SAMUEL J. ANDREWS
CHRISTIANITY AND ANTI-CHRISTIANITY IN THEIR FINAL CONFLICT
PART III
Tendencies in Our Day Preparing the Way of the Anti-Christ.
(Pub. by The Bible Colportage Institution: Chicago, 2nd edition, 1898.)
An Introductory note from Daniel Gracely to website visitors:
The following four chapters from Christianity and Anti-Christianity in Their Final Conflict, by Samuel J. Andrews, trace the effect of pantheistic thinking upon Western philosophy, and, in turn, that part of the Protestant Church which at length embraced modern Christian liberalism. Andrews picks up the trail from Spinoza on, discussing a variety of thinkers or movements. This includes German higher criticism, in which terms like “incarnation,” “Son of God,” etc., all became linguistically deconstructed by that movement’s religious or philosophical thinkers. Some, perhaps even much, of this shift in theological thinking happened during Andrews’ own generation, at least insofar as the brand of pantheistic language the Higher critics used, which owed considerable debt to German Idealism. Reading and studying this section has personally helped me to see that Calvinism is merely one expression of pantheism and thus not unique at its core. By “expression” (in this context) I mean the language symbols (sounds or ‘words’) that are peculiar to one type of pantheist-espousing religious or philosophical group of thinkers. Such language symbols which are pressed into service for pantheism nevertheless change appearance among different pantheistic thinkers or movements (as it does in Barthianism compared to Calvinism, for example). But, of course, the principle of pantheism in all these movements remains the same—the loss of individuation in its terms. This principle is perhaps most notably seen in the repeated emphasis (implicit or forthright) endorsing the divinization of the Mind of man. Since I found Andrews’ chapters striking and, further, germane to the subject of my book, I have included them on the website.)
The following content is by Samuel J. Andrews
(Note: endnotes in this section come after each chapter respectively)
Modern Pantheistic Philosophy
We can readily see in the early departure of the Church from the primitive order through the loss of the first love, what the line of subsequent development must be if there were no repentance and return. The Head unable to exercise the full prerogatives of His Headship; the Holy Ghost unable to life up His voice to warn and instruct; the Church thinking to build up a kingdom in this world, and to rule in it; here are all the elements of a history full of peril and struggle. Of this history for eighteen centuries we are not now to speak. Looking backward, we may see its winding course, its mingled good and evil, the growth of the tares and wheat. But passing over the time intervening, we fix our attention upon the present tendencies and movements in the Church and in Christendom, and ask, To what goal are hey leading? To know this, we must consider the new conceptions of God, of Creation, of the Incarnation, of the Person and work of Christ, of the relation of the Church to the world, and of the coming of the kingdom of God. As the marked tendency in our day is in Philosophy and Theology to spiritual Monism, we begin with Philosophy, that through it we may better understand the principles underlying and directing modern religious thought, and determining its outward expression.
The relation of philosophy to religion is in itself a very close one; and in modern Germany philosophy is equivalent to speculative theology. Philosophy has for its problem to bring all existence into unity, to find some first principle which is the ground of all, and embraces all. It looks behind phenomena to learn their causes; through the ever changing to find the unchanging; through the many to the One. The object of its search is the first great Cause, the ultimate Essence, the Absolute Being, or God; and thus get rid of all dualism. As philosophy necessarily affects the conception of men respecting God, and therefore the conception of their relations to him, and of His actings toward them, it must affect their religion; hence we see the importance of our present inquiry: What does the most recent and current philosophy teach us of God?
It will hardly be questioned by any one competent to judge, that the tendency of modern philosophical thought is to undermine the faith of men in a personal God; and, in general, in all that system of religious doctrine which has the Incarnate Son as its center, and is embodies in the Catholic Creeds, It needs scarcely be said that, so far as this is done, the way is being prepared for him who “exalts himself above all this is called God, or that is worshipped.” So long as men have faith in a personal God, the Creator of the worlds and of man, One who governs all things according to His will, and exists apart from all, no man can seat himself in the temple of God “showing himself that he is God”; such a claim would be instantly rejected as both blasphemous and absurd. Before such a claim could be listened to, there must be wrought in many minds such a change in their conception of God that this claim of Divinity would not offend them as something strange and incredible, but be accepted as wholly consistent with what they believe of the Divine nature, and of its relations to humanity.
The purpose of this enquiry, therefore, is to ascertain how far the orthodox Christian conception of God as personal, the Creator and Ruler of all, is being effaced, and that of an impersonal God substituted for it. So far as this is done, the conception also of the Incarnation of the Son of God as held by the Church is radically changed. Instead of the union of “the two natures in one Person,” the essential unity of the Divine and human natures is asserted, and the way, and the way thus opened for the deified man, our enquiry relates chiefly to the tendencies toward the denial of the Father and the Son as seen in Agnosticism and Pantheism, but a few words must be said also of Atheism.
Atheism: The term Atheist is often applied to those who deny any supreme Being with intelligence and will, the Creator of the world, and distinct from it. It is often also applied to those who say that, if such a Being exists, we can have no knowledge of Him. But this is to confound Atheism with Pantheism, on the one side, and with Agnosticism, on the other. We can, strictly speaking, call only those atheists who deny any design or order in the universe, any first principle or cause, personal or impersonal.. These may be classed as idealistic and materialistic atheists; the idealistic, who affirm God to be an idealistic fiction, an idea of their own minds; the materialistic, who affirm that all that exists is matter and motion, “atoms and empty space”; and that we need only atoms and their properties to explain the universe.
Atheism has never had any great number of advocates, for it is repugnant to the laws of our intellectual nature, and to all noble moral aspirations. Yet, in recent times, a good many scientific men have professed themselves materialists, finding support for their belief in the newly-discovered properties of atoms, and the supposed fact of the conservation of energy. Tyndall defines matter as “that mysterious thing which accomplishes all the phenomena of the universe,” and in which is “the potency of all life.” Huxley says, though his utterances are often inconsistent that “the physiology of the future will gradually enlarge the realm of matter and law until it is coexistent with knowledge, with feeling, and with action.” The materialistic school in Germany has been, of late years, especially aggressive, and ahs largely affected the popular mind, Probably the number of those who affirm matter to be self-existent, and find in it the substance of all being, is now considerable, The atoms are their God, and for a Creator and moral Ruler they have no need.
Atheism thus sets aside, not only the Christian religion, but all religion. As it has no ultimate spiritual principle, nothing but physical forces, there is nothing to worship. And, as there is no future life, as much as possible must be made of the present. According as it prevails among the people there must be seen increased devotion to material interests, with growing disregard of the intellectual and spiritual. Science, because it craves absolute and unchangeable law, is favorable inclined to materialism. It dislikes any Divine interposition; its aim is physical, not moral.
Agnosticism: This term, claimed by Professor Huxley as a word of his coinage, is used to express man’s necessary ignorance of God. In itself it is a negative rather than positive term. Agnostics do not, like atheists, deny absolutely that there is a God, but say, we cannot know whether He exists or not; and, if He exists, we do not know that we have any true knowledge of Him, The central principle of Agnosticism is thus the unknowability of God arising from the limitations of our minds. As this is a mode of thought already quite general, and bears directly upon the main point of our enquiry, we must briefly consider it; first, in its philosophical principle, secondly, in its religious applications.
Going no further back than to Hume (d. 1776), who has been called the father of modern Agnosticism, we find him denying that we have any true knowledge of the attributes of God, whose existence, however, he did not deny. But all our ideas of Him are, and must be, anthropomorphic. “The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery.”
This Agnosticism was the logical result of the philosophical principle then generally accepted, that all knowledge is based upon experience.
It was reserved to Kant (d. 1804) to make Agnosticism an integral part of his philosophy. He affirmed that all we can know of things external to us is their phenomena; of what is back of these phenomena, and underlying them, we are, and must be, ignorant. Of the three great objects of knowledge, God, Nature, and Man, we can affirm nothing certain, Kant gives three antinomies-contradictory propositions-which, he affirms, can neither be proved not disproved. 1.”There exists, either as a part of the world or as the cause of it, an absolutely necessary Being; Contra, An absolutely necessary Being does not exist.” 2.”The cosmos had a beginning, and is limited in space; Contra, The cosmos had no beginning, and is not limited but infinite.” 3.”The soul is an indissoluble and indestructible unity; Contra, The soul is dissoluble and transitory.” (critique of Pure Reason. Meiklejohn’s Trans.)
Thus, according to the Kantian philosophy, reason is unable to attain any certainty as to these vital points; “it is hemmed in by a press of opposite and contradictory conclusions.” It is true that Kant attempted in another way to prove the existence of a God, but only s a postulate or pre-supposition, made necessary in order that man may keep the moral law, which is imperative. God exists because a necessary means to enable man to gain the victory over evil. It is generally admitted that this attempt is unsuccessful, and that any positive affirmation of God’s existence is inconsistent with the leading idea of his philosophical system. Dorner says of this system that “it leaves to the Divine, as compared with the Human, merely the semblance of existence.” Professor Seth (”Scottish Philosophy”) remarks: “Kant is the fons et origo of the most cultured agnosticism of the day.” Religion with Kant is simply morality, and Christ’s significance is only that of a moral Ideal; and, therefore, our faith in Him is moral, not historical. “A rational theology must be founded upon the laws of morality.” Humanity is the true Son of God. Whether the Scriptures are historically true or not, is a matter of no real importance, since the ideal of reason alone has validity.
Thus Kant, by denying that we can have any true knowledge of God, of the world, or of man, laid the foundation of an universal skepticism. As the mind can think only under its limitations, our conception of God must be anthropomorphic, and, therefore, both unreal and unworthy. Nevertheless, “the notion of a Supreme Being is in many respects a highly useful idea.”
As bearing upon this point of Agnosticism, two later writers should be mentioned, Hamilton and Mansel. The purpose of Hamilton, in opposition to the German pantheists, was to show that the Infinite and the Absolute are beyond the limits of our knowledge. He affirms that “All we immediately know, or can know, is the conditioned, the relative, the phenomenal, the finite.” “We cannot know the Infinite through a finite notion, or have a finite knowledge of an Infinite object of knowledge.” Hamilton thus placed himself in direct opposition to all who think that they can define and understand the nature of God. In this sense he was an agnostic; but he also affirmed that,”through faith we apprehend what is be- yond our knowledge.” “When I deny that the Infinite can by us be known, I am far from denying that it must, and ought to be believed.”
Mansel (”Limits of Religious Thought”) takes in substance the same ground. “The conception of the Absolute and the Infinite, from whatever side we view it, appears encompassed with contradictions.” “To speak of an absolute or infinite Person, is simply to use language to which, however true it may be in a superhuman sense, no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself.” Yet Mansel believed in such an absolute and infinite Person. “We are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe in the existence of an absolute and infinite Being.” And this being is personal. “The highest existence is still the highest personality; and the source of all being reveals Himself by His name, ‘I am.’” Thus Mansel agrees with Hamilton that “Belief cannot be solely determined by reason.” The seeming contradictions between reason and belief may exist only in our minds, and prove simply the limitations of thought.
