The church in modern society

Preface

PHIS book is intended for the whole -*• Christian family in this country. The comparative study of the truths contained but imperfectly expressed in the terms of different creeds reveals larger agreements than men have willingly allowed ; and when Christianity is interpreted helpfully and constructively in the light of these agreements, the Church of Christ exerts the organic influence in the social life which the national government exerts in the political and economic life of the people. The collective church has this large and comprehensive work to do, and the aim of these pages is to suggest a way in which it may be done.

Brookline, Mass., October 2, i<

Contents

PAGE

//. Church Development before the Reformation 13

III. The Church in Modern Life ..... 25

CHAPTER I. Permanent Institutions

HP HE order of the social world begins ■*■ with the family. At first, the community was the family magnified by its growing relationships. The church was the family enlarged in a spiritual direction. The earliest human society grew out of the fundamental principles and the historical development of these institutions. They represent, under varying forms, the earliest organization of life, and are capable of that modification in growth by which the seed is traced in its expansion and fruit. They are the beginnings of primitive society, the constituent and permanent elements of all society. Under every modification which history records, these three institutions have retained their identity and exerted their legitimate and intended influence. They are divine in their origin and purpose, in the sense that all life is said to be divine. They are found in the earliest gathering of men together, and are structural in the social and spiritual economy of the race. The personal man, after Adam, has his root in the family ; the political condition grows out of the necessity for order when men are living in community ; the spiritual life of men, however personal in its inward intention toward God, finds expression in an institutional order which is included in the word Church. In the earliest Hebrew times the family, the community, and the church had their essential potency and meaning in a single household. The functions of each institution existed in distinct germs, but were often exercised by one and the same person ; and when they were separated, it was not felt that their relative bearing had been changed.

Humanity was a unit under a threefold manifestation, and this was not more apparent in the Hebrew development, of which the record has been definitely preserved, than in the Gentile developments which existed side by side with that of the Hebrews. It is one of the structural features of human history, that, under all governments and among all races, the family, the body politic, and the ecclesiastical order have found their places. With great changes and modifications they have constantly retained their prevailing types, whether the light of God's presence in the world has been clearly recognized, as among the Hebrews, or partially hidden under superstitions and corruptions, as among the rival race-growths of the East. It deepens the sense of continuous order and of the constant unfolding of the life toward freedom to find that these institutions, which are fundamental in human society, do not change in their essential character as the centuries go by. They are modified by the movements in the affairs of men, but they are the same in structure that they have ever been. It is the tendency of the time to see only the individual existence, to regard life in piecemeal, to secure the wellbeing of one man. Democratic society is a mass of units, and the struggle is toward the points where one man shall prevail ; but the moment a general average is reached in the personal or political or ecclesiastical life, it is found that the ancient institutions of the world reappear and claim their own. They reappear, not singly, but together. If the church is disregarded, the state loses its tone and the family its complementary support. If the state is enfeebled, the church struggles as with an unnatural burden, and the personal education of the family through the state is interfered with. If the family life is neglected, the state is not reenforced with good citizens, and the church is comparatively powerless. The great changes in history are connected with the rise and fall of these institutions. They are so closely related that society is touched as a whole whenever either of them is interfered with. This is freely acknowledged, but in the practical operation of institutions upon individual life it is often disregarded. The family is allowed to do its work without this assistance of the church ; the church and the state are neutral or hostile ; each pursues its own way as if it had nothing to do with the other. As there is in every well-ordered life an unrealized ideal to which the imagination appeals for the enthusiasm and the courage that carry one through the rough passages of experience, so there is a theory of the relation of divine institutions to one another which is necessary to the harmonious and simultaneous development of all the interests of human society ; and it is in and through their essential unity and interdependence that social and spiritual advancement are to be reached.

