Address delivered to Theological Society
of F. C. College, Glasgow, Jan., 1892.
I SHALL begin by congratulating you, and
myself, on the free theological atmosphere in which it is the lot of this
society to do its work. Never has there been fresher air in that dusty
realm than there is to-day; and if we pay the price for our freedom in
bewilderment or doubt, in the suspicion of our enemies, in the helplessness
of our wisest friends to give us certainty, we have at least the sympathy
of the best around us, and the stimulus of working in an age when theology
is no longer stagnant, but the most living of all the sciences. Of what
we seem to be leaving behind us we can speak without panic or regret. Much
of what has been in faith or practice is visibly passing away. But there
is little trace in this process of deliberate destruction; it resembles
rather a natural decay. And it is the beauty of this change, and the guarantee
of its wholesomeness, that it has worked without serious violence, that
it has come, as all great kingdoms do, almost without observation.
Though this may appear to us a crisis, it
is well to remind ourselves that to true thought crisis is chronic. There
is nothing superior about ourselves that we shall have the privilege of
thinking in a new way about theology. It is the world that progresses.
Modern thought is not a new thing in history, nor is it an unrelated thing.
It is simply the growing fringe of the coral reef, the bit of land far
out, in contact on the one hand with the unexplored sea--the bit of land
far out in the ocean of unexplored truth--on the other with the territory
just taken in, and the place, in short, where busy minds are making the
additions to what other busy minds have built through the ages into the
growing continent of knowledge. After all, it is only the old reef that
we extend; it is on the past we build; and the man who ignores the continuity
of the past, and attempts to raise an island of his own, may be sure that
the world's lease of it will be very short. New ideas are, in the main,
a new light on old ideas, and nothing is gained by a ruthless handling
of the older gospel which our fathers held and taught, and which for the
most part made them better men than their sons.
But what is this newer theology, and what
is the direction of the movement where changes and perturbations come home
to us in such a society as this with so great an interest?
To some the new theology is a re-arrangement
of doctrines in a new order, a bringing of those into prominence which
suit the need and temper of the age, and an allowing of others to sink
into shadow because they are either distasteful to this generation or rest
on a basis which it will not honour. We are told, for example, that the
accent in the modern gospel is placed no longer upon faith, but rather
upon love. We are told by others that what they see is the intricate theology
of Paul beginning to give place to the simpler theology of John, or both
being for the time forgotten in the still simpler Christianity of Christ.
To others the change is from the great Latin conception of the Divine Sovereignty
of Augustine and Calvin to the earlier Greek theology, with its emphasis
on the immanence of Christ, or to its renaissance in the nineteenth century
presentation of the incarnation, and the Fatherhood of God.
But, important as these characterizations
are, to contrast the subject-matter of the new and the old Evangelism is
not enough. In a theological society we must get down to principles, and
I wish in a word to state what seems to me the essential nature of this
change, and to illustrate its practical value by plain examples.
The real contrast between the new and the
old theology is one of method. The way to make a sermon on the old lines,
for example, was to take down Hodge, or by an earlier generation Owen,
and see what the truth was, then to work from that--to proclaim what Hodge
said, to expound, assert, reiterate, appeal in the name of Hodge and anathematise
and excommunicate everybody who did not agree with Hodge. The new method
declines to begin with Hodge, or Owen, or even Calvin. It does not work
from truth, but towards truth. It aims not at asserting a
dogma, but at unearthing a principle. With all respect to authors, it yet
declines authority. These are two at least of its more obvious marks--
it does not only allow, but insists on the right of private judgment, and
it declines authority. These propositions mean practically the same thing,
and so far from being novelties are of the first essence of Protestantism.
It is only to re-assert these propositions
in a different form to say that another characteristic of the new theology
is its essential spirituality. We are accustomed to hear it opposed on
spiritual grounds, but its spirituality is really its most outstanding
feature, and as contrasted with some at least of the old theology it has
the exclusive right to the name. The mark of the old theology was that
it was made up of forms and propositions. Filled no doubt with spirit once,
that spirit had in many instances wholly evaporated, and left men nothing
to rest their souls on but a set of phrases.