But, however good in themselves the motives of these philosophers, it cannot be denied that their affirmations of the necessary ignorance of men in regard to God have given a strong impulse to Agnosticism.1 The inference is that, as we can know so little of Him because of our mental limitations, it is useless to carry on the search. And, it is also objected, that to affirm faith without knowledge is credulity. Let us, then, they say, resign ourselves to ignorance. Some of those who thus speak are, doubt- less, willing to be ignorant, and glad to find some philosophic grounds on which to stand; but there are others, in their hearts seekers after God, who are burdened and perplexed by the intellectual difficulties which all questions connected with the Infinite and Eternal must present.2
Pantheism: As to know rightly this form of error is of the highest importance in our enquiry, it is necessary to state as clearly as possible its leading principle and to illustrate it; this will be best done by a brief outline of its modem historical development
The essential element of Pantheism, as stated by Saisset (”Pantheism”),”is the unity of God and nature, of the Infinite and the finite, in one single substance.” The Infinite is not swallowed up in the finite, nor the finite in the Infinite, but both co-exist; and this co-existence is necessary and eternal. Thus we have the One and the many, the Absolute, the All. It will have no dualism, it will unify nature, man, and God. Let us trace the development of this principle, and for this purpose it is necessary to speak of Spinoza.
Descartes (d. 1 650), the founder of modem philosophy, who distinguished God from nature as its Creator, divided nature into the two created substances, extension and thought. But these have nothing in common, and thus arose a dualism that he was not able to reconcile. Spinoza (d. 1677) attempted to set this dualism aside by affirming one Substance, embracing both thought and extension, both God and nature. This Substance, infinite and absolute, has an infinity of attributes; but of these we know only the two, thought and extension, each of which has an infinity of finite modes. This Substance, the permanent reality under all transient phenomena, is ever changing; all finite things are only passing modes of its being, transient manifestations of its essence, coming out of it and again absorbed into it Spinoza called this substance God. Man, as to his body, is simply a mode of the Divine extension; as to his soul, of the Divine thought. Both are individualizations of the Infinite.
If this Substance be God, embracing in Himself all existence-the Absolute, the All in all-we ask, Has He consciousness, intelligence, will? No, says Spinoza. These are elements of personality, and He is impersonal We cannot ascribe to Him purpose or design; He is with out feeling; He cannot love or pity, reward or punish; of His own will He creates nothing; all things eternally exist, and are in a perpetual flow. He is the universal and impersonal principle of the universe, which has neither beginning nor end.
Thus there is one Substance in which co-exists the Infinite and finite. But here the problem meets us: How does the Infinite become the finite; the Absolute, the relative; the One, the many? How does the one impersonal Substance become personal in man? The dualism of Descartes is not set aside; God and nature, extension and thought, soul and body, remain distinct as before.
This pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza was for a time little understood, and generally regarded as atheism. That it wholly denies the Christian belief respecting God, need not be said. Man is not a creature of God made in His image, but a part of Him, a finite manifestation of His infinite essence; he has no free will, and cannot be morally responsible. No finite thing has any reality, all reality is in God.
So well satisfied was Spinoza with his philosophy that he could say:” I have explained the nature of God;” and modem German philosophers have called him,” The god-intoxicated man.”
The attention of philosophers following Spinoza was chiefly given to other questions, such as the origin of our knowledge, and the nature of our mental powers. Of Kant and his teaching notice has already been taken so far as is necessary for our purpose. He left the dualism between thought and being, subject and object, phenomenon and noumenon unsolved. Indeed, his distinction between the pure and the practical Reason made it more conspicuous.
Fichte (d. 1814) took up the problem, affirming that all things must be derived from a single principle, and solved it by making the subject or the Ego supreme; it creates the object. Everything external to itself exists only in the consciousness of the Ego, a form of its productive activity. Nature is reduced to a non-entity. “The conception of a particular substance is impossible and contradictory” The universe, and even God Himself, are of the mind’s creation, so that Fichte could say to his class: “Gentlemen, now we will create God.” The supreme Being in his system is no more than the Moral Order of the world: “We need no other, and can comprehend no other.” This moral order is what Mr. Arnold calls “the Power that makes for righteousness.”
This idealism of Fichte was in its principle rather atheistic than pantheistic, but became pantheistic in its later development. For our purpose it is important to note how it tends to the exaltation of man, on the one side, and to the annihilation of God, on the other. Of his philosophy Bomer says: “Each man per se is immediately, not through the mediation of Christ, but by nature, God. . . God is the only reality in any one.” Christ has, indeed, an unique place as the first born Son of God, but “all men are equal to Him in that which constitutes their proper reality.” It is said by Morell (Hist, of Phil.),”With Fichte the idea of nature and the idea of God absolutely vanished; self became the sole existence in the universe, and from its own power and activity everything human was constructed”; and to the same effect Prof. Seth: “Self, as the eternal sustaining subject of the Universe, formed the beginning, middle, and end of the system.”
In Schelling (d. 1854) the pantheistic element comes much more clearly into view. Of the two factors, subject and object, thought and being, God and nature, he will not with Fichte allow the one to swallow up the other; but will identify them in one primary and eternal essence or first Principle, which is hardly to be distinguished from the Substance of Spinoza. This first Principle is ever developing itself, or “embodying its own infinite attributes in the finite.” Thought and being cannot be separated, for thought is shown to be in all nature by the presence of law. But there are degrees of thought from unconscious matter to conscious man, and the law of the development of the infinite Essence is from lower to higher. “It develops itself sometimes with, and sometimes without self-consciousness.”” Nature,” says Schelling,” sleeps in the plant, dreams in the animal, wakens in man.”” Mind in man is nothing else but nature gradually raised to a state of consciousness.” The universal Divine life runs through a process, but can manifest itself only in finite forms, and so comes under limitations, each individual form being necessarily imperfect. But as being the Divine life in each individual, the finite is not merely finite; it is that in which God has His historical life.” It is God in his growth.” The collective finite, or the world, is the Son of God. This incarnation of God in Nature is the principle of philosophy, everything is to be explained by it. But it is in man that this absolute essence, or God, comes to the full possession of itself, or to self -consciousness; and man, therefore, is the highest of beings. In him the process of the Divine development comes to its culmination. Of this development Morell remarks that “all difference between God and the universe is entirely lost. Schelling’s pantheism is as complete as that of Spinoza.” Of some later modifications of his philosophy it is not necessary here to speak.
It is at this point that Hegel (d. 1831) took up the problem, accepting much from his predecessors. He begins with pure undetermined being, or, what is equivalent, with Nothing with zero; and this he calls the Idea, or God; and out of this must all things come. Creation is not an act. “Without the world God would not be God.” It is, therefore, only an eternal process of becoming which he has to explain. He finds the law of this process to be the law of thought. As thoughts alone are real existences, and are creative powers, the laws of thought are those of being. Thus the two kingdoms of thought and being, or of spirit and nature, are one. In individual things there is no reality, man is a passing phenomenon; the only reality is in the first Principle, the Idea; in other words, in God. In all its determinations this first Principle determines itself; in producing differences, it produces itself in them. The Infinite becomes the finite; the Absolute, the relative. In all these determinations there is progress, but man only of finite things attains to self -consciousness. In him the self- determining Principle, or God, who is everywhere in nature, comes to know Himself, or to self-realization; as distinct from the world, He has no self -consciousness; He attains to this in man. Thus man is both one with nature and with the absolute Spirit, and, therefore, the highest of beings, the last in the chain of development; in fine, man is God.
Thus we have, according to this philosophy, a spiritual principle or essence called God, which is eternally differentiating itself, or eternally becoming. All finite, or differentiated existences are simply necessary modes of His existence,-progressive manifestations of the One Infinite Essence. The law of this progress Hegel lays down as, “The identity of contradictions.” It is not necessary to our purpose here to speak of this; we are now concerned only with the nature of the relation which he makes to exist between the Infinite and the finite, between God and man. And we see here his advance upon Spinoza. With Spinoza there is no real progress, man is but one of the transient forms of finite being; with Hegel, he is the end of the series. Only in man does God folly realize Himself.
It is true, and should be said, that there has been much dispute among the students of this philosophy whether Hegel meant to absolutely deny the personality of God, and the immortality of man, or not But the most competent and impartial interpreters so understand his philosophy. It has been very recently said by Professor Seth (”Hegelianism and Personality” ) “If the system leaves us without any self-conscious existence in the universe beyond that realized in the self-consciousness of individuals, the saying means that God, in any ordinary acceptation of the term, is eliminated from our philosophy altogether – the self -existence of God seems to disappear. . . Evidently this is to renounce the idea of anything like a separate personality or self-consciousness in the Divine Being.” “As to immortality, Hegel shelves the question.”
With Hegel the climax seems to be reached, the last word to be spoken. All dualism is resolved, God alone exists. He is the All, both the Infinite and the finite, the Absolute and the relative, the Eternal and the temporal. His life is an Eternal process of self-development. We know the law of His development, and that its ultimate term is man. Humanity is the consummation of Divinity.
Of the later developments of the Hegelian Philosophy in Germany it is not necessary here to speak. Its three great divisions into Right, Middle, and Left, are well known. The first attempts to reconcile this philosophy with the personality of God, and the immortality of the soul; the second holds God’s personality ”in a general pantheistic sense,” but denies immortality, and the Christ of the Church; the last knows no God apart from the world, no immortality, and no Incarnation but that in which all men alike partake. In this school are Strauss and Feuerbach, whose position will be examined in another place.
Pessimism: The chief representatives of this philosophy are the Germans, Schopenhauer and Hartman. The fundamental principle, as said by Professor Bowen (”Modern Philosophy”), is that “there is an universal, all-pervading Will, a blind, and incognitive, and unconscious God; coinciding in this respect with the one universal substance of Spinoza.” Of this Will every individual human existence is but a transient phenomenon, and death is its annihilation. Christianity as a religion Schopenhaur wholly rejects, as, indeed, he does all religions except that of the Buddhists, which denies the existence of a God. He says (Religion and other Essays, Trans. 1893) that” Everything true in Christianity is found in Brahmanism and Buddhism.” The world is the worst of all possible worlds; nothing is so God as to cease to be.” All qualities are innate, the bad as well as the God,” and” a man’s acts proceed from his innate and unalterable character”; they cannot be other than they are. Of Hartmann, Professor Bowen says: “He is a thorough-going monist;” his unconscious “Principle” is the equivalent of Spinoza’s “Substance” and Schopenhauer’s “Will.” In the universe is no mark of an intelligent free will. The world, if not the worst possible, is so bad that we are “to will the annihilation of all things, and thus get rid of the misery of existence.” “The blissful repose of nothingness” is the consummation, the haven of rest, to which we look forward.
That this pessimistic philosophy is gaining an increasing hold upon the public mind, seems to be shown by the larger circulation of its writings, both in Germany and elsewhere; but, if so, this must be ascribed chiefly to the loss of faith in God, and of the hope of a higher future life. None of its advocates openly commend suicide; but this mode of ending a miserable existence is one which must naturally suggest itself, and be more chosen as the gloom of the last days darkens over the earth.
Of the bearings of this pessimistic philosophy on morality, something will be said later.