The solidarity of human forces is a belief that is taught by a study of the processes of history. This is not always brought out by the historian. The progress of the state has usually been the theme of the historical writer, while its educational, social, and ethical life have been treated as if they did not exist. Buckle was among the first in our own day to enlarge the historical view, and the sociological studies of later date have brought within the range of historical writers the sum of the influences that have controlled the life of the people for a given period. History can no longer be the tracing of a single dominant idea in its process of development. It must be the tracing of the combined working ideas of the world as they have influenced society, and these working ideas are found in the central institutions that have prevailed from the beginning. They have not always had equally free play ; but what has been realized in the social development of other ages has come, not through the family education and the personal life of the individual alone, not through the control of the state in the form of personal despotism alone, not as a result of the ethical development through which the higher beliefs of men have modified human action, but through their combined yet often unequal action upon mankind. The movement of the world has been slow, infinitely slow, but it has been a solid movement toward human freedom. This freedom is not the predominance of any one idea or element ; it has been the fruit of their combined energy in lifting man up to a higher ideal of society. Exclusively regarded on the ecclesiastical side, it has been the realization of the kingdom of God in the world ; regarded in the light of common human experience, it has made mankind sharers in the redemptive agencies of a power that works for righteousness in society at large and is called the Church of Christ. The freedom that exists in the world to-day is not physical, social, ethical, or spiritual so much as it is the enthronement of life upon a higher plane. It is the realization of the meaning of the City of God among the citizens of the world. It is the enlargement of life through the family, the state, and the church, in their combined influence upon the individual man, and in the direction which they give to society. There has been a growth in modern life which has been described as the development of individual liberty. The family, working freely, has been the home of the citizen, of the state, and of the earthly City of God, but the combined operation of church and state was for many centuries to suppress the individual in order to magnify the two institutions which have been employed to build up his life in freedom. The growth of modern society has been in the direction of the emancipation of the individual at the expense of both the state and the church. The problem to-day is to restore the family, the state, and the church to their

Permanent Institutions. g

natural functions as central institutions for the organization, protection, and guidance of human life. The freedom of the individual has been secured through a process of evolution in which humanityhas passed from childhood to maturity. The voice of the whole people is to-day that voice of God which was once thought to be heard in the commands of the king. The state in America and England has the precedence of the family and the church in the direction of society, and the work before the people is to place the church and the family on an equal footing with the state. The gradual transfer of authority from the head of the tribe to the people of the tribe, — the transfer of the rule from Abraham to the children of Israel, — is the description of the process that has culminated in the democratic commonwealth ; but this large and free political and social existence is endangered in two directions. It is accompanied by the diminished influence of the family and io The Church in Modern Society.

by the frequent ignoring of the ethical and spiritual influence of the kingdom of God. They exist ; but their organic character, the part they play as institutions in the moulding and elevation of individual life, is weakened by a mistaken conception of the basis upon which social and political freedom rest. The family and the church need to be restored to the place which the state, to a certain extent, holds in public opinion. They are the natural supporters of the state. The strength of our political life is in the industrial, social, and spiritual education of the people. The public school stands midway between the family and the church, and educates the people the best when both of these institutions inspire its work.

The problem at any period in the history of the world has been only different in form from that which is before the American people. The problem to-day is the relation of the three fundamental institutions, which have always expressed the

Permanent Institutions. u

fullness of human and divine agency among men, to the necessities of modern society. Columbus discovered what he called the new world, and modern society almost had its beginning with that event. People who are here to-day find themselves in a world which is as new to its past as the world which Columbus first saw was new to his fellow-Europeans to whom he carried the fact of his discovery. There is a new feeling about the things which have been accepted. The scientific method takes nothing for granted, and the historical method slowly satisfies those who feel that the foundations of social and spiritual life are to be laid anew. The enlargement of existence, and the presence of forces which are changing the key-note from hour to hour, have given the impression that the institutional life of men is to be begun anew ; and in this conviction it is felt that the family and the church are not the important factors that they have shown themselves to be in history. It is from this point of view that it is wise to study our social development. What are the conservative and constructive agencies which are to control and guide the miscellaneous life of the hour ? How is the old to be adjusted to the new? How shall the family preserve its integrity? How shall the state maintain its freedom ? How shall the church be the family of God among the people? Civil society is the field in which these ancient and permanent institutions are to find their adjustment to the working life of the people, and the Church of Christ has the duty of entering this field and making fresh conquests for God and humanity.

