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Page 17
Third: we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in the
relinquishment of the goal of conversion. We are preaching to educate,
not to save; to instruct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradual
and half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorable
inheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment. Or it
may be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and
volitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed by
sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been
accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is
brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it
through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and
confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and
the relinquishment of the self into the divine hands. But one thing is
true of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion. It is
not merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue.
It cannot come about without faith, the "will to believe"; neither can
it come about by that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is also
something else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us to
do; hence it is something done for us.
Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of Christian
life and preaching under humanistic influence. We are accepting
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur the
distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Education
supplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the church
because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is
a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The church
member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He is
a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been
saved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right
you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It is
strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment
of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that
nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for
being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. It is
strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is
at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero,
degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled
hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! But
for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries,
up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by
discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Social
service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome
fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the
servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sin
is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need is
to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of
that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee
on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money,
and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!
Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse and
its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the
relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social
order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant
Christianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative
and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since they
endeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, its
remotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness as
concerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation of
organized society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, not
a selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the Divine
Sacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen or
captains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died.
There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves or
more important than the men which created and served them. The Holy
Catholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; all
others, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of the
preservation and expression of human personality. Hence, the interest
of the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence,
the axiom of the church's control of, the believers' responsibility
for, the economic relations of society. An unjust distribution of
goods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of the
wealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches--these were
ranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not among
the venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice was
considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The application
of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as
humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence,
nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order.
The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the
economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the
responsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which are
a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century
religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly
reacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon
Christian thought and conduct.
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