we can only approximate. The fact itself, however, can be learned only in life ; and the language is only an imperfect instrument for expressing the life. The religious teacher can not be too careful and discriminating at this point.

Theological Abstractions and Living Men

The second great source of our confusion is the mistaking of the hard and fast lines and antitheses of theological ethics for concrete facts among living men. Ethics in general tends to fall into this error. We speak of the moral agent and of responsibility, and have fairly clear ideas as to our meaning, so long as we remain in the field of abstraction. But the matter becomes indefinitely more complex when we look at actual human beings. Then we find that we have to deal, not with hypothetical and abstract moral agents, but with beings in an order of development where the intellectual insight, the volitional energy and self-control, and the moral sensibility have to be developed, and where the development is never complete. This complicates the matter indefinitely; and while our abstract ideas are still true as abstractions, we see that they have to be greatly modified in application.

The fact appears even more prominently in theology. We form such antithetical classes as saints and sinners, the saved and the unsaved; and we fancy that living human beings admit of being classified in this hard and fast way. Of course these abstractions are necessary in theoretical discussion, and the opposed classes are mutually exclusive and contradictory; nevertheless, concrete men, women, and children can not be divided off so easily. This is a world of growth from irresponsible ignorance and weakness toward responsible power and insight; it is a world of development from sub-moral and subrational beginnings toward moral and rational endings. And in such a world we must view great masses of men as neither saved nor lost, but as developing towards these conditions. They are neither good nor bad, in a strictly moral sense, but are becoming good or bad. An academic ethics and an artificial theology find no place for them, yet they form the bulk of the human race. And we shall never reach any theory which will satisfy the developed moral judgment of men until this fact has been recognized. The human world is less a world in which moral classes exist than one in which moral classes are forming.

But this is generally overlooked, and we divide men into antithetical classes, as the saved and the unsaved. This has generally been done from an abstract standpoint ;

and abstract law and abstract justice and abstract holiness and abstract sin have played their abstract part. But after we have adopted this division, it becomes an important matter to fix the standard of distinction. If one is not saved, it is a matter of serious concern to know the ground of the exclusion, particularly as the traditional classification by no means always runs parallel with our unsophisticated moral judgments. In response to this need, theologians have given a great variety of answers. Those who have lost themselves in theological and ritual mechanism, have found the mark of being saved in the due performance of some rite, or pronunciation of some formula ; but this removes the matter from the moral and rational field altogether. The Churches which insist on personal piety, tend to fix attention on conversion, or a change of heart, or the new birth, as the distinctive mark of the saved ; and, because of the failure to grasp the fact of development, this is commonly supposed to have a definite date in time. And in order that there be no mistake about a matter so important, these Churches have sought for unmistakable signs of grace which should leave no question. This has led to certain conceptions of these things to which experience must conform, on pain of being distrusted, if not rejected, as spurious; and this in turn has led to an indefinite amount of distortion of experience in order to bring it up to the assumed standard.

Exaggerated Individualism

In the imperfect conditions of undeveloped men, every good thing has its attendant evil, or at least a tendency to develop into mistaken forms. A very general tendency, even in the Christian religion, has been to develop into mechanical externalism, in which the spirit is missed altogether. Ancient Pharisaism is a monumental example. The same thing is seen in the medieval Church ; and modern Church history is not lacking in illustration. There is a tendency to substitute a mechanical performance of mechanical rites for the love and loyalty of the heart. Hence, religious reformers have commonly had to protest against this tendency, and to recall men to the worship of the spirit. The Lord looketh at the hearth They that worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth. The prophets of the Old Testament had for one of their chief burdens the worthlessness of rites and ceremonies, and the necessity of the pure heart, if we would secure the Divine favor. God, who looketh at the heart, can never compound for spiritual obedience by accepting anything less. And this has been the tone of all succeeding reformers and reformations. Away with all salvation by machinery, by hearsay, by proxy, and let the soul come face to face with God in repentance and humility and faith ! Only thus can it hope to obtain the remission of sins.

This view certainly represents the ideal of spiritual religion ; and religious development must be looked upon as imperfect, even formally, until this stage has been reached. And if we were dealing with human beings ready-made and finished from the start, we might conceive that this is the only conception to be allowed. But the matter is complicated by the fact and form of human development. This spiritual attitude may be demanded of those who have developed far enough to understand it; but what of those who have not? Are they saved or unsaved?