CHAPTER II. The Church before the Reformation

r*HE Church of Christ is singled out ** in history as the institution which in its various forms has contributed most to the direction of the world. It has ruled in human affairs for two reasons : it has claimed that the future life is determined by one's present conduct, and it has stood for the righteousness that is necessary alike in the family and in the state, if society is to discharge its highest ethical functions. It has had a supernatural sanction, and it has proved itself the best practical scheme for the regulation of conduct. This twofold appeal to men always existed and must be as operative in the future as in the past. It is, in effect, a twofold sanction. Much has been naturally made of the divine authority of Christianity, and of the church as the organized form of society through which its principles have been transmitted and its benefits secured, — too much has perhaps been made to keep the harmony that should subsist between its three permanent factors. It is an ideal state of society where the divine sanction is the supreme reality, and where religious motives universally prevail. The actual state of things in the world is the ordering of life as conditioned by the two motives of future happiness and present convenience. The church, or what has stood in the place of the church, has had in earlier ages the sanction of divine authority more compactly asserted and maintained than it is insisted on now. The Jewish Church was essentially a theocracy in which every son of Israel had his immediate relation to God. Every heathen substitute for the church has aimed to give a divine sanction to the operations of life. The pure theism of the early religions was immensely expanded in its human relation-

The Church before the Reformation. 15

ships by the advent of Christ, who revealed the brightness of God's glory and was the express image of his person. It was the Christ who gave all the old religions a new meaning, as if the dim visions had suddenly burst out into open day. It was the effect of the Incarnation that the divine authority of Christianity was most emphasized at its beginning, but it was greatly assisted in its identifications with human life by the embodiment of Christian principles in practical conduct. The church took the shape in the world which Christ is believed to have intended ; and the tracing of the form which it assumed through successive generations, in the processes of history, is the record of its contact with civilization, and of the way in which the one has acted and reacted upon the other.

The history of the church has usually been written as if it were the only divine institution in the world. It has been regarded as the only leaven of society. The family and the state have been regarded as institutions which perpetuate corruption, while the church alone keeps society pure and maintains the integrity of the social and the political order. The mistake that has been made is in their separation, in urging the claims of the family and the state as infinitely lower than that of the church. It was natural to make this mistake, because the church is concerned with two worlds, the one that is and the one that is in process of being. It grew out of the undue insistence upon the authoritative sanction of the church as a divine institution and of the conviction that a man's spiritual interests exceed in importance his interests as a member of society. The larger principle is expanded in the saying, " He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." But there has ever been, and there is to-day, the purely ecclesiastical way of looking at the church, — exalting its organization, its authority, its succession of ministers, its traditional faith, the validity of its sacraments, as if its virtue

The Church before the Reformation, ij

was in these apart from their relation to men in the form of spiritual ministrations. In one quarter the ecclesiastical authorityhas been exalted into a fetich ; in another, dogmas have taken on doctrinaire forms until the things insisted on as necessary to salvation often acquire the character of theological fictions. It is a long way to clearness of view when the supernatural neither in ministrations nor in belief takes a place that is out of harmony with the other factors of human development. The supernatural is not to be denied in the revelation of the truth to the human consciousness, nor in the Personality of our Lord ; but the supernatural element in the earlier history of our religion has been diminished in its power to move life to-day, and the purpose of improving humanity has come more and more into view. It is comparatively easy to assume much about the spiritual, or divine, authority of the church, and to regard any other sanctions of a working Christianity as unworthy of attention ; and here ardent religionists have often gone beyond their limits. And for this reason there has arisen a repulsion from spiritual authority which has largely entered into the judgments of men. The sanction of the church which carries most weight with thoughtful persons is its practical efficiency as one of the working factors of society. It is better understood and appreciated as a reality than as a divine power. As one of the permanent elements that enter into the continuous life of humanity, it no more loses its higher spiritual character when it is mainly valued for its human uses, than the family and the state are shorn of their divine authority when they are regarded only with reference to the ends which they serve. Each depends upon the other for functions which impart strength to society, and each has its sanction in its necessity to the welfare of humanity. The church has always maintained, along with the assertion of its divine character, close re-

The Church before the Reformation, ig

lations with the state and with the family. It has worked through both, and has itself been shaped and modified by both. In the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations, the family and the state were overshadowed by the theocracy, but they were still the two arms by which the Hebrew Church built up life within the Jewish nation and sustained social and political order. If it transcended the limits which would be allowed to-day, it did no harm where life was still narrowed to the knowledge and doing of few things. At the beginning of the Christian dispensation, Christianity stood outside of the world and asked to be admitted. Its claims to be listened to had to be vouched for. The family and the state, as permanent factors of society, had been organized without its sanction, though not without an institution intended to serve its purpose, and did not feel the need of its assistance ; and yet there was the vacant place in the social order which the religious element in neither Greek nor

