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Page 3
(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more
parts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnell
entitled an essay that still repays careful reading, _The Gospel a Gift
to the Imagination._ One of our chief complaints with the historic
creeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which
religious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose,
rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process.
Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or
sacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula
of logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in
geometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who have
experienced contact with the living God through Jesus.
A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from
which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is
_Humanitarianism_. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its struggle
for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, setting
free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war and
cruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, and
devoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier.
It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of
points. Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of
man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and
bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ. They were
teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with
its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human
justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God. They
proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ's death the
expiation of man's sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in
McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England, the
Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men's consciences,
as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates
a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God,
who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's
transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was
throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel's
enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by
vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and
Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good
than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of sensitive
conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the
Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral:
"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and
he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _The�t_.
176c).
From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:
(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.
(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty
to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively
reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it
is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood
at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.
A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out
most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the
temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,
not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings of
things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, _The Origin
of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself
appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominant
everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer
and miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into nature
exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the
things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.
The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in
the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the
writers of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed a
constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many
attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle was
due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and a
religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either
attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I do
not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Both
physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" as
something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and
what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all the while to new
stimuli, and the title of a recent book, _Creative Evolution_, indicates
a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.
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