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Page 15
[Footnote 9: P. 32.]
Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of the
citadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of any
extra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptions
were only the felt participation of the individual in a collective
consciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and always
continuous with the individual consciousness. So that, whatever may or
may not be true later, the beginning of man's metaphysical interests,
his cosmic consciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply his
social experience, his collective emotions and representations. Thus
Durkheim: "We are able to say, in sum, that the religious individual
does not deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moral
power upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portion
of himself. That power exists; it is society. When the Australian
feels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surprises
him, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and it
is really the product of forces that are external and superior to the
individual."[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself
and his own race. To Leuba, in his _Psychological Study of Religion_,
this has already become the accepted viewpoint. Whatever is enduring
and significant in religion is merely an expression of man's social
consciousness and experience, his sense of participation in a common
life. "Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation of
creative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for a source
of religious inspiration." Professor Overstreet, in "The Democratic
Conception of God," _Hibbert Journal_, volume XI, page 409, says: "It
is this large figure, not simply of human but of cosmic society which
is to yield our God of the future. There is no place in the future for
an eternally perfect being and no need--society, democratic from end
to end, can brook no such radical class distinction as that between a
supreme being, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and the
mass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imperfect struggle."
[Footnote 10: _Les Formes �l�mentaires de la vie religieuse_, p. 322.]
There is certainly a striking immediacy in such language. We leave for
later treatment the question as to the historical validity of such
an attitude. It certainly ignores some of the most distinguished and
fruitful concepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what are
to the majority of men real and precious factors in the religious
experience. It would appear to be another instance, among the many, of
the fallacy of identifying the part with the whole. But the effect
of such pervasive thought currents, the more subtle and unfightable
because indirect and disguised in popular appearance and influence,
upon the ethical and spiritual temper of religious leaders, the
very audacity of whose tasks puts them on the defensive, is vast
and incalculable. At the worst, it drives man into a mechanicalized
universe, with a resulting materialism of thought and life; at the
best, it makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate objectives,
just practical "results" as his guide and goal. Morality as, in
Antigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten law of heaven" sinks down and
disappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and
repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's _One behind the Many_; no
perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the
transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or
for Christian theodicy. That which has been the typical contribution
of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive
vision of life and the world and time _sub specie aeternitatis_ is
here abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the music
of the spheres. We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age.
Here is a prime reason for it. The spiritual solidarity of mankind
under the humanistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolving
and breaking down. Humanism is ingenious and reasonable and clever but
it is too limited; it doesn't answer enough questions.
Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss the question as to
what kind of preaching such a world-view, seen from the Christian
standpoint, needs, we are now to inquire what the effect of this
humanistic movement upon Christian preaching has already been.
That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it is
inevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of life. The very
temperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to the
intellectual and spiritual movements about him. What, then, has
humanism done to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidify
the essence of the religious position? Or has preaching declined and
become neutralized in religious quality under it?
First: it has profoundly affected Christian preaching about God.
The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine
transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man--the
need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern
preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a na�ve and ludicrous degree.
God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic
idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse,
preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest
contrast either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth century
or the separateness and aloofness of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures,
or of the classic Greek theologies of Christianity. God is, of course;
that is, He is the informing principle in the natural and human
universe and essentially one with it. Present preaching does not
confess this identification but it evades rather than meets the
logical pantheistic conclusion. So our preaching has to do with God
in the common round of daily tasks; with sweeping a room to His glory;
with adoration of His presence in a sunset and worship of Him in a
star. Every bush's aflame with Him; there are sermons in stones and
poems in running brooks. Before us, even as behind, God is and all is
well. We are filled with a sort of intoxication with this intimate and
protective company of the Infinite; we are magnificently unabashed as
we familiarly approach Him. "Closer is He than breathing; nearer than
hands or feet." Not then by denying or condemning or distrusting the
world in which we live, not by asserting the differences between God
and humanity do we understand Him. But by closest touch with nature
do we find Him. By a superb paradox, not without value, yet equally
ineffable in sentimentality and sublime in its impiety we say,
beholding man, "that which is most human is most divine!"
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