Roman civilization could fill, and which Christianity supplied with wonderful rapidity when it gained leverage in the world and began to control the lives of men. Though it entered society through the members of Caesars household, it did not stop until it had ascended Caesar's throne. The early history of Christianity is the record of a continuous conflict between the social and spiritual forces in each generation. The natural law of the family and of the state is not in accord with the Christian ideal of what these institutions should be. The church with its credentials in its hands is forcing its way to the head of civilization, and is engaged in reconstructing the social and religious beliefs of men at every step. It is not surprising that paganism colored Christianity, that the pagan idea of the family and the state found recognition in the church, and that, in the absence of the individual freedom of modern life, the family should become shriveled and the monarchical element in

The Church before the Reformation. 21

the state should gain the ascendancy even in the church. The relation was too close for the results to be otherwise. The picture of apostolic Christianity in its simplicity, in its freshness, in its beauty, is imperfectly realized after the church has entered upon its world-career and undertakes to maintain spiritual purposes with carnal weapons. Not that families are not Christians, or that the state is not under spiritual control ; but the freedom of each is lost through a form of society in which liberty of action for the individual has not been secured. When the church has control, it is too often Caesar's hand that carries the pastoral staff, and the social conditions are unfavorable for the natural action of Christian principles. It is difficult to see the situation as it really was, because the materials for its reconstruc tion have been overweighted and put out of sight by a purely ecclesiastical view of Christianity, and because the church, when it gained through the Papacy the control of western civilization, had joined hand in hand with elements that carried it far away from its free and natural influence upon society. It is easy to infer that, with Christianity in the form of despotic authority, and with the integrity of the Christian family constantly threatened by monachism and the living in communities, the free and natural development of human society in its distinctive elements was greatly interfered with up to the time of the Reformation. What the church accomplished was the holding of vital truth and the maintenance of its hereditary and apostolic organization ; it failed because it absorbed into itself the functions which belong to the state, and took its tone too much from the secular power. The family was ignored. The individual was felt neither in the church nor in the state as a personal element. The history of those times makes much of individuals, but they were persons bent upon working through the church or the state for per-

The Church before the Reformation. 23

sonal ends, and do not fairly represent the free and natural action of institutions upon society.

One needs to study history with large sympathies for the imperfect development of great and fundamental ideas, if he is not to lose his faith in the divine movement of the world. The two institutions which should have advanced in peace and unity from the beginning — the church and the state — have been at war with one another since the conversion of Constantine, chiefly because the prerogative of the church in spiritual affairs had been claimed as its right in secular life, and in this conflict the spiritual movement of the world had its opportunity constantly delayed. The progress of society satisfies no theorist ; but in a large view of the order of events, there is, if not the ideal result, such an advance, or such an opening of new features, that the working hopes of humanity are encouraged and maintained. And this is the outcome of the period during which the Christian Church lived through the transition from the ancient world to modern life. You can trace, if you will, beneath the enormous mass of details, the imperfect and restrained operation of the family, the state, and the church, — none of them free, none of them willing to trust the others, yet each compelled to accept some modus vivendi and wait for better days.

CHAPTER III. The Church in Modern Life

r I ^HE modern world begins with the -*• Reformation, with the outburst of intellectual and spiritual life that had long been waiting its opportunity. The Reformation itself was a twofold movement : it took the direction of spiritual independence, but it was quite as distinctly political as it was spiritual. The world had outgrown the church's interpretation of it and insisted that the church should allow a larger and different expansion of the social and spiritual needs of men. The state felt the necessity of asserting its independence of the church. The original institutions of society were making their strongest efforts since the primitive davs to give an increased freedom to individual life. The consciousness of the civilized world was thoroughly awakened ; but the interest in the family, which had long been choked by its more powerful rivals, the church and the state, was not aroused in the same degree. The contest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was mainly the struggle between the church and the state to establish the precedence of the one over the other. Sometimes the one led, sometimes the other, but the effort was always an attempt to reach a result for which the world was not quite prepared. A study of the history of the collective church since the Reformation reveals this widening of the too close embrace of the church and state during the Middle Ages, and the assertion of a freer, more expansive, more truly individual life, which has made a sphere for itself in civil society. In other ages man was a member of the family, of the state, of the church, and expressed his individuality through this membership ; but since