This question has been the source of some extraordinary notions in theology. The question itself arose from a failure to observe that development is the law of human life; and the notions held rested upon factitious ethical difficulties, based upon considering the problem in an abstract forensic way, instead of a concrete and truly ethical manner. Some theologians of rigor and vigor taught the damnation of infants, but humanity generally protested at this ultra rigor. But how to save them was a problem which received no single solution. The great body of Christians turned baptism into a regenerating rite which insured the safety of its subjects. One can not make much out of this on ethical and rational grounds ; but it is interesting as showing the well-nigh universal conviction of the Christian world that some way must be found of saving the children. Those who did not accept this device, found or invented others; and the same fact was true of these — they testified to a good disposition and to the recognition of a moral necessity ; but it was exceedingly hard to adjust them to any ethical and rational scheme. In general, here was a problem which the religious reformer did not always sufficiently consider. In assuming responsibility for the immature, the Church had made some provision for comprehending the race as a whole in the scheme of salvation; but in so doing, it had also exposed itself to a variety of dangers. The Church easily came to be looked upon as having complete power of attorney in the case, so that the individual need not appear at all. This readily passed into a mechanical conception of religion, and a magical conception of salvation, in which all spirituality disappeared. The individual had nothing to do but to make arrangements with the Church, and the Church would do the rest.

Against such a conception the religious reformer rightly revolted. What does baptism amount to without the spirit? What does anything in religion amount to without the pure heart? And this can not be secured by proxy or machinery of any kind. Away then, once more, with all such matters ! for salvation is a strictly individual thing. State Churches were abominations, as their fruits clearly showed. The truly spiritual were to come out from among them, and be separate, and thus build up a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

All of this was well-meant, and all of this had its historical reasons, if not its justification. But none the less was it one-sided. Of course we must reject the mechanism of rite and ceremony as anything in which to trust, or which can dispense with the devotion of the heart; but we can do this and still recognize that this mechanism may be a valuable instrument in forming the thought and training the feeling of developing men. Of course we must reject the notion that the Church can forgive sins ; but still we may believe that it can declare the forgiveness of sins which of itself it can not confer. We must remember that the mass of human beings must live by hearsay, in religion as well as in most other matters; and thus the authoritative teaching of the Church acquires profound significance for the religious life of the individual. The religious reformer was right, but the Churchman was right too. The reformer emphasized individualism; and the Churchman emphasized solidarity. The reformer rightly held that the individual must for himself recognize and accept the Divine will, and that all below this was vain if this result was not reached ; but the Churchman rightly held that the preparatory steps, while making nothing perfect, still had their religious significance in the development of the individual. Both views are needed for the full expression of the truth ; and if the historic circumstances of the time had permitted the reforms to go on within the Church, the result would have been better for all concerned. And this is true alike for the great Protestant Reformation and for minor reformations before and since. That both views are needed especially appears from the struggles of the extreme individualists in fixing the beginning of responsibility. One considerable body, which would hear of nothing but conscious choice and self-initiative in religion, officially fixed the tender age of eight years as the date when adult life begins.

But in their determination to have a holy Church, our Nonconformist ancestors decided to have only the best ; and this made it necessary to draw a sharp line between the Church and the world. It was heresy to find this in baptism or any such thing. They knew only too well that baptized persons could hold full membership in the synagogue of Satan. And as spirituality was their aim, they naturally fixed their attention on the religious life, and more especially on its assumed beginning in conversion. And, in order that there might be no mistake about the matter, a deal of attention was directed to the signs of grace, whereby a sheep might infallibly be known and separated from common goats. This led, in New England, under Edwards's influence, to much fictitious psychology and ethics, and to a general browbeating of human nature. Our Methodist ancestors tended to test conversion by its emotional attendants. Other things being equal, these will vary with the measure of the break between the new life and the old. An outbreaking sinner, who has been living in violation of all the laws of God and man, could not begin the new life without a break with about all there was in his old life. In such a case the fountains of the great deep would be broken up within him, and there would be an intensity of feeling and a manifest new departure which would be lacking, or less obvious, in the case of a better man. And as Methodism, in its original work, dealt largely with persons of this class, conversions were largely of this type, and they came to be the standard to which conversions should conform. Such conversions were said to be clear or powerful; while others, less marked, though admitted, were still open to the suspicion of being less thorough. Every one familiar with Methodist revival services knows how much of this thing there has been among us.

Thus we have seen the origin and justification of the ideal of the individualistic Churches in regard to personal religion; and we have also seen how much confusion and uncertainty exist in popular thought respecting the matter. And the only way out of this confusion seems to be to get back to our fundamental religious conceptions, and from them seek to find our way to some clearer views of the religious life.