The task of the newer theology has been to
pierce below these phrases and seek out the ethical truth which underlay
them: and having found that, to set up the words and phrases round it once
more if possible; and where not possible, to set up new phrases and a more
modern expression. It is of course because men have been accustomed to
these old forms that they fail to recognise the truth when clothed in other
expression, and therefore raise the cry of heresy against all who take
the more inward or spiritual view.
Two classes in the community must of necessity,
and always, oppose the new foundation--the Pharisee who is not able to
see spirit for forms, and the lazy man who will not take the trouble to
see spirit in form. It is always easier to assert truth than to examine
it, to accept it ready made than to verify it for oneself, and we must
always have a class who are guilty of these intellectual sins, who mistake
credulity for faith and superstition for knowledge. The calm way in which
these men assume that they are right and put all the rest of us on our
defence is a miracle of effrontery, a miracle only exceeded in wonder by
the tolerant way it is submitted to. I am not sure but that if Christ were
among us He would not denounce the Pharisee as He did of old.
But it is not enough to say that the new
theological quest is a movement in the direction of spirituality. What
is that spirituality? Is it a mere vagueness, a substitution of the shifting
sand of the mysterious, and the undefined for the buttressed logic of the
older doctrines? On the contrary, it is the most definite thing in the
world. Instead of relaxing the hold on truth, the new method makes the
grasp of the mind upon it a thousand times more certain. Instead of blurring
the vision of unseen things, it renders them self-transparent; instead
of making acceptance a matter of mere opinion, or of upbringing, or of
tradition, it forces truth on the mind with a new authority--an authority
never before to the same extent introduced into theological teaching. That
authority is the authority of law. The basis--like the basis of all modern
knowledge--of the coming theology is a scientific basis. It is a basis
on great ethical principles. It is not a series of conceptions deduced
from another central conception or grouped round a favoured doctrine of
a favourite Divine--a Calvinism, a Lutheranism, an Arminianism,
or any conceivable ism. It is a grouping round law, spiritual, moral,
natural law, a structure reared on the eternal order of the world, and
therefore natural, self-evident, self-sustaining and invulnerable.
This method, dealing as it does with law
and spirit, ignores nothing, denies nothing, and formally supplants nothing
in the older subject-matter; but it tries to get deeper into the heart
of it, and seeks a new life even in doctrines which seem to have long since
petrified into stone. This was largely Christ's own method. He dealt with
principles--His teaching was mainly excavation--the disinterring of hidden
things, the bringing to light of the profound ethical principles hidden
beneath Rabbinic subtleties and Pharisaic forms.
The Reformation--Protestantism--these were
large attempts in the same direction, and modern thought is the heir to
this spirit. Being a process of growth, and not a series of operations
upon specific theological positions, this method is in the best sense constructive.
It can never destroy except empty forms. To be negative, to oppose or denounce
time-honoured doctrines is poor work--poor work which unfortunately many
minds and pens and pulpits are continually trying to do. The only legitimate
way to destroy an old doctrine is Christ's way to fulfil it. Instead of
busying themselves about its death and calling their congregations ostentatiously
to attend the funeral, the new theology will invite them rather to witness
anew the resurrection of the undying spirit still hidden beneath the worn-out
body of its older form.
As an illustration of what I mean, I propose
to select one or two Christian doctrines which in their current forms have
lost their power for thinking men, and try to show how these may live once
more and play a powerful part in current teaching. One or two of the greatest
Christian truths have already been so abundantly re-illuminated and re-spiritualised
by modern literature and preaching that one need only name them. An admirable
case is the doctrine of inspiration. It is idle to deny that the authority
of the Bible was all but gone within this generation. The old view had
become absolutely untenable, misleading and mischievous. But from the hands
of reverent men who have studied the inward characters of these
books, we have again got our Bible. The theory of development, the study
of the Bible as a library of religious writings rather than as a book;
the treatment of the writers as authors and not as pens; the mere discovery
that religion has not come out of the Bible, but that the Bible has come
out of religion: these announcements have not only destroyed with a breath
a hundred infidel objections to Scripture, but opened up a world of new
life and interest to Christian people.
So thoroughly has the spiritual as opposed
to the mechanical theory of inspiration imbued all recent teaching that
the battle for Scotland at least may be said to be now won. If there is
anything further to be said on the subject, indeed, it is to caution ourselves
against going too far or being very positive.
Modern criticism in this country, especially
of the Old Testament, is not in a good way. The permission to embark upon
it at all is sudden, and very few men are sufficiently equipped for a responsible
reconstruction. Probably in Old Testament criticism there are not ten competent
experts in the country, and these are all more or less disagreed, and what
is more, afraid to announce their disagreements lest the others should
turn and rend them. One of the greatest of these ten has just written an
important book. I happen to know that it is being handed about among the
nine for a review in a certain high-class theological monthly, and not
a man of them will touch it.
Hasty conclusions as to authorship or canonicity
are as foreign to the scientific spirit as the old dogmatism. Guinness
Rogers has well pointed out that in the far future, when English has become
a dead language, almost no internal evidence would allow the literary critic
to allocate the authorship of John Gilpin, e.g., to the melancholy
recluse who wrote the Olney hymns; and in dealing with questions of Biblical
authorship the minute scholarship of this day, based on favourite words
and particular styles of thought, is often in danger of ignoring such broader
facts as the versatility of human nature, the changing moods of thinkers,
the contradictions which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exhibit within the same
man's soul at the same period, or at contrasted periods of his life of
which history can keep no cognisance.
This remark applies with even greater force
to the subject-matter of the Books. We have treatises written, for instance,
on the theology of Peter. Men talk of the Petrine conception of this and
the Petrine presentation of that; they contrast the Petrine standpoint
with the Pauline and the Johannine, and even go the length of fixing the
proportion in which the various theological truths were held in the Petrine
system. The absurdity of all this may be seen from a single fact. The entire
Petrine remains that have come down to us and upon which all these elaborate
structures are reared amount to a page or two, all that the apostle ever
wrote or all that is left to us. They could be read to a congregation in
exactly half the time that it would take a minister to deliver a half-hour's
sermon. Think of the absurdity of judging a man's theology, or the proportion
in which he held its various parts, by half a sermon, and you will never
again hear the word Petrine without a smile. The men, and especially the
Germans, who allow internal evidence--not seeing its excessive limitations--to
be abused in this way are the true literalists, and their provincial analysis
can only hinder the victory of a spiritual cause. If the new theology is
the scientific spirit, that class of work is its stultification.
But to pass on to another instance. The unearthing
of the tremendous ethical principle underlying the atonement is now restoring
that central doctrine to theology just when in its mechanical forms it
was on the point of being discredited by every thinking mind. The Salvation
Army preacher, it is true, still preaches it as a syllogism, and pays the
penalty in the utter apathy or mystification of his hearers at least on
that point. But no man who preaches the spirit of it, instead of the phrases
of it, will lose his audience. The man who makes words, even Bible words,
the substitute for thought, can never be understood of the common people
at the present day. There is nothing the street preacher needs to be warned
against with more earnestness than the mechanical preaching of the syllogisms
of the atonement. One listens often and with admiration and respect to
the powerful way the street preacher brings home the great facts of personal
sin to the crowd around him, to his almost melting appeal for instant decision
to this offer of salvation--nearly always in my experience glowing with
real enthusiasm and backed with an almost contagious faith and hope. But
when he tries at that point to answer the simple inquiry, How? when he
stands face to face with the question of the drunkard leaning against the
lamp-post, "What must I, the drunkard, standing here to-night in Argyle
Street, do to be saved?" he takes refuge in some text or metaphor,
a proposition, and passes on. What I complain of in Gospel addresses is
that many have no Gospel in them, no tangible thing for a drowning man
to really see and clutch. They break down at the very point where they
ought to be most strong and luminous. To tell the average wife-beater to
take shelter behind the blood or to hide himself in the cleft is to put
him off with a phrase. I do not object to these metaphors, I believe in
metaphors. I go the length of holding that you never get nearer to truth
than in a metaphor; but you have not told this man the whole truth about
your metaphor, nor have you touched his soul or his affections with what
lies beneath that metaphor; and it falls upon his ear as a tale he has
heard a thousand times before. It is not obstinacy that keeps this poor
man from religion--it is pure bewilderment as to what in the world we are
driving at. The new theology when it preaches the atonement will not be
less loyal to that doctrine, but more. It will not take refuge in the poor
excuse for slipshod preaching and unthought-out doctrines that we must
wait for God's light to break. God's light breaks through some men's preaching,
through some clear, honest, convincing statement of truth, and not occultly.
