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Page 49
Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we are
returning to a form of the old dualism. We cannot seem to help it. We
may construct philosophies like Hegel's in which thesis and antithesis
merge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world as
representing only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress or
human understanding. But that does not alter the incontestable witness
of present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon,
interwoven with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and the
unresolved moral dualism within the individual life. It is important
enough to remember, however, that we have rejected, at least for this
generation, the old scholastic theologies founded on this general
experience. Fashions of thought change with significant facility;
there is not much of the Absolute about them! Nevertheless we cannot
think with forgotten terms. Therefore ours is no mechanically divided
world where man and God, nature and supernature, soul and body, belong
to mutually exclusive territories. We do not deny the principle of
identity. Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and all
the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totally
depraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, a
magical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it. But
we are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the
principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetual
vision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from which
the old dualism took its rise. It is the form which it assumed, the
interpretation of experience which it gave, not the facts themselves,
obscure but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we have
dropped. Identity and difference are still here; man is a part of his
world, but he is also apart from it. God is in nature and in us; God
is without and other than nature and most awfully something other than
us.
Indeed, the precise problem of the preacher today is to keep the old
supernatural values and drop the old vocabulary with the philosophy
which induced it. We must acknowledge the universe as one, and yet be
able to show that the He or the It, beyond and without the world, is
its only conceivable beginning, its only conceivable end, the chief
hope of its brevity, the only stay of its idealism. It was the
arbitrary and mechanical completeness of the old division, not the
reality that underlay the distinction itself, which parted company
with truth and hence lost the allegiance of the mind. It was that the
old dualism tried to lock up this, the most baffling of all realities,
in a formula,--that was what undid it. But we shall be equally foolish
if now, in the interests of a new artificial clearness, we deny
another portion of experience just as our fathers ignored certain
other facts in the interests of their too well-defined systems. We
cannot hold to the old world view which would bend the modern mind to
the support of an inherited interpretation of experience and therefore
would not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we hold
new views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the most
precious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it would
darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it.
Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly
order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each
element with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of the
world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yet
trusted to a purely intellectual judgment.
So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sorts
of authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we do
not reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed
though we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the day
breaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier perhaps to give
up the religious point of view, but for that ease we should pay with
our life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors
in the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake alone
any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Our
task, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the old
absolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the
experience of the human heart and mind and will which produced that
philosophy.
Nor is this so hard to do. Now, as always for the genuinely religious
temperament, there are abundant riches of material lying ready to its
hand. It is not difficult to make transcendence real and to reveal to
men their consummate need of it when we speak of it in the language
of experience and perception. What preaching should avoid is
the abstractions of an archaic system of thought with all their
provocative and contentious elements, the mingled dogmatism and
incompleteness which any worked-out system contains. It is so foolish
in the preacher to turn himself into a lay philosopher. Let him keep
his insight clear, through moral discipline keep his intuitions high,
his spirit pure, and then he can furnish the materials for philosophy.
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