The Essential Point of View

Religious truth can be expressed only by figures borrowed from the relations of the life that now is. All religious speech, then, is based on metaphor, and must be taken, not for what it says, but for what it means. The task of religious thought is to 3 find the meaning in the metaphor, and also to find the metaphor which shall best express the meaning. There is a choice in metaphors.

The traditional theological doctrine concerning sin and salvation has been largely built on metaphors, taken partly from the rites of the ancient temple service and partly from governmental, legal, and criminal relations. God's relation to men was generally conceived, in the obsolescent theology of the past, as that of an irresponsible governor. Men were by nature criminals, and the theory of the mutual relations of God and men was based mainly on this conception. The notion of the governor and his rights was determined largely by the political absolutism of the time, and the standing of men was determined by the forms of criminal law and criminal procedure. The two together produced a most incongruous compound. The theology was bad, and the ethics was worse. God, like the king, could do no wrong ; and the clay was forbidden to protest at anything the potter might do. The infinite illdesert of a sin against an infinite being was a favorite contention. Guilt was artificial, justice was artificial, penalty was artificial, salvation was artificial, perdition was artificial. There was very little in the doctrine concerning any of these things that spoke clearly and convincingly to the reason and conscience of men. This general view resulted in conceiving men as rebels, apostates, traitors, and as all deserving immediate perdition at the hands of God. They were by nature children of wrath, and of course unsaved. A great many texts, interpreted according to the fashion of that time, readily lent themselves to such notions.

But the entire Church has grown away from this view, except as a very imperfect and inadequate representation of the truth. God may be represented as governor, but never with the limitations of a human governor, and still less with the irresponsibility of an Oriental ruler. The crude devices of criminal law, also, which are mainly makeshifts for doing as little injustice as possible, are never to be appealed to as models of divine procedure. We are fast displacing the entire conception of God as governor by the conception of God as father; and the conception of the divine government is giving place to the conception of the divine family. The deepest thought of God is not that of ruler, but of father; and the deepest thought of men is not that of subjects, but of children. And the deepest thought concerning God's purpose in our life is not salvation from threatening danger, but the training and development of souls as the children of God. Salvation or redemption is but an incident or implication of this deeper purpose, and must be interpreted accordingly. The entire subject must be studied as a relation of living moral persons rather than of ethical and juristic abstractions.

This new conception of the fatherhood and the family contains all that was true in the old conception of governor and subject ; but it is deeper and more comprehensive, and hence truer, than the old. And in so far as the older view conflicts with this, it must be modified or set aside. It may be retained as a partial view, or as one aspect of the subject, but it must always be interpreted in accordance with the larger view. But, on the other hand, the new conception is not to be viewed as a sentimental one, or as involving a relaxation of the rigor of moral demands.

The training and development of souls as the children of God, then, is God's essential purpose in the creation of men; and we must understand our human life from this point of view. And we must also bear in mind that it is an order of development. That was not first which was spiritual, but that which was natural, and afterward that which was spiritual. The development has a natural root as well as a spiritual goal. The development also involves the unfolding of the constitutional powers of man as well as his abstract spiritual capacities. For a long time the development remains on the plane of the natural without attaining to the consciously spiritual ; but all the while it is the development of man in a divinely ordered scheme ; and all the phases and factors of this scheme have their place and function in the divine plan for men.

Of course in such a scheme our traditional categories of the saved and the unsaved can not be applied in any hard and fast manner, but must be limited to a relative significance. They have a value in abstract theory, and they may express a limit toward which men are tending, but they can not be rigorously applied to the rank and file of the race. As said before, men are not so much saved as they are becoming saved ; and men are not so much lost as they are becoming lost. The process is going on; the classes are forming; but we are totally unable to form any fixed classification of these living men and women about us. The various traditional tests are grotesque in their inadequacy, when they are not purely mechanical and non-moral.

Human beings are carried on in the beginnings of their existence as unconsciously as nature itself. They are borne along like the rocks and the trees, the earth and the stars, without any sense of the will and the purpose which underlie their motion. But it is God's thought for men that they shall not always be borne along thus unconsciously, but shall become aware of God's presence and purpose in their lives, and shall reverently recognize the presence, and filially accept and co-operate with the purpose. They are to pass from the unconsciousness of nature and the ignorance of childhood to the conscious recognition and acceptance of the Divine will ; and then they are to go on with God in deepening sympathy and growing fellowship forever.