Neo-Kantianism, or Hegelianism: Of this philosophy, which has within a recent period appeared in Scotland and England, and whose chief representatives are the late Professor T. H. Green, and the Professors E. and J. Caird, some words may be said. So far as we are here concerned with it, it does not differ in any essential point from original Hegelianism. Its central tenet, as we are told by Professor A. Seth ( ‘^ Hegelianism and Personality” ) is “the identification of the transcendental self with a Divine or creative Self”; or, in other words, the identification of the Divine and the human self -consciousness. As regards this Divine Self, or, as it is frequently called, “Spiritual Principle,” there is much vagueness of expression. Professor E. Caird (”Evolution of Religion” ) speaks of it as “a self -determining Principle manifesting itself in all the determinations of the finite.” It is said to be ‘’somehow present and active in each individual.” Is this “Spiritual Principle” the Christian God ? Does it exist for itself, with a distinct self-consciousness, and with all that constitutes personality? Apparently not. Its self -consciousness is that of the individual man, separated from which it is nothing. But this takes away the individual self-consciousness; and, as said by Professor Seth, “man’s selfhood and independence are wiped out with a completeness which few systems of pantheism can rival.” “There is only one self-the Universal or Divine-and this all-embracing subject manifests itself alike in the object and in the subject of human consciousness; in nature and in man. Both are God, though they appear to be somewhat on their own account.”
Of the pantheistic character of this Neo-Hegelian philosophy, it is said by Professor Upton (”Bases of Religious Belief” ), writing of Professor E. Caird’s “Evolution of Religion” : “So far as I can understand his position, it is simply unmitigated pantheism, for, according to it, every moral decision to which man comes, noble or base, is an act for which no human being but only God is responsible.” “Sin, repentance, moral responsibility, become only empty words.”
Evolutionary Philosophy: Of this philosophy Mr. H. Spencer is the chief representative. He must be classed among the agnostics, as affirming that no definite conception of the Infinite or Absolute is possible. For a personal God he substitutes a Force or Energy which he calls “The Unknowable,” but of which, he says, we have a dim but positive consciousness. We know it “to exist,” to be a “reality,” “the first cause of all,” “the source of power”; in a word, “an infinite and eternal Energy by which all things are created and sustained.” Yet he tells us, also, that it is “utterly inscrutable,” “absolutely incomprehensible,” ” forever inconceivable.”
In what relation does this Energy stand to the universe? It is its cause. There has been no act of creation, but an eternal evolutionary process, passing in endless cycles from “the imperceptible to the perceptible, and back again from the perceptible to the imperceptible.” The law of this process is “the continuous redistribution of matter and motion.” Nothing that exists can be other than it is; all life, intellectual and moral, as well as animal, comes under this law.
We are here concerned with this philosophy only as it bears upon religion. Having substituted for a personal God “an infinite and eternal Energy,” can we worship it? Mr. Spencer thinks that the feeling of wonder and awe which it inspires, is worship. It has, indeed, no positive attributes, it is not God, or wise, or merciful, or just; it is merely a force working unconsciously and blindly; but we are told that this is better than the Christian God, and that if we cannot pray to it, or bow down in worship, we can fear and wonder as we behold its mighty workings in the universe.
It is apparent that belief in such a dynamic force can have no more practical bearing upon the moral conduct of life than the belief in gravitation. It has in it no religious element. It not only denies the personality of God; but the personality of man also; and presents to us only nature, and man, as under a process of Evolution which has neither beginning nor end. For immortality there is no place. Man being only one of the forms of expression of the Universal Energy, has no free will, and no moral responsibility. It need not be said that with this philosophy revealed religion has no possible points of contact, and least of all has Christianity.
Of the Hegelian philosophy a recent writer says “In itself it is unmixed anthropotheism, not the exaltation of a creature into the place of God, but the assertion that the creature is the sole and essential God. . . Alas! Herein lies its bad excellence, that while utterly expunging from creation, as a popular representation, a present Deity; while rejecting an Incarnate Saviour, an indwelling Spirit, an inspired record, a coming day of judgment; its subtlety is such that there is no point of Christian verity, no office of the adorable Trinity, no text of Holy Writ, for which it has not an appropriate niche in its temple of lies. It contradicts nothing, it stultifies everything; it confounds, neutralizes, and eliminates all objects of present faith. It is the first truly philosophical system which, denying the life to come, eternizes the present. . . The thought of man is the fountain, the judgment of man the judge, of all things. . . And man, though as an individual bom and mortal, is as man the eternal essence.” A German writer says of it that it is “a paganism dressed up anew, and sublimed to a self-adoring worship of mind.” A very recent writer, Professor Wenley (”Contemporary Theology and Theism” ) says: The warring of the pantheistic and monotheistic tendencies, both implicitly present in Hegel, ended, unfortunately, in a complete victory for the former.”
In examining the anti-Christian influences now at work, we find the current pantheistic philosophy the most fundamental and powerful. Beginning with the century, it has now penetrated all regions of human thought. Theology, Literature, Science, Art, all bear its impress. Its growing influence has been often noted. It is said by J. S. Mill (1840):” The philosophical writings of Schelling and Hegel have given pantheistic principles a complacent admission and a currency which they never before this age possessed in any part of Christendom.” Buchanan (1857) says: “The grand ultimate struggle between Christianity and Atheism will resolve itself into a controversy between Christianity and Pantheism.” Saisset (1868) speaks of Pantheism “as having made, and daily making, the most alarming progress.” “This is the beginning and end of German philosophy, it begins with skepticism, it ends with Pantheism.” It is said by E. Caird (1888):” In the scientific life of Germany there is no greater power at present than Hegelianism, especially in all that relates to metaphysics, and thus to the philosophy and history of religion.” Fairbaim observes (”Place of Christ in Modern Thought”): “It were mere folly to attempt to understand modern movements in theology without Hegel, especially those that circle around the history of Christ.” Christlieb (”Modern Doubt”): “Fichte and Schelling made the idea of Divine personality to be absorbed in an all-confounding idealistic Pantheism, which received from Hegel its last development. This philosophy appears in German literature from Schiller to Heine. Hence, we meet at the present day so many educated persons whose faith in a personal Deity has resolved itself into faith in the moral order of the universe, or in some universal law or principle.”
But no proof need be given of what is universally confessed. A mighty wave of Pantheism, beginning in Germany, has been sweeping over Christendom during the present century; and now finds but little to resist it. As Greek philosophy developed when the popular religions were in a process of disintegration, so is it now. It was then an attempt to replace the old faith by a new philosophic religion. So today, Christianity being regarded in many quarters as incapable of giving a satisfactory theory of the world and of human life, philosophy steps in and undertakes the task. It will give us a new religion based upon a new conception of God, a new Christianity based on a new conception of Christ, a universe evolved, not created. How far the new will supplant the old, time only can show us, for we do not know how far faith in the Christian Creeds has been silently undermined. But Christianity meets a new enemy, a philosophic religion which boasts itself able to satisfy, as Christianity is not able to do, all the demands of the intellect; a religion more suitable to our advanced culture than one transmitted from an ancient and half-civilized people. It is a religion which many will gladly welcome, for it opens a wide gate and a broad way in which all men, of whatever race or belief, may walk without jostling one another.
1 It is said by Pfleiderer (”Development of Theology”) that “in the course of the next decade, upon this agnosticism Matthew Arnold based his ethical Idealism, Seeley his aesthetical idealism, and Spencer his evolutionism; three theories which, with all their dissimilarities, have this in common, that they all regard the impossibility of a Divine revelation, and of a revealed religion, to be the necessary consequences of the incognizability of God.”
2 It should be observed that many who call themselves agnostics, are not really such. The real agnostic simply affirms that he does not know about God, he is in doubt; this is a purely negative position. But to affirm or to deny a God is a positive act. The true agnostic neither affirms nor denies, he has no belief one way or the other; he simply doubts. How far from this position, for example, is Mr. Leslie Stephen in his recent book, “An Agnostic’s Apology.” He affirms that the limits of human intelligence exclude all knowledge that transcends the narrow limits of experience. Theology is thus excluded, God is unknowable, the universe is a dark riddle. There is no revelation, no miracle, nothing supernatural, no future life. These are not negative, but positive affirmations; not those of an agnostic, but of a gnostic, of one who knows. The old Creeds, all statements in the Church symbols as to the nature of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, he affirms cap now” produce nothing but the laughter of skeptics, and the contempt of the healthy human intellect.” And he affirms that “Agnosticism is the frame of mind which summarily rejects these imbecilities.” Mr. Matthew Arnold is equally positive. He affirms that we cannot believe in God or angels, because “we absolutely have no experience of one or the other.” He knows that God is not a Person, but merely a Force or Power. And, in general, it may be said that no men are more dogmatic in their utterances than most of the professed agnostics.
Modern Philosophy and The New Christianity
We have seen the attempt on the part of modem philosophy to get rid of all dualism, and to bring all things into unity. Regarding this philosophy as the characteristic and most potent antichristian influence of our time, we are here especially concerned with its bearings upon Christianity; but its influence is seen in all spheres of human thought, in Biblical criticism, in Science, in Literature, in Sociology, and in Art. We are now to consider only the two chief modifications of Christianity springing from this attempt to unify God and man; and which are becoming familiar to the Christian ear under the general name of the “New Christianity,” though sometimes called the “New Religion,” the “New Theology,” the “New Reformation,” the “New Orthodoxy,” and other like terms.
What is this New Christianity? and who are the Neo-Christians? As yet no very clear and positive answers have been given. There is a vagueness of statement, or, perhaps, in some cases, an intentional reserve, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the new and the old. It is said by one of them: “The time has not come for writing the New Theology.” But all its advocates affirm that Christianity is in a transition state. Theological knowledge, like all other knowledge, must be progressive. Thus, we are told by a recent writer, (Allen, “Continuity of Christian Thought”), that “the traditional conception of God which has come down to us through the middle ages, through the Latin Church, is undergoing a profound transformation. A change so fundamental involves other changes of momentous importance in every department of human thought, and, more especially, in Christian theology. There is no theological doctrine which does not undergo a change in consequence of the change in our thoughts about God. “It is said by another: “We need a new theology constructed on a new foundation.”
If there is such a change going on, and one so momentous, in Christian Theology, we are bound to give it the most careful consideration. We are not dealing, we are repeatedly assured, with merely verbal distinctions, old wine in new bottles; if this be all, it is not a matter of vital importance. The body is more than raiment. But it is much more than this. As was recently said by one of its representatives: “We can- not keep the new wine in old bottles: this can end only in destroying the bottles, and spilling the wine.”
But when we seek to know more accurately the fundamental principles and distinctive features of the New Christianity, we find that, in fact, there are two doctrinal systems, differing widely in their conceptions of God, and in their Christologies, yet reaching substantially the same result-that Divinity and humanity are one. Let us examine them successively, and learn what is distinctive in each. We begin with that school which makes distinctive the doctrine of the Divine immanence in man.
I. The Divine immanence in man.
We are told by this school of Neo-Christians that “the idea of God as transcendent, is yielding to the idea of Deity as immanent in His creatures.” It is said (”Progressive Orthodoxy”): “We add a single remark upon the general philosophical conception of God in His relation to the Universe, which underlies these Essays. It is a modification of the prevailing Latin conception of the Divine transcendence by a fuller and clearer perception of the Divine immanence. Such a doctrine of God, we believe, is more and more commending itself to the best philosophy of our time, and the fact of the Incarnation commends it to the acceptance of the Christian theologians.”This Divine immanence is the fundamental fact on which this school of Neo-Ohristians builds its theology.
As transcendence and immanence are philosophical terms, we must note their meaning in philosophy.
It was the doctrine of the pantheist, Spinoza, that all that exists, exists in God. He is immanent in the universe, and cannot in any act pass out of Himself, or transcend Himself.3 God and the universe are one. “All the energy displayed in it is His, and therein consists His immanence.” “A being acting out of himself, is a finite being.” Creation, being a transcendent act, is impossible.
