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Page 39
Merely to create such an atmosphere then, to induce this sort of mood,
to shift for men their perspectives, until these needs and values rise
once more compelling before their eyes, is a chief end of preaching.
Its object is not so much moralizing or instructing as it is
interpreting and revealing; not the plotting out of the landscape
at our feet, but the lifting of our eyes to the hills, to the fixed
stars. Then we really do see things that are large as large and things
that are small as small. We need that vision today from religious
leaders more than we need any other one thing.
For humanism and naturalism between them have brought us to an almost
complete secularization of preaching, in which its characteristic
elements, its distinctive contribution, have largely faded from
liberal speaking and from the consciousness of its hearers. We have
emphasized man's kinship with nature until now we can see him again
declining to the brute; we have proclaimed the divine Immanence
until we think to compass the Eternal within a facile and finite
comprehension. By thus dwelling on the physical and rational elements
of human experience, religion has come to concern itself to an
extraordinary degree with the local and temporal reaches of faith.
We have lost the sense of communion with Absolute Being and of the
obligation to standards higher than those of the world, which that
communion brings. Out of this identification of man with nature has
come the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which reduces free
will and the moral responsibility of the individual to the vanishing
point; which stresses the control of the forces of inheritance and
environment to the edge of fatalistic determinism; which leads man
to regard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral
disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral
rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to
his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in
which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent
sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while
it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated
tables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over the
guilty secrets of the battlefield.
Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms of the
drawing-room, as though he were some vast St. Nicholas, sitting up
there in the sky or amiably informing our present world, regarding
with easy benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking
at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly
caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts,
and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in
philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and
methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be
found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly
rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and
practical and informative, but the vision and the absolutism of
religion are a departing glory.
What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, with
its confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizing
and secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure of
reality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are half
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods.
For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so the
partial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doing
is stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature and
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality,
forgetting the equally important fact of the difference, the
distinction between the two. But sound knowledge and normal feeling
rest upon observing and reckoning with both aspects of this law of
kinship and contrast. All human experience becomes known to us through
the interplay of what appear to be contradictory needs and opposing
truths within our being. Thus, man is a social animal and can only
find himself in a series of relationships as producer, lover, husband,
father and friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spirit
immanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, and in that
very solitariness, which he knows as he contrasts it with his social
interests, he finds identity of self, the something which makes us
"us," which separates us from all others in the world. A Crusoe,
marooned on a South Sea island, without even a black man Friday for
companionship, would soon cease to be a man; personality would forsake
him. But the same Crusoe is equally in need of solitude. The hell of
the barracks, no matter how well conducted, is their hideous lack of
privacy; men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an unbroken and
intimate companionship kill their comrade or themselves. We are all
alike and hence gregarious; we are all different and hence flee as a
bird to the mountain. The reality of human personality lies in neither
one aspect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is found
as we hold the balance between identity and difference. Hence we are
not able to think of personality in the Godhead unless we conceive of
God as being, within Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being.
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