REGIS

BIBL. MA)

COLLEGE

THEOLOGICAL STUDY
TODAY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO. ILLINOIS

THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY

NEW VORK

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAB3HA

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SISDAI

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY

THEOLOGICAL STUDY
TODAY

F

ADDRESSES DELIVERED at the

SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY

of the MEADVILLE THEOLOGICAL

SCHOOL, JUNE 1-3, 1920

REGIS

BBBL. MAJ.

COLLEGE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

7S830

COPYRIGHT 1921 BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

All Rights Reserved

Published June 1921

Composed and Printed By

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

FOREWORD

The addresses which follow were given at the
seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the
Meadville Theological School, June i, 2, and 3, 1920.
They are now put into permanent form both as a
record of this anniversary and as a landmark in the
history of theological science and theological teaching.
The School was founded in 1844 to train ministers for
the Unitarian churches of the West. During its early
years it was also used as a ministerial training-school
by the churches of the Christian connection. It has
played a not insignificant part in the teaching of
theology in America, in spite of obstacles which
might now be considered insurmountable. It was
for years without endowment and without a library
worthy of the name. Only one of the two young
professors who constituted its first faculty had been
settled over a church. It was located in a small
village of strong Calvinistic tendencies, many miles
from any important cultural or educational center.
The nearest Unitarian church was one hundred and
forty miles away. The minister of this church, who
served the School as a non-resident professor of pas
toral care, was compelled to make a journey of forty
miles by stage at the end of a hundred-mile journey by
water. Access to Meadville from the south meant a
stage journey of one hundred miles from the Ohio
River.

vi FOREWORD

The School was founded in an era of theological
controversy, and the members of its faculty were
debarred from the fellowship of the theological world,
with the single exception of the Divinity School of
Harvard University. They were eligible to mem
bership in no theological society. The standard of
admission was at first necessarily low. Applicants
were expected to know something about English gram
mar, geography, arithmetic, and the elementary
principles of natural philosophy; but even this mod
est requirement was not% insisted on from men
already in the ministry.

In spite of these obstacles the seventy-five years
of the School's life are years of which it need not be
ashamed. Its graduates have penetrated to every
corner of the United States and Canada where there
were churches which they were eligible to serve, or
missionary outposts in search of ministers animated
by a spirit of adventure. They have acquitted
themselves with distinction in positions of influence,
and they have not been ashamed to serve in lowly
places. No better service was ever rendered to the
cause of pure religion by Meadville graduates
scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific than
is being rendered at the present time. Never
have they been in charge of more important
posts, and never have these posts been more effec
tively manned. A tree is known by its fruits.
Meadville is content to be thus known and
judged.

FOREWORD vii

Why is it that, considering the crudity of the
tools with which the School was for many years
compelled to work, its output has been of so high
a quality? The answer is threefold. In the first
place, though admission to the School was at first
easy, as it was indeed in other seminaries of three-
quarters of a century ago, the classroom standard was
exacting and the erudition of its professors was, con
sidering the time and place, amazing. The quality
of the work done in the classroom compared favorably
from the very beginning with that which was done
in the most highly favored institutions of the East.
In the second place, the founders of the School were
men of God. Harm Jan Huidekoper, coming to
Meadville from Holland at the beginning of the
last century, put into the founding of the School the
spirit which had animated his life, the spirit of
devotion to the living God. That was the spirit
which animated his son, Professor Frederic Huide
koper, and the first president, Rufus Stebbins. The
teaching of the School was infused from the beginning
with an atmosphere of manly and earnest piety. In
the third place, the founders of the School were men
of vision. Though they believed intensely in the
conclusions at which they had arrived, they believed
even more strongly that theological study should be
prosecuted in the freedom of the truth. This proposi
tion was written at the beginning into the charter of
the School. From the day of its foundation all its
privileges were open to students of good character

viii FOREWORD

and high ideals, regardless of theological opinions.
And thus the foundation of the School was laid not
only deep but broad.

Some of the views which were set forth in the
classroom concerning the Old Testament by President
Stebbins, and concerning the New Testament by
Professor Huidekoper, have been outgrown and
rejected even in strongholds of orthodoxy. But the
high standards of scholarship and the fine consecra
tion which they brought to their tasks, along with
the clear vision demanding devotion to the truth at
the expense, if necessary, of any previous formulation
of truth, which has characterized the School for
seventy-five years — these constitute its distinctive
quality and its distinctive contribution to theological
education.

By means of increased resources the opportunities
of the School have been greatly expanded. It now
possesses an adequate faculty and a large and growing
library. By non-resident lectureships it is kept in
contact with the outer world and brought into touch
with modern problems. Admission to the theological
course now demands previous college preparation.
The School is affiliated for a quarter of the year with
the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and
is taking steps to erect a building of its own near the
gateway of that University.

No longer in a spirit of barren and unfruitful
controversy, or in a spirit of voluntary isolation from
the other institutions which are training ministers of

FOREWORD ix

religion in other fellowships, is the work of the School
to be carried on. It is significant that a goodly
number of such institutions were represented at the
seventy-fifth anniversary and that professors from
several of these have taken part, with our own
faculty, in giving the addresses printed in this volume.
All this is a foreshadowing of the time when the
intrusion of the sectarian spirit into theological
teaching will become a sin against the Holy Ghost,
and when the pure devotion to truth, which char
acterizes the university at its best, will characterize
the intellectual processes of the seminary as well.

F. C. S.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE HISTORY or RELIGIONS i

The Historical Study of Religions
James Bissett Pratt, Ph.D., Professor of
Philosophy, Williams College

II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 25

Philosophic Conceptions on Which Further

Religious Progress Depends
George Rowland Dodson, Ph.D., Associate
Professor of Philosophy, Washington
University

III. THE OLD TESTAMENT 53

Old Testament Study Today

Henry Preserved Smith, D.D., Professor of
Hebrew and the Cognate Languages, and
Librarian, Union Theological Seminary

IV. THE NEW TESTAMENT 75

New Testament Study Today
Clayton Raymond Bowen, Th.D., Frederic
Henry Hedge Professor of New Testa
ment Interpretation, Meadville Theologi
cal School

V. CHURCH HISTORY 106

History in Theological Education
Ephraim Emerton, Ph.D., Winn Professor of
Ecclesiastical History, Emeritus, Harvard
University

xi

xii TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

VI. SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 131

The Modern Theological Method
Francis Albert Christie, D.D., James Free
man Clarke Professor of Church History,
Meadville Theological School

VII. RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 158

Education in Worship
Theodore Gerald Soares, Ph.D., D.D., Pro
fessor of Homiletics and Religious Educa
tion and Head of the Department of
Practical Theology, Divinity School,
University of Chicago

VIII. SOCIAL ETHICS 183

The Equipment of the Minister as a Social

Reformer
Robert James Hutcheon, A.M., