The newer religious thinking

Front matter

ThV^J^

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

V

Preface

T^HE newer religious thinking here spoken of is not mine, nor any other man's, nor that of any institution, or school, or division of Christendom. It is a world movement. It is the lineal descendant of world movements older than Abraham. I have not attempted to define it except in the most general way, nor to compass it, but only to speak sympathetically and suggestively of it.

I have not spoken technically, but in plain language. This is not a monograph. It is not specialist work. It is a talk about matters in everybody's thought. If I should characterize it at all, I should call it an interpretation, a trying to put new things and feared things — "they feared as they entered into the cloud " — in their simple and divine light.

8 Preface.

Such touching evidences of its oral helpfulness have reached me that I commit it to type. In so far as God's mind is in it, may it reach men's minds. For there is sore need of light. And there is need that the light have in it warmth and vision. If even a little of this is here, may it gladden eyes and stir hearts.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 29, 1893.

Contents

Page

I. This Thinking Characterized 13

II. Its Hunger after God 39

I

Wherefore, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedie7it unto the heavenly vision. — Acts xxvi. 19.

A DIVINE compulsion is here acknowl- "^^ edged. It becomes the law of a great, aspiring, epoch-affecting life. And the compulsion, the law, are of the sort which alone can be most potent over human life. They spring from vision, from an illumination of the inner nature. They are thus a part of the man. They are from without him, and yet from within him. They demand great

1 Preached at Prospect Street Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sunday night, October 30, 1892. Somewhat amended here, but the spoken fo7'm retained. So of the later discourses.

thoughts, feelings, revisions, renovations. Slowly, perhaps reluctantly, they command his assent. But being of him as well as from beyond him, they move and transform him. They are life. In the obeying of them there is life. The living spirit cannot be disobedient to them.

This is what religion is. It is a something from outside, and 3^et from inside. It is the life of a man, of men, of peoples, of epochs ; a part of them, and yet not of them so much as a reciprocity between them and their correlative in the nature of things, in the heart of the world, — in, for short, God. Being thus life, it is always renewing itself. It is ever young. There is always a newer reliofious thinkino^.

There always has been such thinking in the past. Noah is farther on than Enoch ; Israel than Abraham ; the Moses of Deuteronomy than the Moses of .Exodus ; Samuel than Joshua; David than Samuel, with that great discovery of his, " Thou desirest not sacrifice," and with that new face on nature, life, and religion, which ever in him appears. Isaiah is farther on, too, than EHjah ; and the late Isaiah than the earlier. The Christ of the Peraean ministry is an advance over the Christ of the Galilean ministry.^ Saint Peter at Caesarea, ten years after Pentecost, confesses that God has made clear to him a truth until then unperceived, — a truth around the question of the correctness of which the apostolic history thenceforth turns. The Saint Paul of First and Second Timothy is farther on, not only by a decade, but in his intellectual outlook, than the

1 Whether or not the Evangelists indicate an advance in the thinking of the Saviour during his public ministry, corresponding with his advance in method, is a question of interpretation ; and since their testimony is indirect, the interpretation will be colored by one's insight and conception of developing character. It will also be colored, perhaps, by one's view of the person of Christ. My own view of his person is very high. Nevertheless, as his method advanced, so, it seems to me, did his mental outlook. Neither am I able to see why its earlier advance (Luke ii. 52) should have been stayed when he reached the period of intense activity which would most have furthered such advance. And since there is no finer test of character than its behavior under access of fresh light, particularly when one is amidst life, I should be sorry to think of the Saviour as not knowing the fellowship with us of such character- testing. " It behoved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren " (Heb. ii. 17).

Saint Paul of First and Second Corinthians. The Saint John of the Epistles sweeps a wider horizon than the Saint John at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. On the open vision of the Greek Fathers succeeds the dogmatic rigidity of the Latin Fathers. Anselm treads broader fields than Gregory the Great. Luther, Zwingle, Calvin, exploit new fields, and dissentiently. Jonathan Edwards leads a new movement in the religious thought of New England, as well as that revival of its religious life known as the " Great Awakening." The history, in short, of the Old Testament and of the New, that which gave significance and permanence to the writings there gathered, is progress, clearer and yet clearer apprehensions of truth. The history, too, of the Christian Church, as Professor Allen, of our city, has so admirably outlined in his book, " The Continuity of Christian Thought," is a history of the unfolding of Christian ideas. As I said, there always has been a newer religious thinking. Those ages which seem to have been motionless, and their thought dormant, were moving. There was many a morning star of the Reformation in the Middle-Age night.