The Church in Modern Life. 2j

the Reformation he has more and more asserted his personality, his conscious selfexistence, his right to think for himself. It is this largeness and freedom of movement which is specially expressed by the modern meaning of the term civil society. This was not unknown to the Greeks, and before the Reformation it existed whereever the people had gained industrial or commercial freedom ; but so soon as men began to enter into a larger sense of their individual rights, they sought a common sphere in which to exercise them, and civil society is this sphere in modern life. Society has been mainly dominated since the Reformation by hostility to institutions which fetter one's personality and restrict his freedom. A large number of the religious movements that grew out of the Reformation made this principle the basis of opposing the institutional order of society and of gaining larger liberty for the individual. The political parties in the state have proceeded mainly upon the same idea. It has been difficult to maintain the principle that society is based upon permanent institutions. Not to multiply illustrations, and confining attention to the church alone, there has been a wide departure from that intense spirit of organization that pervaded every element of society in the Middle Ages, and protected, while it restricted, the movements of men. The individual man has been determined to have his own way in all things, and the aggregate of the life of the people has brought the state and the church alike to a point where their permanent relations to the common welfare are often overlooked by the people at large. There has been an entire revolution since Wycliffe breathed the spirit of a Christian freeman into the church life of England, and Luther spoke out of his inner consciousness in Germany.

It is necessary to give this point a larger statement than the simple noting of the fact, because it covers the whole

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ground of the modern church. Political and religious movements have been closely allied in the history of mankind. This is as true of the ancient as of the modern world. The tendency in both church and state for the last three centuries has been strongly toward individual liberty, and the drift in religion has been toward a democratic church in a free nation. The authority of institutions as privileged orders is now constantly denied, and there is a profound distrust of whatever is weighted by traditions. There is a view of life that justifies these radical positions. You cannot measure modern life by the rules that fitted an entirely different state of society. The old life of the world must cast off its ancient habit if it is to meet the conditions of the new day, and this is what democratic society has done in the last century and is doing in this ; but while the surface movement has been of this sort, there has been a far different movement beneath the visible order. Sojo The Church in Modern Society.

ciety thrives and survives like the strong oak of the pasture because it strikes its root deep down into life. It cannot exist without the economic laws or the institutional order. The instincts of nature and the dictates of right reason alike preserve the conditions by which the life of men is dependent upon permanent organizations. It is here that the conservative view of society justifies itself and institutions are seen in their bearing upon personal character. There must be a political check upon pure democracy, if government is not to drift into anarchy. There must be an ecclesiastical check upon pure voluntaryism in religion, if the church is not to lose its title to authority and reverence among men.

The influence of the Reformation is here deeply felt. The whole output of modern life has been the assertion of a principle which is destructive to the integrity of social order, and yet it is this principle of order which is perhaps more precious than any other in the estimation of men. The material and personal gains of life spring from the incentives that come to one and act as spurs to the powers within him ; but they fail to make the most of a man, unless, as the head of a family, as a citizen, and as a servant of God, he is in his place in the institutions which have been organized in the world for the preservation and purification of society. The weakness of modern life is in its severance from the permanent sources of power, which are expressed in family education, in intelligent citizenship, and in the Christian idea of character. There can be no substitute for these in any form of society, and the danger in the free development of present life is that what is permanent in the ordering of society shall be overshadowed by individual theory and experiment. The family is not sufficiently developed ; the tendency of the church is to become a club-house ; the state is the prey of politicians ; the church cannot work freely and to advantage unless the family and the state are in harmony with its purpose ; and it is in reaching out to a reconciliation between what is permanent and what is experimental that the spiritual regeneration of society is to find its fulfillment. This is the task that is before the Christian Church in every nationality where it has ancient or recent foothold. It is as imperative, in its demands, in the older civilization as in the new. It is to become a working factor in free society, not supreme as in the Middle Ages, not overborne by the state as often during the last two centuries in England and in Continental Europe, not an incipient and permitted power as in the first Christian days, but gaining the consent of the best minds and leading the thought of the world, because it teaches and preserves the traditions of the past and expresses the free convictions of men, endowed with liberty, in such a union that the continuous order of Christian thought is transmitted, with its full power to sustain and guide the expansive and intensive life of the individual man.