Some Christian Convictions by Henry Sloane Coffin


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Page 2

Chapter 7. The Church 181

Chapter 8. The Christian Life Everlasting 205




SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS




INTRODUCTION

SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED
CHRISTIAN BELIEFS


When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stone
was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe nor
any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectual
beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to house
their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of
materials they found already prepared by other movements of the human
mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of the
quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand the
construction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear in
many minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than a
century; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet been
exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but new
openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot be
certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear an
identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of the
principal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of the
temple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit of
the Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out of
the thought of each age.

_Romanticism_ has been one rich source of material. This literary
movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the
opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by
the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English
Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer
expression to all the elements in human nature. It brought a new feeling
towards nature as alive with a spiritual Presence--

Something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for them
miraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and sent
writers, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the pages
of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an inner
Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle,
who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken in
words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols of
the ineffable God.

To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in
the structure of our present Christian thought:

(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct,
that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in
feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and
express. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of this
movement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was like
finding names for your feelings."

(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "from
within" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, but
penetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Him
as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to
us He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five
thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more
startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with
bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to speak
of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that were
joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of the
Almighty," and Christ is not so much God _and_ man, as God _in_ man.

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