If we may not charge this school of Neo-Christians can understand the Divine immanence in nature and man? Is there an immanence, distinct from that indwelling of God in man through the Holy Ghost of which the Bible speaks, which is not pantheistic, but preserves the essential distinction of the Divine and human natures, and of the personalities of God and man? It is here that we meet great vagueness of expression. It has been defined by one as “such immanence that the human mind is one in principle with the Divine mind”; and by another, as “absolute oneness with God”; by another, “that man and God and the universe are fused into one”; by an- other, that “humanity is consubstantial with God.” Are we here taught that God and man are of the same essence or substance? Or, are we to take a distinction between unity and identity? Can we say that we are one with God in kind, and yet not identical with Him?
It may be answered by some that this unity means no more than that communion of man with God of which the Lord and the Apostles speak, such unity that “we dwell in God and God in us”; and that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” But that this, and like expressions, are not to be taken in a pantheistic sense, is shown by the whole tenor of the Bible. Man made in the image of God, and so capable of communion with Him, is still distinct from Him; not God, but a creature of God. If this unity with God be all, the New Christianity gives us nothing new. Its immanence is only the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in man, and preserves his personality and responsibility.
We have, then, still to ask, what other meaning we are to give to the term immanence that is not pantheistic? Perhaps we may learn this by asking the meaning of other terms, in frequent use, as expressing the relation of men to God, “Divine Sonship,” and “Divine Humanity.” The word Divine is confessedly ambiguous; it may mean simply likeness, or it may mean identity of essence. That man was made in the image of God, affirms likeness; and on the ground of this likeness, he may be called Divine. So man, as made by God, is His son, and this sonship may be called Divine; and the same term be used of our humanity. But neither term of itself affirms identity of essence. Man may be Godlike and not God; if a creature of God, he cannot be God.
Thus we are still left uncertain in what sense our humanity and our sonship are Divine. But we may obtain light by asking what place these Neo-Christians give the Lord Jesus-the Incarnate Son? What was His Sonship? in what sense was it Divine? We are told by an eminent writer of this school-Pfleiderer-that He does not differ from others “because of an unique metaphysical relation between Him and God.” The peculiar and exclusive place given Him in the Creeds, as the one pre-existent and only-begotten Son, does not belong to Him. The relation of sonship is a general one; “all men having the same Divine origin and destination.” As immanent in all, all are God’s sons, and He is Son of God in the same sense in which all men are. The relation is an ethical one, and, therefore, universal. The Incarnation is, as said by one, “a race fact.” His distinction is not one of nature, but simply that He was the first to recognize the common filial relation, and to fulfil the duties it imposes. He thus became the religious, Ideal, the perfect Son, whose example others are to follow. Knowing as a Son His union with the Father, He could say: “I and my Father are one.” All men, as they stand in the same filial relation, may have the same consciousness of sonship, and affirm the same unity; and this consciousness of our Divine sonship is “the essence of Christianity.”
Thus in regard to the Person of the Lord and His Divine Sonship, we reach the result that He differed from other men only so far as He was more conscious of God immanent in Him, and so could reveal Him in word and work; and that all men are in the same sense Divine, for God is imminent in all. If we speak of Deity as especially incarnated in Jesus, it is only as a larger pitcher may hold more water than a smaller, or as one star may be brighter than another.
The question returns: How is this universal immanence of God in humanity to be distinguished from Pantheism? Many attempts have been made to draw a clear line of distinction between them by those who affirm the essential unity of the Divine and human. One of the latest of these attempts, known as “Ethical Theism,” is by Professor Upton (”Bases of Religious Belief”), who speaks of all rational beings as “so many differentiations of God,” or as “those created by Him out of His own substance”; and yet he would preserve man’s free will and substantial individuality. But if of “one substance with God,” “differentiations of Him,” how is it possible to maintain distinct individual existence?4
We must call any system Pantheistic which denies man’s free will, and makes the individual self to be swallowed up in the universal Self. It is on this ground, as we have seen, that Professor Upton declares the philosophy of the Absolute Idealists or Neo-Hegelians to be “unmitigated Pantheism.” 5
It is only when the fact of the creation of nature and of man by an act of the Divine will is clearly held, that Theism can be clearly distinguished from Pan- theism. Nothing that God by an act of His will brings into being, can be a part of Himself. The Creator cannot be the created. Any philosophy which makes the universe to be of the Divine Substance, or an eternal or necessary manifestation of God, and any theology based upon it, must be pantheistic. If, as said by Hegel, and repeated by many since, “God without the world would not be God,”the world is an integral part of Him, without which He would be imperfect; and, therefore, if we affirm Him to be perfect, it must be co-existent and eternal.
But it is our purpose here only to state beliefs and show their bearings, not to disprove them. We are concerned only to note how the attempts to get rid of all dualism between God, nature, and man, all tend to pantheistic identity. If the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation be set aside, and that of a universal incarnation under the name of Immanence be substituted for it, the Neo-Christians are right in saying that “our conceptions of God, and of His relations to men, are undergoing a profound transformation.” Especially this transformation is seen as regards the Person of the Son. It is said by Dorner: “The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies is the endeavour to point out the essential unity of the Divine and the human.” The dualism of the two natures in Christ must be got rid of. We are told by one of this school that “the peculiar power and truth of Christ’s humanity will not be reached till this anomalous division and composition of His Person be abolished.”
Thus, if we accept the teachings of this new theology, the old distinction of the Divine and the human must be given up. As said by one: “We are passing over from the conception of God as another Self existing over against the human self, to the more spiritual view of God as the Self-immanent, not only in nature, but also in the worshipper’s own soul”; and it is this view “which, in the present day, most commends itself to cultivated minds.” It is said by another: “This idea of the Immanence of God underlies the Christian conception . . .and is an idea involved in all modern philosophy and theology. It may well be called a new Christianity. At any rate it is the only religion that will fully realize the idea of religion, and so meet the wants of the new time.” The relation of this form of the New Christianity to the current pantheistic philosophy is obvious. We have seen that modern philosophical thought has spent its strength on the problem how all things may be brought into unity, and that Hegelianism professes to give it its final solution. Philosophy and theology are at one: the first affirms that God came to self- consciousness in man; the second bases on this a universal Incarnation. It is said by Professor Seth: “Hegelianism has attempted to find a unity in which God and man shall be comprehended in a more intimate union, or living interpenetration, than any philosophy had succeeded in reaching.” This unity it finds by making God and man essentially one. Thus Dorner says of Hegel’s Christology: “The unity of God and man is not an isolated fact once accomplished in Jesus; it is eternally and essentially characteristic of God to be, and to become, man. His true existence, or actuality, is in humanity; and man is essentially one with God.” As the Divine impersonal Principle or Idea first fully realizes itself in man, man is the real God, the culmination of the Divine development. It need not be said that between this philosophic Pantheism carried to its last results, and the Christianity of the Creeds, there is a chasm, broad, and deep, and impassable. But as always between the old and the new there are some who attempt to mediate, so is it now. Between those who hold fast to the old historic Christianity and its Creeds, and those who teach the new religion of absolute Pantheism, appears a mediating party, the Neo-Christian. To the pantheistic spirit it will make large concessions. It will not affirm boldly that man is God, but in effect effaces any real distinction between them by its doctrine of a Divine immanence, making humanity Divine; and on this basis will reconstruct Christian theology.
Let us now briefly sum up the bearings of this new form of Christianity on the relation of men to God, and on the work of Christ as man’s Saviour.
1. If God and man are not separated by any real distinction of natures, it is idle to speak of our humanity as fallen and corrupt The Divinity in us may be obscured, but is indestructible.
Our sin and misery lie only in the unconsciousness of our Divine Sonship, and our redemption is in our awakening to a consciousness of it. It is a process within every man’s own spirit, and is effected when he realizes his Sonship. There is no need of any sacrifice for sin, or of any mediator outside of our humanity. “As directly united with God, man possesses his full salvation within himself.” Jesus did not redeem us from the law of sin and death by His sacrificial death; but from Him, as from all prophets and religious heroes, goes forth ‘” a redeeming force,” only in a far higher degree, because “He, among all the ethical and religious geniuses and heroes of history, occupies the central place. . • As He possessed the new and most exalted ideal of man, so He presented it in His life with impressive and educating power.” His work in our salvation was not to bear our sins in His body on the tree, and by resurrection to become the source of a new life; but to furnish an ideal for men, and to educate them by His earthly example. As said by the writer last quoted: “The true redeeming and saving faith of the Christian consists in his adopting this ideal as the conviction of his heart, and the principle of his whole life.”
2. As the work of Jesus was completed by giving in His earthly life a moral and religious ideal, His relations to us since His death have no real importance. His life on earth was a historical demonstration that God and man are essentially one, and having taught men their Divine Sonship, His work was done. As to His bodily resurrection, some of the Neo-Christians are silent, but some affirm its belief to have been a hallucination of the early disciples. As an historical fact, it is not important. He is not now fulfilling any priestly functions in Heaven, or any work of mediation between God and man. He is not the second Adam, giving His resurrection life to man. The Church does not exist as His body, it has no living Head. It is the community of all the sons of God, in which He has no supreme place. It is the ethical principle of the Divine Sonship perfectly illustrated in Him, which makes church-unity; and as this Sonship embraces all men, so the Church embraces all. It is as large as humanity. We enter it by natural birth, we enter into its full communion when the consciousness of our sonship is fully awakened within us; and this not by the Spirit of Christ sent by Him, and working in any supernatural way, but by the redeeming force of His ideal. As there is no living Head of the Church whose life and grace are conveyed through sacraments and ordinances, these have only such value as a man’s own spirit may give them.
3. If Christ is not now carrying on any redemptive work in Heaven, will He have any work in the future? Clearly, He Himself believed this, for He continually spoke of His return, and of His work as King and Judge; and this is affirmed in all the Creeds. But we are told that, while He was from one point of view far above His time and surroundings, from another He was the child of His time, and of His people; and, therefore, we must not be surprised at His belief that He would return to set up His kingdom, and be the King and Judge. In this He shared the mistaken Messianic expectations of the Jews. The Church is now outgrowing this illusion, and sees in the Messianic King descending from heaven to establish His kingdom, only “a earned conception of that spiritual-ethical kingdom” which will be realized only when all come to a conscious- ness of their Divine Sonship.
II. A Divine humanity in God.
Before considering this we may be reminded of the orthodox faith, that man was created by God in His own image, but is absolutely distinct in his essence from his Creator. It was this created nature which the Son took when He came into the world and became man; He came under the law of death, but rose from the dead, and in the risen and glorified form of this nature He now abides. As opposed to this faith, this school of Neo-Christians affirms that the Incarnation, as realized in Him, was not a union of two natures, but “the development or determination of the Divine in the form of the human.” This has been otherwise expressed as “an eternal determination of the essence of God, by virtue of which God in so far only becomes man as He is man from eternity.” Again: “The Incarnation is a revelation of the essential humanity of God, and of the potential Divinity of man.”
Thus there is in the Godhead a human element” and, as the Godhead is incapable of change, it must be an eternal element; and, unless we affirm a dualism in the Godhead, this human element is itself “a determination of the Divine in the form of the human.” Thus we get an eternal Divine-human element, “an uncreated humanity.”
