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Page 16
That there is truth in such comfortable and affable preaching is
obvious; that there is not much truth in it is obvious, too. To
what extent, and in what ways, nature, red with tooth and claw,
indifferent, ruthless, whimsical, can be called the expression of the
Christian God, is not usually specifically stated. In what way man,
just emerging from the horror, the shame, the futility of his last and
greatest debauch of bloody self-destruction, can be called the chief
medium of truth, holiness and beauty, the matrix of divinity, is not
entirely manifest. But the fatal defect of such preaching is not that
there is not, of course, a real identity between the world and its
Maker, the soul and its Creator, but that the aspect of reality which
this truth expresses is the one which has least religious value, is
least distinctive in the spiritual experience. The religious nature is
satisfied, and the springs of moral action are refreshed by dwelling
on the "specialness" of God; men are brought back to themselves, not
among their fellows and by identifying them with their fellows, but
by lifting them to the secret place of the Most High. They need
religiously not thousand-tongued nature, but to be kept secretly in
His pavilion from the strife of tongues. It is the difference between
God and men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. It is the
"otherness," not the sameness, which makes Him desirable and potent in
the daily round of life. A purely ethical interest in God ceases to be
ethical and becomes complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenal
we have shut the door on the chief strength of the higher life.
Second: modern preaching, under this same influence and to a yet
greater degree, emphasizes the principle of identity, where we need
that of difference, in its preaching about Jesus. He is still the most
moving theme for the popular presentation of religion. But that
is because He offers the most intelligible approach to that very
"otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconciling
influence over the heart of man--the way the human spirit expands and
blossoms in His presence--is moving beyond expression to any observer,
religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for
human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunner
and defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimous
solicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and women
of this torn and distracted age, which is so desperately seeking its
own life and thereby so inexorably losing it! But why is the heart
subdued, the mind elevated, the will made tractable by Him? Why,
because He is enough like us so that we know that He understands, has
utter comprehension; and He is enough different from us so that we are
willing to trust Him. In what lies the essence of the leadership of
Jesus? He is not like us: therefore, we are willing to relinquish
ourselves into His hands.
Now, that is only half the truth. But if I may use a paradox, it is
the important half, the primary half. And it is just that essential
element in the Christian experience of Jesus that modern preaching,
under the humanistic impulse, is neglecting. Indeed, liberal preachers
have largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it has become
so easy! Humanism has made Jesus obvious, hence, relatively impotent.
With its unified cosmos, its immanent God, its exalted humanity, the
whole Christological problem has become trivial. It drops the cosmic
approach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical. It does not
approach Him from the side of God; we approach nothing from that
side now; but from the side of man. Thus He is not so much a divine
revelation as He is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity are
one in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His creatures in
multifarious differences of degree but not in kind. We do not see,
then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolated
man, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older and
superseded Christologies. But rather, He is the perfect revelation of
the moral being, the character of God, in all those ways capable of
expression or comprehension in human life, just because he is the
highest manifestation of a humanity through which God has been forever
expressing Himself in the world. For man is, so to speak, his own
cosmic center; the greatest divine manifestation which we know.
Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and _ipso facto_
we have our supreme revelation of God.
So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gained
something by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and
we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic
experience which created it. But I beg to point out that, on the
whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we have
made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level,
but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that?
Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His
loved ones know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good
humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabulary
of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been
preached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."
And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text means
not that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus--and we have
already seen that Jesus is like us! One only has to state it all to
see beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!
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