Faith cometh by hearing, and if our plan of salvation is not telling upon
our audience it is blasphemy to blame God's spirit. The blame lies in our
own spirit and in our offering words instead of spirit, and in our neglect
to spend time and thought, in trying to get down to the professed meaning
and omnipotent dynamic of the law of Sacrifice.
If a man has not something more to say about
the atonement than the conventional phrases, let him be silent. By introducing
from time to time he may earn the cheap reputation of being orthodox; but
it is for him to consider whether that is an object for which his conscience
will let him work. There are thousands of tender and conscientious souls
now in our midst who cannot find that foothold on the conventional doctrine
which they are led to believe their teachers have, and without which they
feel themselves excommunicate from the work of the Church and the fold
of Christ. If we see no further behind these words, let us say so, and
not keep up this fraud, or preach these words, until we have sunk our spirits
in them and can teach them with vital force and truth.
* * * * *
Gentlemen, I do not for a moment mean that
we are to treat our congregations to dissertations on biology. Nature--human
nature--are to be to us but discoveries of things as they are, the expression
of principle, the theatre, on whose stupendous stage each can see with
his own eyes the great laws act.
And this leads me to a final statement. We
have seen that the method of the new Evangelism is to deal with principles.
The mental act by which we are to search for truth, truth being in this
spiritual form, is not therefore to be so much the reason, but the imagination.
We are to put up truth when we deliver truth to others, not in the propositional
form, but in some visual form--some form in which it will be seen without
any attempt to prove. Truth never really requires to be proved. The best
you can do for a law is to exhibit it.
Gentlemen, as a preparation for the work
of the new Evangelism in which you are to spend your lives, I commend you
to the study of the principles of the laws of God in nature, and in human
nature: the development of that seeing power, as opposed to mere logic,
which discerns the unseen through the seen. About the greatest thing a
man can do, Ruskin tells us, is to see something, and tell others what
he sees.
The Gospel as Christ gave it was a gift to
the seeing power in man. His speech was almost wholly addressed to the
imagination, to the imagination in its true sense, and this, which is the
highest language of science, is also the language of poetry and of the
poetry of the soul, which is religion. Unless we can fill the new theology
with what the soul sees and feels, and sees to be true and feels to be
living, it will be as juiceless and inert as the old dogmatic.
For it is only a living spirit of truth that
can touch dead spirit, and the test of any theology is not that it is logically
clear or even intellectually solid, but that it carries with it some sanctifying
power.
These examples of the rejuvenescence of old
truths under the more spiritual treatment of an ethical theology are more
or less obvious. I wish in the time that remains to apply the method a
little more in detail to one particular department of theology, which is
perhaps less intruded upon by modern teachers. The revolt of the moral
sense of this country against the doctrine of a physical hell, and the
appeal to a Judgment Day, has lately led to almost complete silence on
the whole subject of eschatology. Is this great theme or any part of it
--say the conception of a Day of Judgment--not capable of a deeper ethical
treatment? If the Divine judgment upon sin lies in the natural law of heredity,
may we not find among the laws of the moral world some larger and more
universal principle of judgment which shall restore the appeal of these
forgotten dogmas to their place in religious teaching? It is quite clear
we must discuss this or remain silent. No man can now say such words to
his people as these--I quote from no less an authority than Jonathan Edwards,--"The
God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or
some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you. It is nothing but His
Hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it is to be
ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to Hell last night; and there
is no other reason why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in
the morning. . . . There is nothing else to be given as a reason why you
do not this very moment drop down into Hell."
That kind of thing is not over, though we
may hear little of it.
Many of you have seen some, at least, of
the great classical pictures of the Last Judgment. Here [in the next chapter]
is Ruskin's account of the greatest of them all, the Last Judgment of Tintoretto,
which hangs on a well-known church wall in Venice, in full view of the
congregation.