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Page 13
Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its chief roots in
Calvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, was the religious leader of
the Reformation outside Germany. But his system, also, is only
the continuation of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faith
originating with Augustine. He reduced it to order, expounded it with
energy and consistency, but one has only to recall its major doctrines
of the depravity of man, the atonement for sin, the irresistible grace
of the Holy Spirit, to see how untouched it was by the characteristic
postulates of the new humanism. And it was on his theology that New
England preaching was founded. It was Calvin who, through Jonathan
Edwards, the elder and the younger, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins,
Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course of the
New England pulpit.
The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influence
is accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of our
physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite
largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents
of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism
of the New England theology.
It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may be generally
characterized as scientific and practical, that we now turn. These are
the forces which apparently are most affecting Christian preaching
at this moment. But it is important to remember that a large part
of their influence is to be traced to the philosophic and ethical
tendencies of the earlier humanistic movement which had set the scene
for them, to which they are so sympathetic that we may assert that
it is in them that their practical interests are grounded and by them
that their scientific methods are reinforced. I divide this second
group of media, for clearness, under three heads.
First comes the rise of the natural sciences. In 1859, Darwin
published the _Origin of Species_ and gave to the world the
evolutionary hypothesis, foreshadowed by Goethe and other
eighteenth-century thinkers, simultaneously formulated by Wallace
and himself. Here is a theory, open to objections certainly, not yet
conclusively demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yet
possess, as to the method of the appearance and the continuance of
life upon the planet. It conceives of creation as an unimaginably
long and intricate development from the inorganic to the organic, from
simple to complex forms of life. Like Kantianism and the humanistic
movement generally, the evolutionary hypothesis springs from reasoned
observation of man and nature, not from any _a priori_ or speculative
process. With this theory, long a regulative idea of our world,
preaching was forced to come to some sort of an understanding. It
strikes a powerful blow at the scholastic notion of a dichotomized
universe divided between nature and supernature, divine and human.
It reinforced humanism by minimizing, if not making unnecessary,
the objective and external source and external interpretations of
religions. It pushes back the initial creative _act_ until it is lost
in the mists and chaos of an unimaginably remote past. Meanwhile,
creative _energy_, the very essence of transcendent life, is, as we
know it, not transcendent at all, but working outward from within,
a part of the process, not above and beyond it. The inevitable
implication here is that God is sufficiently, if not exclusively,
known through natural and human media. Science recognizes Him in the
terms of its own categories as in and of His world, a part of all its
ongoings and developments. But His creative life is indistinguishable
from, if not identical with, its expressions. Here, then, is a
practical obliteration of the line once so sharply drawn between the
natural and the supernatural. Hence the demarcation between the divine
and human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared.
This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute
values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final
terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by
the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed
to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern
mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. But
God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not
static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete,
not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of
the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely
contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to
disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite,
a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral
estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not
perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence
relatively normal and sufficiently intelligible.
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