In what relation does this Divine-human element stand to Christ, the Incarnate Son? It was the teaching of F. D. Maurice6 (see Haweis, Contemporary Rev., June, 1894): “That Jesus Christ was the coming forth of something that had always existed in God; it was the coming forth of the human side of God, God manifest in the flesh.” In general, those of’ this school agree that before the Incarnation, or before any act of creation, the Divine-human element had in the Son its eternal embodiment. On this ground He is called by one, “the Archetypal man,”and His humanity, “the Archetypal humanity”; by another, “the Eternal Prototype of humanity,” “the Eternal Pattern of our race.” It is because He was the archetypal man that humanity is what it is. “His humanity is more real and true than ours because it is the original from which ours is derived.” “The Pat tern of man,”it is said by Bishop Brooks, ”existed in the nature of Him who was to make him.” “Before the clay was fashioned, this humanity existed in the Divinity; already was there union of the Divine and the human, and thus already there was the eternal Christ.” The word “Christ includes to our thought such a Divinity as involves the human element. . . Of the two words, God and man, one describes pure Deity, the other pure humanity. Christ is not a word identical with either, but including both.” This special Christ-nature, the Divine-human, has existed forever; and it was because this Christ- nature existed in the Godhead that an incarnation was possible. Being already man. He could manifest Himself as man; as a Son of man, He could become the Son of Mary.
We thus reach a new conception of the Person of Christ, and a new doctrine of the Incarnation. As regards His Person, we are told that the term Christ includes, to our thought, such a Divinity as involves the human element. Is this eternal Divine-human element in the Son alone, or is it an integral part of the Godhead? The first is impossible, for then the Father and Spirit would be pure Deity, the Son Deity plus humanity. We must then believe that an eternal Divine-human element has forever existed, which, though common to all the Divine Persons, finds its embodiment in the Son. It was to reveal this humanity, and thus to teach men that it has always existed and is Divine, that the Son came into the world.
Being thus ” the pre-incarnate Man,”the Incarnation could not be the assumption of a new, created humanity, but merely the revelation of that which the Son already possessed. And this revelation was made by the taking of a mortal body, thus bringing His Divine humanity under certain limitations. Thus we meet the humanity of the Lord imder two different conditions; as it eternally pre-existed in Him, and as it was in Him when He was on earth. What was the nature of this change from the higher condition to the lower, and how effected ? We are told by one, that “possessing already an essential affinity, he enters into a flesh and blood affinity”; or “changes His condition of being by the assumption of a mere human body. “How vague and superficial this is, need not be said. But it rests upon the assumption everywhere made by this school, that there was no such fall of man, no such corruption of nature, as the, Church has held. The Divine humanity cannot be separated from God, and cannot become really evil; and therefore the work of the Son on earth was not to offer Himself a sacrifice for the sins of men, but “to present us with a perfected specimen, the type, the promise, the potency, of the entire race of tempted, suffering humanity.” The sacrificial aspects of the Atonement vanish; no element of humiliation enters into the Incarnation. “It was the actual manifestation of God in the human, so that Jesus of Nazareth became the revelation of God in His absolute glory.” A future and more glorious revelation of Him is not promised or to be expected. The world is already redeemed, He has made all things new, we are living in the new heaven and earth.
Thus the end of the Incarnation was not, by the Lord’s assumption of our nature and by His death, “to condemn sin in the flesh,” and to bring in through resurrection a new and immortal form of humanity, as has been always taught by the Church; but to “show men that the eternal Divine-humanity possessed by the Son is theirs as their birthright, and that to regain it is the perfect life. As said by Bishop Brooks, the work of Christ was “to build a bridge on which man might walk, fearfully but safely, back into the Divinity where he belonged.” As said by another: “He descended into the race to renew or recreate it after the original Divine image.” He established no new Divine relation between God and man, He simply restored the old. He had, as the risen and glorified Man, no new and higher life to impart.
When the Lord left the earth, having finished His work, He regained His place as “the archetypal man,” “‘His pre-incarnate state of fullness and immortality.” His mission was ended when He had shown in his own Person the eternal Divinity of human nature, and set before men the heavenly ideal; it was now for them to realize it.
Let us now note some of the bearings of this doctrine of the Divine humanity.
1. The distinction between the Church and the world is effaced. As “the eternal Prototype,” He, not Adam, is the Head of humanity. Our humanity is derived from Him, and is the same in all men; therefore, all stand in the relation of sons to God. We are told that when “He came unto His own,” He came not to the Jews, or to any elect portion of men, but unto all men; when He uses the figure of the vine and the branches. He speaks of Himself and of the whole human race. In like manner, when St. Paul speaks of the Church as His body, he does not mean a part, more or less, of men, but the totality of men regarded as an organic whole. As said by one: ” The Church belongs to all, and all to the Church.” “The whole family in heaven and earth is the Church.” “The appearance of the Son of God is the sanctification of the human race.” We wrongly narrow the meaning of the term Church when we speak of it as composed of the baptized. “Every man by virtue of his birth is called. Humanity is the ecclesia, called out and away from the old animal life from which it sprang.” All are, in virtue of the Divine humanity, the sons of God; and we are told that “the belief of the Church that God has only one Son, and that all others, as fallen and sinful, must become His sons by regeneration and adoption, is no longer preachable or credible among thinking men.” As all are children of God and partakers of the Divine nature, “every man must belong to the Church, and the Church to him, whether he knows it or not.” It was said by Maurice: “The truth is, every man is in Christ,” and if so, a sharer in His perfect humanity.
2. The distinction between the Church and the world being thus, as to its essence, effaced, we may no longer say that the Church is set to save men by gathering them out of the world, but is set “to save the world.” This salvation it effects by showing men the Divinity of their nature, and by teaching them that, therefore, all human interests are heavenly and Divine; and that what is needed is their development. Christ, being immanent in the world, His life pervades humanity. Through Him all things are now holy. The kingdom of God, which began at His advent, enlarges with the development of the Divine humanity in all its manifold forms and earthly interests; or, in other words, with the progress of a Christian civilization. How directly this tends to help on, or rather to serve as a foundation for, the present sociological movement, is obvious; and also the place it gives to the Church as the leader in them. If the Church is to save the world by developing and perfecting it, then it must address itself with all its powers to the work of Christian socialism, for, as said by Maurice: “This is the assertion of God’s order.”
3. It ministers to the pride of man by thus making him the partaker of a Divine humanity by natural birth. As the Divine-human, our nature cannot become really corrupt, or be eternally separated from God. Sin is but the passing obscuration of the sun, the dirt upon the image of the coin: the cloud melts away, and the sun shines bright again; the dirt is washed off, the image reappears distinct. When made fully conscious of our Divine origin, we rise to a true sense of our dignity and power as men. As said by one: “The most glorious and perfect Godness is, in the deepest sense of the word, natural to man.” “Christ came to help me to realize myself to be a man.” “Whatever man does in his true human nature, is Divinely done.” Since the Son came, “no man has a right to say. My race is a sinful, fallen race, . . because he is bound to contemplate his race in the Son of God.”
4. While it claims greatly to exalt Christ, in fact it puts Him out of sight as the living, ruling Lord, and Head of the Church. If it does not deny His present Priesthood, it makes little or nothing of it; and ignores, if it does not deny, His return to earth to complete His redemptive work, and to lift up His saints into the glory of the resurrection life. All that is to be expected is the gradual awakening of men to a consciousness of their natural participation in His humanity, and thus lead to amelioration of present evils; and somewhere in the indefinite future, to a universal Church.
As the eternal Christ came to restore humanity to its original goodness, and not to give to it a new higher life through resurrection; all sacraments and ordinances appointed by Him look backward rather than forward. They restore the old, but give nothing new. ”Baptism merely tells me that I am God’s child.” It is the acknowledgment on our part that we are already by natural birth, sons of God. (See F. W. Robertson’s Sermons on Baptism.) In like manner, all sacraments are but recognitions of pre- existing relations, His incarnation reveals to us the fact of our sonship, and the acknowledgment of this fact is regeneration.
5. The doctrine of a Divine humanity in the Godhead, cannot be distinguished in its bearings upon the relation of God to man from Pantheism. If we have two essential and eternal elements in the God- head, we have Dualism. But God is absolutely one. His personality excludes all mingling of elements. In the Eternal Word made man, the Divine and the human co-exist, but mingle not-”perfect God and perfect man.” This is possible only in Him. His humanity, made immortal in the resurrection, and glorified by the Spirit of glory, is purely human, and of this we are made partakers through regeneration. To speak of humanity “as consubstantial with God,” and to say that “God and man are essentially one,” is pantheistic. When it is said by one (Rev. Dr. Parks’ “Theology of Phillips Brooks”): that there is a sense in which the words of the Nicene Creed of the Incarnate Son, that ‘He is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father,’ may be applied to humanity”; how can the Divinity of man be more distinctly affirmed? The writer adds: “If this be not true, I do not believe that the doctrine of the Incarnation can be justified, or at least can have any vital meaning for us.”
In this outline of the New Christianity we must keep in mind that, in both its forms, it attempts to hold a mediating position between the orthodox faith as represented in the great Creeds and the strong pantheistic tendencies of our time; and therefore may be presented under varying aspects as one element or the other may predominate in the mind of the writer. Doubtless, there are many who are quite unaware how far their theology is pervaded by the pantheistic leaven; but any one who reads our more recent theological literature with open eyes, will not fail to see that a doctrine of a Divine humanity,-a humanity eternally existing in God, or of a general Incarnation under the name of immanence, is rapidly supplanting the doctrine of a humanity created by God in His image, but now fallen and sinful and alienated from God, and to be redeemed only by the atoning sacrifice of His only- begotten Son, the Word made flesh. It is plain that the doctrine of the immanence of God in man, and that of a human element in God, each lays a broad basis for the deification of man, and so serves as a preparation for the Antichrist.
3 Deui ut omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens.
4 This Professor Upton does by affirming that “the universe, with its centres of energy and personal selves, is called into existence by a partial self -surrendering of His own essential being; and God thus creates a cosmos, in one aspect distinct from Himself, in which only rational souls are possessed of freedom of will. God is living and immanent in all; and thus a universal Self, which we can distinguish from the finite self. This is the incarnation of the eternal, present in every finite thing.” This is a wide application of the doctrine of the Kenosis, or God’s self-limitation. All finite things are of one substance with God, but partially sundered from Him by His own act. Man, though a part of God, is free because “God withdraws Himself from identity with his will” and thus gives him some degree of independent reality.
This attempt to make man of the substance of God. and yet preserve his personality and freedom, and thus to avoid pantheism, can scarcely be called successful. It is not easy to see how “Ethical Theism”‘ by dividing Deity into perfect and imperfect, unlimited and limited, can escape being called pantheistic.
5 Professor J. Seth speaks in the same way: “Professor Caird maintains explicitly the entire immanence of God in man as well as in nature. The immanence of God precludes His transcendence; His unity with man makes impossible that separateness of being which we are accustomed to call personality.”
6Of Maurice’s theology Dr. Hartineau said: “It was an effort to oppose the pantheistic tendency, and is itself reached and touched by that tendency.” “It owes its power not less to its indulgence than to its correction of the pantheistic tendency of the age.”
Deification of Humanity
In our examination of the words of St. Paul (2 Thess. ii, 4), where he speaks of the man of sin as “sitting in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” and claiming Divine honour, we found reason to believe that the Apostle did not speak of a deification like that of the Roman emperors, but of one far higher, and resting upon a very different ground. This point we shall now consider in the light of what has been said of the current philosophical pantheism, and its influence upon the religious movements of our time.
In our examination of the tendencies of modem philosophy we have seen that all tend to deify man. As all roads were said of old to lead to Rome, so all present movements, social, political, religious, find their centre in humanity. Philosophy teaches man that he is Divine, and he is quite ready to believe it, and to act accordingly. Science, which shows the greatness of the universe, and which should teach him humility, only enlarges his conception of the greatness of the intellect which is able thus to search out Nature’s mysteries. What eulogiums are daily pronounced upon the dignity and excellence of Humanity, and what unbounded possibilities of development are before it ! If Science is able now to explain in large measure the universe, its origin, its laws, its evolution, what limit can be set to future possible discoveries? If Philosophy is competent to solve the problem of the Divine existence” and reconstruct the Godhead in thought, and define the law of its beings this itself gives proof of man’s potential Divinity. It is upon the consciousness of this Divinity that the religion of the future must be founded.
The great obstacles to these tendencies to deify humanity lie in the facts of the creation of man with limited and defined powers; and of the Incarnation, as given in the Creeds, and held by the Church. Of creation we shall have another occasion to speak. As regards the Incarnation, it is obvious that so long as the absolute distinction between Christ and other men is held – “His two natures and one Person” – no man affirming that he is God, can be received by the Church. But this dualism of the two natures in one Person, which the Church does not attempt to reconcile, but accepts as a reality in Jesus Christ, is offensive to the philosophical pride which is not content till it has reduced all things to unity. It is willing, as we have already seen, to admit that He is Divine if all men are equally Divine. If we may say that God is incarnate in all as in Him, or that all partake of the Divine-human element manifested in the Son, then all are alike the sons of God; and the distinction of Jesus Christ is made one of degree, not of kind.
These two forms of neo-Christianity, although differing widely as to the Person of Christ, agree in the result that man is essentially one with God. In the first, Christ is Divine, not as the eternally pre-existing Son of God “made man” by His birth of the Virgin, but as simply man through the immanence of God in Him. God being immanent in all men, all are Divine in the same sense in which He was Divine. In the second, we have in the Son an eternal, ‘” archetypal ” man, of whose Divine humanity we are partakers, and are thus brought into unity with Deity. We are, as said by one, ” consubstantial with Him, and 80 consubstantial with God.”
It is the deposition of the Lord from His place as the One Incarnate Son through the assertion of the incarnation of God in the race, which removes the first great obstacle in the way of the reception of the Antichrist; for it is as the representative of our common Divine humanity that he will demand the homage of the world. By a belief in a general incarnation, as affirmed by one school of the neo-Christians, Christ is no more God-man as to His nature than all are God-men.
If one may suppose this belief to have spread widely in Christendom, the questions must arise: To whom, as the best representative of our Divine humanity, shall men pay their homage – to one who lived many centuries ago, when humanity was comparatively undeveloped, or to one of our own day, – the product of its highest culture? Why, it is now asked by not a few, should Jesus of Nazareth stand forever as the great example of the Incarnation? Can we affirm that the fulness of our Divinity has been realized in any one man, or at any past time? . Are we not rather to expect a higher realization of it in some one to come? If humanity is under the law of dynamic evolution, or if a Divine Principle is ever developing itself in men, must there not be a continual upward religious progress? We cannot, therefore, believe that a man of the distant past is to be regarded as the final term of man’s evolution, or the highest manifestation of God. Whether Christ or another will hold the higher place as the Divine man, is a matter which time only can decide. But the strong presumption is that we are to look forward rather than backward, and that it is unreasonable to regard any religious or moral type of the past as perfect and unsurpassable.
It is also to be remembered that in rendering homage to one who appears as the rival of Christ, men will not do homage to one who differs in his nature from themselves, and superior to them; but to their own nature as embodied in him. In exalting him, they exalt themselves. Yet the community of nature does not forbid that they recognize in him one in whom is a larger measure of Divinity, and so capable of taking the place of a supreme religious leader. While distinguished above others, yet is he in closest sympathy with them. He is not, like the Christ of the Church, a superhuman being coming down from heaven, and returning thither, but a true son of man; nor does he stand in special relations to a few, as does the Head of the Church, but is the representative of universal humanity.
It is, indeed, hard for many reared from childhood under the influence of the Christian faith, but now accepting more or less clearly the pantheistic theory of God’s continuous self-development in humanity, or of its continuous evolution, to set Christ aside as its highest realization, and to believe that any one higher than He can come. Yet, this logical conclusion is more and more forcing its way, and demanding assent. Of this we may see many signs. The time may not be far distant when multitudes will say what a few now affirm: ” It is a dishonour done to human nature to teach that in any man of the past it has reached its culmination.” The path of humanity is upward and onward; the Divine element in it will manifest itself more and more, and we may not go back eighteen centuries to find the Ideal man.
Of the growing depreciation of Christ, and His rejection as the Ideal which we of to-day are to reverence and imitate, some proofs will be given later.
As illustrative of the present tendencies to deify humanity, and thus deny the special place of Christ, we give some extracts from representative writers; showing how rapidly these are preparing men’s minds to receive the coming Antichrist. We begin with some writers who best represent logical Hegelian pantheism; and first with Strauss, taking the translations from Mill’s “Mythical Interpretation”:
“The infinite Spirit is alone actual when He shuts himself up in finite spirits. The union of the Divine and human natures is real in an infinitely higher sense when I apprehend the whole of humanity as its subject of operation, than when I set apart a particular man as such. Is not the incarnation of God from eternity a truer thing than one in an exclusive point of time? Taken as residing in an individual Godman, the properties and functions which the Church doctrine ascribes to the Christ are inconsistent and self -contradictory; but in the idea of the race of men, they harmonize together. Humanity is the union of both natures, it is God made man, the Infinite manifesting itself in the finite. . . Humanity is the miracle-worker. . . It is the sinless one. . .It is that which dies and rises again, and ascends toward Heaven. Through faith in this Christ, and especially in His death and resurrection, is man justified before God. A dogmatic theology which, in handling the topic of Christ, rests in Hun as an individual, is not dogmatic theology, but a sermon.”
Thus, according to Strauss, the human race as a whole is the Godman – the Incarnate Son – the true Christ – its history is the Gospel. It comes from God, and returns to Him; ever dying to the old, and living to the new; making progress upward forever. Individuals die, but the race lives; this is the eternal life.
The race being thus the ideal Christ, we ask what is the significance and importance of the historical Christ ? It is only this, that ” by means of His personality and destiny. He became the occasion of bringing the union of the Divine and human into universal consciousness; the uncultivated mind being unable to contemplate the idea of humanity except in the concrete figure of an individual. . . In this way the Church has unconsciously made the historic Christ the full realization of the idea of humanity in its relation to God; whereas, in any individual we should see only the temporary and popular form of the doctrine.”
Feuerbach is still more outspoken (”‘Essence of Religion,” translated by Miss Evans): “Religion in its heart, its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth, the Divinity of man.” “Its true object and substance is man.” “Man, adoring a God, adores the goodness of his own nature.” “The nature of God is nothing else but the nature of man considered as something external to man.” “Man has his highest being, his God, in himself.”
Renan speaks in the same strain. “There has never been in nature or in history any fact caused manifestly by an individual will superior to that of man.” “The Absolute of justice and reason exhibits itself in humanity alone. . . The Infinite exists only as it is clothed in a finite form.” What account he gives of the Lord in his “Life of Jesus,” is well known. He is presented not only as a weak enthusiast, but as conniving at falsehood.
Leslie Stephen affirms that ” Christ was simply man, and His character quite within the range of human possibilities. There is no need of postulating an incarnation.”
Professor Clifford uses bolder language. “The allegiance of man may not be diverted from man by any Divinity. . . A helper of man outside of humanity, the truth will not permit us to see.” “The dim and shadowy outline of the superhuman Deity fades slowly away from before us, and as the mist of His presence floats aside, we perceive with great and greater clearness the shape of a yet greater and nobler figure, of Him who made all gods, and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says: “Before Jehovah was, I am.’ ”
Let us listen to B. W. Emerson: “Jesus saw that God incarnates Himself in man, . . and in a jubilee of sublime emotion said, ” I am Divine, through me God acts, through me speaks. Would you see God, see me, or see thee when thou thinkest as I now think.’ Jesus would absorb the race, but Tom Paine, or the coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting the exuberance of the power.” This is to say that all men are equally Divine as Jesus; and that every one, even the coarsest blasphemer, who denies His exclusive claims, does a service to the race.
If we now turn to the philosophical representatives of Evolution, we see that they also give to humanity the highest possible place. Thus Mr. John Fiske says: ” The Darwinian theory shows that the creation and perfecting of man is the goal toward which nature’s work has all the time been tending. . . On earth there will never be a higher creature than man. . . Not the production of any higher existence, but the perfecting of humanity, is to be the glorious consummation of nature’s long and tedious work. • . Man is the chief among God’s creatures.” This leaves no place for Christ as the Incarnate Son, the second Adam, and the Head of the new and glorified humanity. It is said by another that “Human history is the record of the process of the evolution of the Divinity out of the humanity.” Another says: ” Divinity is humanity raised to its nth power.” “The individual man is partly the animal from whom we have come, and partly the God who is coming into him.”
The ideal man, the consummation of the evolutionary process, is thus he in whom the primitive animal element is extinguished, and the Divine fully manifested. Let the race, as said by Tennyson,
“Move upward, working out the beast.
And let the ape and tiger die.”
In this process upward the law of continuity is not broken; there is no place for a supernatural inter- position, and a heavenly humanity of which the risen Lord is the source. There is only a simple unfolding of the natural, beginning with chaos and ending with the cosmos. Man begins a beast and ends a God.
These extracts, which might be indefinitely multiplied, serve to show that the line of distinction between the Divine and the human, God and man, if not openly denied to exist, is being rapidly effaced. The world is learning, and is quite ready to believe, that human nature has in itself, and in its own right, the possibility of many future Christs; and the world may rightly expect them.
We see how broad and deep a foundation is thus laid in the philosophical teachings of the essential unity of the Divine and human natures, for the deification of the Antichrist. The belief of this unity has not yet fully penetrated the popular mind, and most shrink from the name of pantheists; but the spirit of pride which it begets, is already everywhere manifest. A recent writer says: “A most notable sign of our time is the growing faith in man. . .For superhuman revelation we may put human discovery of the truth; and declare all religions, all Bibles, to be the outgrowth of human nature. As man takes the responsibility of evil, so also he provides the remedy. In place of supernatural grace converting the sinner, and trust in the atoning merits and sacrifice of a Redeemer, he substitutes the human ability to put away sin, and to do what is right and God. . .In a word, in place of the descent of God, he puts the ascent of man.”
Where this spirit of pride prevails it is idle to preach the offence of the Cross. To say that man is a sinner and needs a Saviour, is pessimism, and offensive; to say that he is a god, is optimism. Man has no confession of sin to make, he needs no atoning sacrifice, no Divine teacher, he accepts no Divine lair as supreme over him; the assertion of his own Divinity is his creed, to live in the power of it is his religion. As said by one: “Man can obey the law of righteousness without any Divine interposition/’ No revelation that God has made of Himself and of His will in past generations, is authoritative for us; our God is within us, and our guide; no book can bind us; and no prophet can be our master. As one has sung:
“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
Conscious of the Divinity within us, we teach and are not taught. To worship God aright, we must pay homage to man. To-day is Lord of all the past, and man is Lord of to-day.
This is the spirit that prepares the way for the Antichrist. Christ being deposed from His place as the only Godman; all men being as to nature equally with Him Godmen, the nations are prepared to welcome one who will prove to the deceived and wondering world his Divinity by his mighty acts, wrought in Satanic power; and will say, ” This man is the great Power of God.” As the representative of deified humanity, he will seat himself in the temple of God, and all “the children of pride” will worship Him. And thus the kingdom of Man will come, and the world will say, this is the kingdom of God, this is the King.
Tendencies of Modern Biblical Criticism
It is well known that biblical criticism has greatly changed its character within a few years. It is said by Pfleiderer (”Development of Theology”) that the year 1835 marked an era, three works then appearing by Vatke, Strauss, and F. C. Baur, so fundamentally differing from earlier works, and showing so predominantly the new element, that “we are justified in taking from these the special character of the biblical criticism of to-day.”
Let us ask in what consists the special character of the biblical criticism of to-day. We find it in the at- tempt to adjust the statements of the Scriptures, doctrinal and historical, to certain new ruling ideas, pan- theistic, agnostic, evolutionary, scientific; and to reject all that cannot be thus adjusted. We may divide the critics of whom we here speak into the two general classes, 1. Those who deny a personal God, or any knowledge of Him, if he exists; 2. Those who reject some fundamental facts or principles affirmed in the Bible, thus destroying its unity, and undermining the faith of men in it as the revelation of a Divine purpose and will.
I. It needs scarcely be said that all criticism of a book purporting to be a historical account of the actings of God with men from the earliest times, must take its character mainly from the critic’s conception of God, and of His relations to men. If the critic conceives of Him in the pantheistic way, as Absolute Spirit, impersonal, unconscious, without will or purpose, or as the unknowable Force of the Agnostics, the Bible is on the face of it incredible. No man can accept it as credible who does not believe in such a God as it sets forth, — One who is in the fullest’ sense personal, who has made and rules all things according to His will, who has a purpose in human history which He makes known to men, who can give them ordinances and rites of worship, and reward or punish them as they obey or disobey. If there be not such a God, making known His truth to those whom He chooses, and inspiring them to teach others, the Bible is a record of what could not possibly have taken place. Its Jehovah is a being who does not exist, and all its accounts of His dealings with men are idle fictions.
When, therefore, a critic sits in judgment on the Bible, we ask him, first of all, what he believes respecting God and His relations to men. Can these relations, as presented in it, be true? If his conception of God be such that he starts with the assumption of the necessary untruthfulness of most important points of the biblical record, it is idle to consider his criticism in detail; if, indeed, that can be called criticism which assumes the necessary falsity of the statements criticised.7
We may then exclude from the class of true biblical critics all those who, denying a personal God, make thereby the fundamental statements of the Scriptures, dogmatic and historical, impossible. And the agnostic must also be excluded, since his affirmation of the unknowability of God is, in substance, a positive assertion that the Bible, as a revelation of His character and will, cannot be true. Of its essential falsity to the atheist, it is not necessary to speak. The critics of these several classes are thus set free from any inquiry as to the reality of the great facts on which biblical history rests — the creation, the relation of Adam to the race, the fall, the redemption, the Incarnation. Its foundation truths denied in advance, the Bible ceases to be a sacred and authoritative book, and has an interest for the critic only as the sacred books of other peoples have, that he may show its origin, its gradual growth, how its statements came to be believed, and what influence they have had in moulding modem religious belief. Its study is mainly a matter of antiquarian research, and its chief value is as an illustration of one conspicuous form of religious development.
It may seem strange that pantheists, agnostics, and atheists should think it worth while to employ them- selves upon such a work of supererogation as to at- tack the Bible in detail, when they have already condemned it in the gross; but many books of this kind of pseudo-criticism are yearly written. We may take as an eminent example Strauss in his “Life of Jesus.” With his pantheistic conception of God and of His relations to men, he could not accept the Gospels as possibly true. Such a man as the Incarnate Son, the Christ of the Church, could never have lived. Undoubtedly there lived the man Jesus, a super-eminent religious genius, yet in nature a man like other men, without supernatural powers, a son of His age; and the work of criticism is to separate the nucleus of historical truth in the gospel narratives from the encrustations that have grown up around it. The reader, knowing his philosophical starting point, knows from the first to what conclusion Strauss will come; and that, even if there were absolute agreement among the Evangelists as to the details of the Lord’s earthly life, the more important of their statements would have been rejected all the same.
Again, let us take the agnostic, Mr. M. Arnold, with his critical pre-suppositions, as he has expressed himself in his ” God and the Bible.” The God of the Bible is the “ Eternal Power that makes for righteous- ness;” not personal, not a Being who thinks and loves. All that we know of this Power we ” know in the same way we know of the force of gravitation, by its effect upon us; we know no more of the nature of one than of the other.”8 All the miraculous statements we are to regard as poetry or legend; and so, also, what be calls the materialistic features — the supernatural birth and bodily resurrection of Jesus, the expectation of a Messianic kingdom, and of a new heaven and earth. The fall of man is a legend, Satan an imaginary being. “ Theology goes upon data furnished by a time of imperfect observation and bound- less credulity.”
There being so little of doctrinal and historical truth in the Bible, we ask with some surprise what Mr. Arnold can find in it to commend it to popular reading, for he fells us, “the world cannot be without it, and we desire to bring the masses to use it.” After taking away all that it teaches of a personal God, of His Incarnate Son, of creation, of sin, of atonement, of resurrection, of judgment, we wonder to be told that we may still retain in the expurgated book “ the elements of a religion more serious, potent, awe- inspiring, and profound, than any which the world has yet seen.”
II. Of the critics who do not wholly deny the truth- fulness of the Bible on a priori grounds, and yet only partially accept its statements, no classification can be made. They are of all shades of opinion, according as their criticism is determined by their philosophy, their science, or their feelings. Many, coming to the Scriptures with a philosophical theory of the order of man’s religious development, will make this order the test of truth, and reject all statements that do not conform to it. It is on the principle of “a psychologically possible process of development ” that much of the more recent criticism of the Old Testament is based. Some affirm that the Hebrews could not have been monotheists in Moses’s days, for Mono- theism must have been a later development; and that Jehovah was simply a tribal God, and the Hebrews polytheists. Nor could the Mosaic ritual have been given so early, since ritual presupposes a long period of religious development, and comes at its end, not at the beginning. We may not, therefore, speak of “the Law and the Prophets,” but of the Prophets and the Law. The account of the Covenant with the Jews cannot be true, since the selection of one people would be “particularism,” and make the Deity partial; and, therefore, Jewish history is no more sacred, and of no more real importance as a revelation of God, than the history of any other people. And, in general, we may not speak of any “falling away” from a Covenant relation, of any decline from a higher spiritual condition to a lower; but rather of a continual upward progress in Jewish history. In the destruction of the first temple, and the cessation of its worship, the Jews suffered no loss. It was, in fact, we are told, a religious gain. They entered thereby into a larger liberty, and a more spiritual service. So, also, in the destruction of the second temple; the synagogue was a great advance upon it.
Others base their criticism mainly upon scientific grounds, into which more or less pantheistic elements enter. We are told by some evolutionists that we must give up the Mosaic cosmogony, and the idea of a creation. The uniform persistence of Force in nature puts miracles and all Divine interpositions out of the question; and biology refutes the biblical account of man’s formation, and shows his development from the lower animals. As there is a natural law of progress in humanity, the account of the fall cannot be accepted. Nor are we to accept the supernatural birth of the Lord, since nothing can come into humanity from without; all is developed from within. And the future of humanity must be in the same line as the past; no break of dynamic continuity, no resurrection, no day of judgment, no new creation.9
Others still reject the Bible on the ground that in many things it affronts their moral sense. An all-, powerful God, being Love, could not have done in the treatment of the nations what He is said in the Old Testament to have done, nor does He punish individuals or nations for disobedience to His will. Redemption from sin and evil by the death of His Son, as related in the Gospels, does not satisfy their injured feeling, for why should sin and evil exist at all ? We must choose, they say, between imperfect goodness and imperfect power; and, whichever taken, the Bible ceases to be authoritative.
But underlying all hostile criticism, and giving it a force which it could not otherwise have over the popular mind is the feeling which is in the air, that the Bible is a superannuated book. Transmitted to us, for the most part, from a remote past, and embodying the religious conceptions of an uncultured people, what authority has it over us? It reflects, as we are incessantly told, the crude beliefs of a people living in the early age of humanity, when men’s conceptions of the Supreme Being were necessarily narrow and very anthropomorphic; a time when any scientific study of nature was unknown, when legends were everywhere received as facts, and dead heroes were magnified into gods. It is not possible for us of this century to go back to such undeveloped forms of religious belief. We have outgrown them. Our religion must be conformed to the advanced philosophy and science of our own time, to the modem ideas of man and nature. The Bible is, indeed, valuable as a record of what men have believed, but its conceptions of God are the conceptions of childhood, and must now be greatly enlarged, and our relations to Him be determined by our wider knowledge of nature and of humanity.
Many illustrations might be given of the growing disposition to regard the Old Testament as superannuated, having little historical value, and no religious authority. Thus it was said a half-century ago by Theodore Parker, who, in this matter, represents a multitude: “The Old Testament contains the opinions of from forty to fifty different men, the greater part of them living from four to ten hundred years before Jesus, and belonging to a people we should now call half-civilized. . . It, therefore, has no authority, and if an appeal is made to some command in it, we answer that nobody knows when it was given, by whom, or to whom. The physics of the Bible are shown to be a false science, its metaphysics false philosophy, its history often mistaken.”
A very recent writer, Professor Goldwin Smith, in a magazine article (1895) entitled “Christianity’s Millstone,” affirms the Old Testament to be this millstone. The New Testament must be separated from the Old; the two should not be bound up in the same volume. “The time has surely come when, as a super-natural revelation, the Old Testament should frankly, though reverently, be laid aside, and never more allowed to cloud the vision of free enquiry, or to cast the shadow of primal religion on our modern life.”10
It is probable that some of those who are under* mining the faith of men in the Old Testament, are desirous of preserving a measure of faith in the New. But the two cannot be separated. We can explain the appearing of Jesus and His teachings only by accepting the covenant relation of the Jews, the law and ritual as Divinely appointed, and the Divine inspiration of their prophets. Taken as a whole, there is a beautiful unity, God’s purpose in the Incarnation running like a golden thread through all. There is a beginning, middle, and end, but the end separated from the beginning is unintelligible.
It is a loud modern cry that we give up the traditional Christ of the Church, and go back to the historical Christ. We must rediscover the long-lost Jesus. We must by criticism of the gospels learn who He was, and how much of what He is reported in them to have said and done. He did, in fact, say and do. We can regard nothing as settled; all must be examined anew. Endless questions here arise: who the writers of the several Gospels, the time of their composition, their relations to one another, their accuracy, the rule of interpretation, and the like. The same questions arise as to the Epistles. The discussions of learned scholars have been minute and long drawn out, and, we may add, almost fruitless, because without any agreement of results as to the one point in question, the person of the Lord.11
It is a striking illustration of the separation between the Head and the Church, that after eighteen centuries its scholars are going back to the records of His earthly life to find out who He was! If it had continued in the heavenly fellowship to which He exalted it, it would be able to tell the world with one voice both what He was and what He is.
