|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 68
"'It shall be Dogma, that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first
instant of the Conception, by singular privilege and grace of God,
in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was
preserved from all stain of original sin.' The senior cardinal then
prayed the Pope to make this Decree public, and, amid the roar of
cannon from Fort St. Angelo and the festive ringing of church bells,
the solemn act was accomplished.'"[42] Here is an assertion regarding
Mary's Conception which has only the most tenuous connection with
religious experience and which was pronounced for ecclesiastical and
political reasons. Here we have dogma at its worst. Here, indeed, it
is so bad as to resemble many of the current political and economic
pronunciamentos!
[Footnote 42: _The Last Days of Papal Rome_, pp. 127 ff.]
Now, nobody wants dogmatic preaching, but there is nothing that we
need more than we do doctrinal preaching and nothing which is more
interesting. The specialization of knowledge has assigned to the
preacher of religion a definite sphere. No amount of secondary
expertness in politics or economics or social reform or even morals
can atone for the abandonment of our own province. We are set to think
about and expound religion and if we give that up we give up our place
in a learned profession. Moreover, the new conditions of the modern
world make doctrine imperative. That world is distinguished by
its free inquiry, its cultivation of the scientific method, its
abandonment of obscuranticisms and ambiguities. It demands, then,
devout and holy thinking from us. Who would deny that the revival
of intellectual authority and leadership in matters of religion
is terribly needed in our day? Sabatier is right in saying that a
religion without doctrine is a self-contradictory idea. Harnack is not
wrong in saying that a Christianity without it is inconceivable.
And now I know you are thinking in your hearts, Well, what
inconsistency this man shows! For a whole book he has been insisting
on the prime values of imagination and feeling in religion and now he
concludes with a plea for the thinker. But it is not so inconsistent
as it appears. It is just because we do believe that the discovery,
the expression and the rewards of religion lie chiefly in the
superrational and poetic realms that therefore we want this
intellectual content to accompany it, not supersede it, as a balancing
influence, a steadying force. There are grave perils in worshipful
services corresponding to their supreme values. Mystical preaching
has the defects of its virtues and too often sinks into that vague
sentimentalism which is the perversion of its excellence. How
insensibly sometimes does high and precious feeling degenerate into
a sort of religious hysteria! It needs then to be always tested and
corrected by clear thinking.
But we in no way alter our original insistence that in our realm as
preachers, unlike the scientist's realm of the theologians, thought
is the handmaid, not the mistress. Our great plea, then, for doctrinal
preaching is that by intellectual grappling with the final and
speculative problems of religion we do not supersede but feed the
emotional life and do not diminish but focus and steady it. It is
that you and I may have reserves of feeling--indispensable to great
preaching--sincerity and intensity of emotion, that disciplined
imagination which is genius, that restrained passion which is art,
and that our congregations may have the same, that we must strive for
intellectual power, must do the preaching that gives people something
to think about. These are the religious and devout reasons why
we value intellectual honesty, precision of utterance, reserve of
statement, logical and coherent thinking.
We are come, then, to the conclusion of our discussions. They have
been intended to restore a neglected emphasis upon the imaginative and
transcendent as distinguished from the ethical and humanistic aspects
of the religious life. They have tried to show that the reaching out
by worship to this "otherness" of God and to the ultimate in life is
man's deepest hunger and the one we are chiefly set to feed. I am sure
that the chief ally of the experience of the transcendence of God and
the cultivation of the worshipful faculties in man is to be found in
severe and speculative thinking. I believe our almost unmixed passion
for piety, for action, for practical efficiency, betrays us. It
indicates that we are trying to manufacture effects to conceal the
absence of causes. We may look for a religious revival when men have
so meditated upon and struggled with the fundamental ideas of religion
that they feel profoundly its eternal mysteries.
And finally, we have the best historical grounds for our position.
Sometimes great religious movements have been begun by unlearned and
uncritical men like Peter the hermit or John Bunyan or Moody. But we
must not infer from this that religious insight is naturally repressed
by clear thinking or fostered by ignorance. Dr. Francis Greenwood
Peabody has pointed out that the great religious epochs in Christian
history are also epochs in the history of theology. The Pauline
epistles, the _Confessions of Augustine_, the _Meditations_ of Anselm,
the _Simple Method of How to Pray_ of Luther, the _Regula_ of Loyola,
the _Monologen_ of Schleiermacher, these are all manuals of the
devout life, they belong in the distinctively religious world of
supersensuous and the transcendent, and one thing which accounts for
them is that the men who produced them were religious geniuses because
they were also theologians.[43]
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|