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Page 4
From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian
convictions, with much else, these items:
(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of
insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of
the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the
mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole
creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they
made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate
districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the
supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to
truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response
to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it
must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our
labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of
working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal
fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding
His new and completer entrances into the world's life.
(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which
religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and
grow in a changing world.
(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and
attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find
in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now
is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.
And not from nature up to nature's God,
But down from nature's God look nature through.
(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes
that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various
writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.
(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more
complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to
light.
A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this
scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the
Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,
but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church,
and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined
the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch,
pronounced the _Books of the Chronicles_ less accurate historically than
the _Books of the Kings_, considered the present form of the books of
_Isaiah_, _Jeremiah_ and _Hosea_ probably due to later hands, and
distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less
moment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, and
suggested Barnabas as the writer of the _Epistle to the Hebrews_. But
the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the
Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to
which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery
of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the
Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of
the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they
profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.
We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian
thought to these scholarly investigations:
(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that
falls in with the idea of development or evolution.
(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,
science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of
which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.
(3) An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin
(however we may end) with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of
God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him
reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from Humanitarianism.
Christianity, like the fabled giant, Ant�us, has always drawn fresh
strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the
Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His
figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in
the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces
are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact
with the Jesus of history.
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