There is another school of critics who come to the Gospels in the Kantian spirit, and who make very little of facts; the idea is all. Having the ideal Christ, we need no more. It is unimportant whether there was a real man corresponding to the ideal. It is not, it is said, by His acts as a Mediator between God and us that Christ saves us, but as the representative and example of the idea of self-sacrifice. This idea once gained through Him, it must be separated from His individual person that it may become universal. He may wholly disappear from memory; but the idea remains ever active, and we need not go back to its origin.
But we may not go here into details as to the several critical schools. The critics, writing from all points of view about the Lord’s person and work — historic, philosophic, scientific, agnostic, evolutionary — each determining by his own pre-accepted criterion what measure of truth there may be in the gospel narratives, have filled the minds of their readers with confusion and perplexity. Almost any modern commentary is an illustration of the critical spirit of the times, and of the perplexity which it brings to the common reader.12
Nor in saying this do we disparage the service which genuine criticism may give to the better understanding of the Biblical records. Every kind of knowledge, geological, archeological, historical, scientific, linguistic, is valuable for the light it may cast on these records, and let there be no suppression of the light; but it is to be remembered that the real point at issue between Christianity and anti-Christianity is not the verbal accuracy, or the general infallibility of the Bible.
We can suppose the possibility of the destruction of every copy of the Bible now in existence, but this would not be the destruction of Christianity. It lives in the living Head of the Church: and however valuable the sacred records of the past, their loss would bring no limitation of His prerogatives, or of His ability to manifest Himself to men. Whilst, therefore, gladly acknowledging the aid which criticism, the higher and lower, may furnish to the elucidation of the Bible, we remember that the book is only a means to an end; and that its value is in opening to our knowledge the purpose of God in His Son so far as it has been accomplished, and preparing us to be His helpers in what remains to be done. To one whose eyes are steadily fixed upon the risen Lord, a great deal of the current biblical criticism will seem trifling, if not wholly useless. In the multitude of details unity is lost, the goal is not seen; men’s hearts are set upon the past while God desires present action. Only one question is of supreme interest to us: Is the Virgin’s Son, raised from the dead, now at God’s right hand, having all power in heaven and earth? If the critic says, “He is not, He sleeps in some unknown grave,” of what value are his laboured and wearisome efforts to prove small contradictions or errors in a book which can have for us only an antiquarian interest? If the critic says, “He is now living and Lord of all,” why trouble himself to refute what, in the nature of the case, is of very small importance, and which the Lord may at any moment refute by His acts ?
Can any one think that honest and earnest men will long remain in this state of doubt as to the truth- fulness of the Scriptures, or profess to believe what they do not in fact believe? Most will say: “The Bible must be taken as a whole, or rejected as a whole. We will take it as the Church has received it, in its entirety, or we will cast it away altogether.” No protestations of biblical critics that they can tear out a page here and a page there, that they can substitute abstractions for Persons, “Eternal Verities” for Father and Son and Spirit, legends for facts, speculations for prophecy, and still keep all that their spiritual needs demand, will satisfy him who will have realities, not idle words. He will say: “I will put the book away, I will not perplex and weary myself in attempting to separate the truth from the error. When biblical scholars have come to some fixed conclusion as to what the Bible is, and what it teaches, and the Church has put the finally ascertained truth into her rewritten Creeds; then I can read it with some assurance that I am not deceiving myself with empty beliefs.”
No building can long stand when the foundation is undermined; the first rude shock makes it fall. Many, indeed, may continue to profess great reverence for the Scriptures, as did the Jews of the Lord’s day, and study them much, simply because they interpret them in the spirit of the time, and find in them what they wish to find. And we have reason to believe that there are many who, like Mr. Arnold, sing the praises of the Bible long after it has ceased to have for them any authority, or any theological value. They think that it has for the masses an ethical value, and fancy that, while scholars and cultivated people like themselves find much of it out of date, its ideas of moral order and right will keep their hold upon the popular mind, and help to preserve social peace.
Looking to the future, we may not attempt to conceal from ourselves the real character of much of the current biblical criticism. Formerly, accepting- the Scriptures as a revelation from God, showing His purpose in nature and man, it limited itself to pointing out some discrepancies, or apparent contradictions; errors affecting particular points, historic or dogmatic, but leaving their general truthfulness un-” impeached. The special criticism of our day is far more aggressive and destructive. It affirms on a priori grounds, philosophical and scientific, that very considerable parts of the Bible cannot be true.
It would, of course, be unjust to say that all, or even most, of our biblical critics go to this extent. Not a few attempt to stay the destructive work; but that this work goes steadily on, becoming more and more aggressive, no one acquainted with the more re- cent critical literature can doubt. Nor can we doubt that it has more and more the tide of popular feeling with it. One of these critics, well qualified to judge, has very lately said: “We rise from the survey of this exegetical literature with the feeling that we have only begun the critical history of the biblical writings.” Even now the process of biblical disintegration has gone so far that we see in the “Polychrome Bible” all the colours of the rainbow.
This overthrow of the faith of men in the Bible is a great step forward in preparing the way for the Antichrist. It is of comparatively less importance in the Roman Catholic than in the Protestant communion, since the former makes the Church itself to be an infallible teacher; and to those thus believing, what the biblical critics may say is a matter of indifference. Still it is abundantly manifest that in the Roman communion the loss of faith in the Scriptures is greatly weakening the faith of many in the Church. But to the Protestant, the loss of faith in the Bible points to a great religious change. It leaves him without any guide or teacher, for his choice must be between the biblical teachings of God and of His relations to the Universe and to man, and the teachings of Pantheism. Men are too nobly constituted to be atheists, nor can they long be agnostics. They cannot remain in the pains of doubt, or emptiness of unbelief.
To reject or ignore the Bible on whatever grounds is to be ignorant of God and of His purpose in man and thus to be exposed to the most dangerous form “of delusion, that of self-deification. In proportion as unbelief in the Scriptures increases, the Person of the Incarnate Son, who, as the First and Last, the Be- ginning and the End, alone gives it unity and meaning, recedes from our sight; and, as He recedes, dark- ness deepens over both present and future. “For years the most unobservant has seen how within the ‘ Church the study of” prophecy has been greatly disparaged, — a sure sign of that decay of faith which, beginning here, extends itself to history and doctrine, and ends in their final rejection.
Thus the Bible, made up, as we are told, of disconnected and discordant parts, emptied of all historical unity, revealing no Divine purpose, neither explains the past nor casts light upon the future. Why retain it? Put it among other sacred books, call it literature, keep it for its teachings of ethics, and as illustrating the evolution of religion; but the new age must have its new Bible, one reflecting its advanced knowledge of God and man and nature. It was said by Thomas Carlyle (” Essays”) “A Bible is the authentic biography of noble souls.” “To each nation its believed history is its Bible; not in Judaea alone, or Hellas, or Latium, but in all lands and in all times.” We may, therefore, look for a new Bible which will not narrow its records to the life of one covenant people, but be the history of the evolution of the idea of God in all the noble spirits of the race; and thus be the sacred book of a universal religion!
7In Jewish history, as presented by the pantheistic critics, we have not the dealings of God with the Jews, but the evolution of their conception of God. The historical statements have value chiefly as illustrative of the growth of spiritual ideas. God is not a Person making known to them in gradual revelation a purpose in which He calls them the workers together with Him, but an impersonal spiritual Principle developing itself in them. It is on this ground that such histories of the Jews as given by Kuenen, Reuss, Renan, Menzies, and others, although they may have value for the critical student, tend to weaken the faith of the general reader in the Biblical history. If this does not con- form to the historian’s philosophy of God and of man’s religious development, the conclusion is foregone that the events could not have taken place as narrated.
8Mr. Arnold is unwilling that this Power should be called the Unknowable, for he feels the absurdity of saying: “The Un-knowable is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” ”Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Un-knowable.” He explains the Jehovah of the Hebrews by affirming Him to be “the unconscious deification of the law of righteousness.”
9 A very recent illustration of the disposition to adjust the teachings of the Bible to modem scientific theories is seen in “The Place of Death in Evolution,” by Dr. Newman Smyth, 1897. We are told by him that death had originally no moral significance, but gradually acquired one. In itself it is both useful and beneficent, and necessary in evolution. It lifts man into a higher stage of life, and, therefore, will in the end be universally welcomed. Of course there can be no bodily resurrection, and the resurrection of the Lord was an expression to His disciples of “His spiritual identity.” When a man dies, death is no more; and when all are dead, death will disappear forever. Dying is ” passage out of death into life.” When there is ” complete detachment of the soul from atomic matter, and it is brought into new and better connection with the elemental forces, the natural is completed in the spiritual.” This is the resurrection. Thus the earth is made a birthplace for souls, which, transported at death into some other world, have there their growth and development.
Dr. Smyth thinks that “the coming defender of the faith once given to ike saints will be a trained and accomplished biologist.”
10 Some are now making an attempt to accredit the Bible by presenting it as a book for literary study. It is said that by “a Judicious selection” of its most graphic and eloquent passages it may be made a source of literary, as well as spiritual, stimulation. As expressed by one writer: “Who shall say that it is not to be included in the curriculum of polite learning as a theme, perhaps of equal moment with Shakspeare? “This is meant to do the Bible high honour. But how could we find a more significant sign that it is ceasing to be regarded as an inspired book, un- folding to men the character and purpose of God. His mercy and grace in His Son, salvation from sin, and the terrors of judgment? Instead of being read as a book in which the voice of God is heard calling all to repentance, to obedience, and to righteousness, a voice which no man may disregard but at the peril of his soul, we are told to read it as literature, — a collection of elegant extracts, of biblical masterpieces. Doubtless the purpose is by appealing to the literary taste, the imagination, the sense of the beautiful and sublime, to obtain for the Bible a new hold upon the attention of cultivated people. But its sacred character is thus lost. It is merely a book among books— of value for intellectual culture, but no more the one book, able to make us wise unto salvation, to which we come upon the bended knee, praying for that light from the Spirit who inspired it, without which we read in vain.
11It is to be noted that those who reject the personality of God make the knowledge of Him to be intellectual only. As said by one: ” Theology is not a matter of faith, but of intellectual grasp and careful scholarship.” And this is necessarily the case if, as we are told, we must study all forms of religion to learn “the self -evolution of the Idea “in them, and thus come to the knowledge of God. If God be a Person, then can we all, learned and unlearned, come into personal communion with Him and know Him as our Father. But this approach to Him is not alike open to all without regard to spiritual character. As it is in the power of a man to make himself known to some and not to others, much more is it in the power of God. Those who dare to rush unbidden into the Most Holy to find Him, will find only thick darkness. To the weary and the heavy-laden, the meek and penitent, the Incarnate Son says: *’Come unto me,” and they shall see His face; but to the proud and presumptuous who say: ” Bring Him to our tribunal, and we will sit in Judgment on Him,” He is invisible. The critic who feels no need of a Redeemer, may scan the pages of the Evangelist with his micro- scope, but will find no Son of God.
12 We may take, as an instance, Godet on the Gospel of John (English Trans.) In the first volume of five hundred closely printed pages we find two hundred and fifty-five occupied in preliminary discussions quite beyond the reach of one not especially versed in such themes. The natural effect is to awaken doubts in our minds, for those must be very serious objections which demand such elaborate replies.