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Page 43
Following this insistence upon the difference from nature, the
more-than-natural in man, the second thing in religious preaching
will have to be, obviously, the message of salvation. That is to say,
reducing the statement to its lowest terms, if man is to live by such
a law, the law of more-than-nature, then he must have something also
more-than-human to help him in his task. He will need strength from
outside. Indeed, because religion declares that there is such divine
assistance, and that faith can command it, is the chief cause and
reason for our existence. When we cease to preach salvation in some
form or other, we deny our own selves; we efface our own existence.
For no one can preach the more-than-human in mankind without
emphasizing those elements of free will, moral responsibility, the
need and capacity for struggle and holiness in human life which it
indicates, and which in every age have been a part of the message of
Him who said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father, which is
in heaven, is perfect."
Therefore, as we have previously corrected the half truth of the
naturalist who makes a caricature, not a portrait of man, we must now
in the same way turn to the correcting of the humanist's emphasis upon
man's native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth which
fulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the divine rescue
which answers to its inadequacy. Man must struggle for his victory; he
can win; he cannot win alone. We must then insist upon the doctrine
of salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist's
picture. Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. For
not only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing gives
him equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, he
generally does so. The preacher does not dare deny the sovereignty
of sin. Humanism hates the very name of sin; it has never made
any serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt. Neither
naturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, for sin takes man, as
holiness does, outside the iron chain of cause and effect; it breaks
the law; it is not strictly natural. It makes clear enough that man
is outside the natural order in two ways. He is both inferior and
superior to it. He falls beneath, he rises above it. When he acts like
a beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and bestial. When he
lifts his head in moral anguish, bathes all his spirit in the flood
of awe and repentance, is transfigured with the glorious madness of
self-sacrifice, he is so many worlds higher than the beast that their
relationship becomes irrelevant. So we must deal more completely
than humanists do with the central mystery of our experience; man's
impotent idealism, his insight not matched with consummation; the fact
that what he dares to dream of he is not able alone to do.
For the humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes him
self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which
is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what
is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the
acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently
the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the
appeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide
of an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind;
in both the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emotions but
it gives men little power to act on what they hear and feel to the
transformation of their daily existence. Thus the humanistic sense of
man's sufficiency, coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion of
help from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a
critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled
out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power,
both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse.
Who can doubt that one large reason why crude and indefensible
concepts of the Christian faith have such a disconcerting vitality
today is because they carry, in their outmoded, unethical, discredited
forms, the truth of man's insufficiency in himself and the confident
assurance of that something coming from without which will abundantly
complete the struggling life within? They offer the assurance of that
peace and moral victory which man so ardently desires, because they
declare that it is both a discovery and a revelation, an achievement
and a rescue. There are vigorous and rapidly growing popular movements
of the day which rest their summation of faith on the quadrilateral of
an inerrant and verbally inspired Scripture, the full deity of Jesus
Christ, the efficacy of His substitutionary atonement, the speedy
second coming of the Lord. No sane person can suppose that these cults
succeed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sensitiveness,
the intellectual integrity of such a message. It does not possess
these things. They succeed, in spite of their obscurantism, because
they do confess and meet man's central need, his need to be saved.
The power of that fact is what is able to carry so narrow and so
indefensible a doctrine.
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