And as there always has been a newer religious thinking, so there is to-day. A book has been shown me, which belonged to the late Rev. Asa Bullard. It is marked, " To be preserved, as it is my only copy." It is without titlepage. It is Horace Bushnell's " Christian Nurture." It never got far enough in the hands of the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, of which Mr. Bullard was the executive, — now our Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, — to have a titlepage or an imprint. Why 1 Because certain men who saw its advance sheets pronounced it heresy, and raised such an alarm about it that it was suppressed. That book, issued by other publishers, is now a classic. Nobody is afraid of it. Mr. Bullard rejoiced in it, as, for aught I know, he did from the start.-^

1 Mr. Bullard died April 5, 1888, aged eighty-four years and ten days. He had been a member of Prospect Street Church since 1857. A window to his memory was put into the church at Easter, 1892. Its subject is, " Christ Blessing Little Children," after Hofmann. It is inscribed: "In

When Professor Park was transferred from the chair of Homiletics to that of Theology at Andover, he was considered by man}^ a very dangerous man. Controversy regarding his teachings waxed hot. Pamphlets, reviews, newspapers, assailed him. Now he is regarded as a bulwark of orthodoxy. When Prof. Nathaniel W. Taylor was teaching at New Haven, sixty years ago, matters now of commonest acceptance, Connecticut was convulsed to its centre with religious alarm against him, and the Seminary at East Windsor, now Hartford Seminary, was established to save the faith from his ravages. An elderly Englishman has recently contributed to one of our reviews, from personal recollection, the story of three religious panics in Great Britain, of a similar type, about matters that have ceased to give men anxiety. But let me summon you yourselves as witnesses.

Loving Memory of the Children's Minister, Rev. Asa Bullard: Born, 1804; Died, 1888: From Prospect Street Churchand Sabbath School." Mr. Bullard did not agree in all respects theologically either with Dr. Bushnell or with the writer. The allusion here is only to his attitude toward Dr. Bushnell's book on the Christian upbringing of children.

Probably all of you whose lives have covered as many as twenty-five or thirty years have, consciously or unconsciously, somewhat changed your thought on religious matters. If you have not, I condole with you. Twenty-five or thirty years in such a world as this ought somewhat to modify the ablest thinking even on religious subjects.

Now what does this mean ? Does it imply that the facts at the basis of religion are not trustworthy 1 Does it insinuate that everything in religion is relative, and a mere matter of point of view ? Not at all. Such inferences were as absurd as to have inferred, when men were gradually accepting the Copernican astronomy, or modern geology, that sun and stars and earth were not trustworthy, and were only relative, and matters of point of view. Sun, stars, earth, in common with the facts at the basis of religion, change not. But man's measure of them, grasp of them, knowledge of them, and impressibleness by- them, change with the growing mind and heart of man.

So far is such a state of things as I have been describing from being ground for alarm, that it is ground, the rather, for devout and unspeakable joy. As Kepler cried out, on discovering the clew to the computation of the orbits of the heavenly bodies, " I think God's thoughts after him ! " so does Saint Paul speak of the mystery hid through the ages, but now made known, and affirm that the chiefest of the apostles only sees as yet " in a mirror, darkly," but shall see " face to face." Every man, by reason of such a state of the case, becomes a discoverer of truths divine, and a medium through whom others may receive the knowledge of such truths ; and the way is thus left open for an infinite progress in knowing, appreciating, and using the facts of religion. Any other state of the case would make future history a blank, and eternity a horror. For the world to go on, with progress in the apprehension of religious truth at an end, — seeing that religious truth is the deepest, the sweetest, the most transforming, — and for men, out of this world's toil, sweat, travail, weariness, and defeat, to be hurried on into an eternity in which our earth thoughts and earth measures of God were a finality, would be a fate of history and of humanity too fearful to contemplate. But such is not the fate, as these phenomena, from the earliest Hebrew history until this hour, abundantly and gloriously prove.

It would be interesting to make even a cursory study of the progress of religious thought in the Old Testament ; of the same progress during the perhaps four centuries between Malachi and Christ ; and of the same in the New Testament. This is a distinctively modern study, and is yet in its infancy. Toward it the new chairs of Biblical Theology, in various institutions, are contributing. With it, for comprehensiveness and balance, the study of other, and especially of contemporaneous religions, needs to go, — " comparative religions," as that study is often called. The same sort of study, similarly paralleled, for the Christian ages, would also be of great interest.

Fresher, because more recent, accessible, and in touch with current thinking, would be a study of this progress during the present century, and particularly in Great Britain ; because the study of that portion of it would include a relatively compact territory, history, and group of men. For this last, as I referred to Professor Allen's " Continuity of Christian Thought," in reference to the Christian ages, let me commend TuUoch's " Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century." In these movements, the poets, of some of whom we have been thinking together recently, have had a far greater hand than Professor Tulloch indicates, — he having in that book treated only of distinctively religious writers. Tennyson's " In Memoriam," for example, marks a great " divide " and new upland in our century's outlook toward immortality. That service to human thinking would have been, of itself, an immeasurable gift to the world, had the Laureate written nothing else.

We cannot, however, go into these matters now. But there is a practical question we can go into. The question is this : What business have we to mutiny against this law of our being, the law of the Bible, the law of religious history, the law which hinders the future from being a blank and eternity a horror, and go heresy-hunting ? They stoned heretics in the Old Testament. They cut off their heads and crucified them in the New. They invented the horrors of the Inquisition for them in the sixteenth century. We build the sepulchres of those heretics. We are always quoting them and praising them. We know that they discovered truth for us, and made the world better for us. Why, then, do we start off to be the ruin of heretics now } Why do we hold the clothes of them that stone them } Have we not a measure of common-sense ? Do we care to repeat the folly of trying to suppress the Horace Bushnells, the Nathaniel W. Taylors, the Professor Parks, of nowadays? Surely we shall be laughed at some day for doing this. ^ Perhaps we shall live long enough to laugh at ourselves. Mr. Bullard, with his sense of humor, must have edged off into a smile and then into a laugh, when he saw that poor thin little Bushnell book, without any titlepage or imprint, and with its " To be preserved, as it is my only copy." There were soon copies enough.

Turning, however, from these reflections, let us notice, first, certain indications, and then certain characteristics, of the newer rehgious thinking at the present time.

I. Certain indications.

1. And, to begin with, even unbelief, in its truer, more typical phases, is in a hopeful state of newness and progress. It does not scoff; it is sorry not to believe. Its quarrel is with extreme partisans of faith, not with those humble, teachable souls who live their faith. Witness divisions xxxi., xxxii., and XXXIII., of " In Memoriam " as an expression, indeed from a somewhat different point of view, of this new attitude.

2. Those Christians, moreover, commonly termed " unevangelical " are likewise in a certain refreshing newness and progress of thought. Those of them often called " radicals," while moving away from some of the simpler facts of religion, are in many instances taking the most commendable steps toward the practical aspects of the religious life ; while the so-called " moderates " are adopting thoughts and methods which bring them nearer to the so-called " evangelical " religionists. They hunger for a warmer, more pronounced religious experience; for meetings for prayer ; for mission work ; for such work even among the heathen ; and for some ground of unity which may bring them into closer touch with the Church universal.

This might be abundantly illustrated were there time. The odium theologicum, if not passed, is passing. And as a liberal spirit among so-called " Evangelicals " is often the cause of much reproach to its possessors, so among the classes already referred to, those who are moving in this newness and progress are often maligned for doing so. The superintendent of the non-sectarian East End Christian Union, of our city, tells of meeting a Trinitarian who did not want to contribute toward it because it was too liberal, and then a Unitarian who found fault with it because it w^as too orthodox. And with the thought underlying the superintendent's plain rejoinder, " I told both of them that I had no use for such men," the truer spirits of both wdngs will tend more and more to agree.

3. Think, again, how^ in the Church of Rome there are also the progressives ; how the present Pope is in this respect an advance on the last ; how men like the revered pastor of one of our Cambridge Catholic churches, while no less Catholics, are pushing forward — often at the expense of that obloquy from their associates which the prophets and apostles of progress have generally to encounter — into a practical fellowship with religious men outside their ancient communion.

4. Once more, in the religious bodies nearer ourselves than any of these, reflect, for example, on the coming of the Episcopal Church toward Phillips Brooks ; on the tightening fellowship of the Presbyterian Church, which revolts from schism in the case of Union Seminary and of Professor Briggs, whom such organs of conservatism as the " New York Observer " have long been scourging outrageously ; and on the disposition of our own denomination to include rather than to expel men, churches, and institutions of learning, on which a section of the religious press has waged war for years.^

In the light of facts like these, it may be unhesitatingly affirmed that there is a greater unity amidst diversity, a greater respect for differences of opinion, a greater bringing of all questions to the test of life and of spirit, and a larger, truer thinking about God, and

1 On the primary movement now going on in human nature toward inclusiveness and .soHdarity, see Professor Tucker's memorable Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, June 30, 1892. These sentences in it bear on that portion of the subject here alluded to : —

" Questions are arising in our time, and passing into heated discussion, of the most fundamental and vital kind, which in other times would have split the most compact body, but thus far they have not divided a single communion. The one ecclesiastical sin of our age is schism. Of that alone we are intolerant" (pp. 18, 19).

The Oration is entitled, " The New Movement in Humanity from Liberty to Unity." Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, Boston. 1892.

life, and truth, to-day, among religious people the likest to ourselves, than there has ever been before ; and that we, in this respect, are, as I have intimated, wittingly or unwittingly, in the current of a great worldmovement in similar directions, embracing " Unevangelicals " as well as "Evangelicals," Catholics as well as Protestants, and the truer types of unbelievers as well as believers. Thus is the prayer, " Thy kingdom come," getting its answer, — • slowly, with many a reverse, with sore travail still, but surely. He whose right it is already reigns, and is marshalling events, movements, men, opinions, into compacter, truer lines of tendency, expectation, and promise ; all of which shall eventuate according to that " heavenly vision" which, whether we will or not, we cannot choose but obey, and the ending whereof the wisest and the most far-sighted only sees as " in a mirror, darkly."

II. Next, and in conclusion, let us try to fix in our minds certain characteristics of the newer religious thinking of our time.

I. One of them is its scientific temper.

The thinking of which I speak is not going on in this century of the vastest expansion of the boundaries of knowledge that the world has ever known without being affected at once by the knowledge, and by those processes of induction and of deduction by which the knowledge has come. It grows tired of theories. It wants facts. After these it is groping everywhere, — in the world of nature, in the field of archaeology, in that mighty research for a true account of the origin of the human species, often caricatured as a trying to prove one's descent from apes, but a far deeper and wider reaching investigation than the caricaturists dream ; in heredity, too, in animal psychology, in sociology, in the history of opinions, and in those seers, the prophets, psalmists, and poets of all time.

It wants the truth, nothing but the truth, and will have it at all hazards ; and is unalterably purposed to count nothing finally settled, until it matches in with God's whole book of nature as well as of grace, and of the human heart as well as of metaphysics.

And since there is no schism in the truth, but truth agrees with itself, verifies itself, and is a unity, we ought to be devoutly thankful that such a purpose marks the newer religious thinking.

2. Another characteristic of this thinking is its practical bent.

" What can religion do for a man ? " it seems forever to be asking. That which, more than anything else, has sickened it of over-confidence in certain systematic ways of looking at truth is the miserable fruit of such systems. It does not want a religion professing to follow the forgiving Jesus, if that religion does not make men forgiving. It does not want a religion of love which does not make men loving. It does not want a religion which teaches that all men are brothers, if it produces the class distinctions, the outrageous disparities between wealth and poverty, and that luxurious selfishness so common, hardly less in the Church than out of it, in our time.

Furthermore, when it accepts religion, albeit never so devotedly, it is not content with prayers, sacraments, sound doctrine, and religious routine. In these it believes. But it wants something adequate to show for them in deeds. It is willing to invest heavily in religion, but demands dividends in bettered lives, ennobled communities, and truer political, economic, intellectual, and social conditions.

3. Yet another characteristic of the newer religious thinking is its purpose to include in its concept the entire religious impulse of the world.

When " they therefore that were scattered abroad upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen travelled " far, " speaking the word to none save only to Jews," until an almost accidental experiment taught them better, they did what religion has characteristically done until our time. That God was with and in the religious life of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, etc., as well as with and in the religious life of the Hebrews, has be.en little recognized until recently. But he was. No race, no people, no history, has a monopoly of religion. Religion is a great fact. It is a part of the race of man. It is the correlation of man and what is above and beyond him.

The newer religious thinking recognizes this comprehensiveness. It is trying to understand all religions. It hopes, through the religions and religious impulses of all peoples, to bring in the simpler, clearer, and final religion. Hence the men of faith are reaching out and striking hands with the men who, until recently, would have been called the men not of faith, to help them and to receive help. To illustrate what I mean : Almost no man ever helped me more in spiritual things — I say, please note, " helped me," not I him — than a friend of mine, now passed on into the infinite light, who was to such an extent an agnostic that, for a long time, he could not so much as pray. But his life was a faith, a prayer, a holiness, such that he was a new manifestation of God to my life, and to the lives of all who knew him.^ In such a sense as this, the men of faith are striking hands with men hitherto

1 It is to his memory that this book is inscribed.

generally counted not of faith, for mutual help.

Similarly the newer religious thinking despairs not that the different divisions of Christendom, heretofore seemingly hopelessly estranged, and all theistic religions, and indeed all religions, have contributions to make toward, and in some sense a place to take in, the ampler and more adequate religious life that is to be. This is the same thing as to say, not only that the newer religious thinking has a scientific temper, but that it has at length come to recognize religion in its every form as a great, scientific, and mightily instructive fact. Please observe that, in making this statement, I have no time to define and clarify it. Because I do not do so, it may be that I shall be misunderstood. But when " men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation " are represented as contributing to the apocalyptic glory, it is impossible for me to believe that the religions, and religious capacities, receptivities, and aptitudes of " every tribe, and tongue, and people, and

34 The Newer Religious Thinkin nation " are not also taken into the account, and given their range and use. " God," we read, "is no respecter of persons;" and I beg leave to doubt if, any more, he is a respecter of religions.

4. Finally, while the newer religious thinking is scientific in temper, practical in bent, and is enlarging its concept of religion, let no man say, or even imagine, that this thinking is other than inspired by, and obedient unto, a " heavenly vision," which ever hovers in its foreground, and beckons it on.

The boundaries of its belief may be lessened, for it doubts much ; but the depths and heights of that belief are infinite. Out on a simple, real, honest confidence it ventures, like Abraham scarce knowing whither it goes, but sure that it must leave not only Ur of the Chaldees, but Haran, and come into a place which it is after to receive for an inheritance.

God, for it, is no longer in a creed, however true the creed may be ; nor in any book, however priceless; nor in any organization, however venerable and sacred ; nor in any form or observance, however helpful in itself; nor here, nor there, nor accessible in thus and such a manner; but God is with the man, — in him, about him, beyond him, his Father, Helper, Friend, and All-sufficiency.

And he himself is in God's universe, nor ever can get out of it ; so that even mysterious heaven grows simple, being God's ; and he does not crave so much to be in heaven, even, as to be in such a mind as God is in, and as to be helping some other God's-child, his brother, though he were fathoming hell to find him.

And for him fear is done; for has not perfect love cast it out } And hope is ever fresh ; for can he ever wholly find out God, or sound God's love's-depth ? And as for motive, of the want or badness whereof so many complain, that is no longer his solicitude ; for has not the same marched on him, seized him, and possessed itself of him forever, even the movement of none other than the living God motive henceforth in him ? True, he expects nothing other than to descend again and again into the depths, — cast down many a time, defeated, spent; but went there not One before him thither ? Shall he not follow so kingly a Forerunner? And has not all this a purpose ?

But, truth to tell, he is reluctant so much as to think of himself. Self, in fact, is getting out of him. Truth, reality, God, are getting in. Herein, too, he is " not disobedient unto the heavenly vision," and therefore wots not that that vision is even now transfiguring him, and that something of eternity already shines in his face.

ITS HUNGER AFTER GOD.

SYNOPSIS.

Hunger after God the propulsion of newer religious thinking. — Jacob and Moses illustrate this. — Why it is necessarily so. — The receivers and revel ators of larger religious truth have become such by reason of their hunger for it (examples). — Sketch of the upgrowth of the newer religious thinking of our time. — The newer literature contained it, in principle, but religious thinkers were specially its channel. — Coleridge and Bushnell ; their wide influence. — The Tractarians: — Necessarily, over against the two tendencies represented by the foregoing, came Arnold, Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley, etc. — Their application of religion to life. — The Germanic contribution ; contrast between it and the Anglo-Saxon. — The thinking of this decade an advance on that outlined above, by reason of ampler data through long inductive work. — America, until recently, provincial in this matter. — The sketch suggests how hunger after God has impelled the movement. — Personal testimony. — This hunger necessitates image-breaking in theology. — Mr. Beecher's remarks in connection with his " Background of Mystery." — Some idols needing overthrow : (i) The machine thought of God ; there is a Biblical pantheism ; (2) Exaggeration of the idea of God as ruler ; God not mainly that ; (3) Undue insistence on the philosophy of the Trinity ; how far that doctrine may rightly go ; (4) God in Christ as mainly governmental or forensic; the facts can never be included under this category ; Christ a vital, living, present Saviour. — Other idols suggested. -;- The Good Tidings unspeakably hurt by such misrepresentations of God. — The Church, the clergy, the laity, in fact all true souls, have herein a heavy responsibility laid on them.

II. ITS HUNGER AFTER GOD.i

And yacob asked him^ and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. — Genesis xxxii. 29.

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto thein, The God of your fathers hath se?it me unto you ; and they shall say to me. What is his najne ? what shall I say unto the7n ? — Exodus iii. 13.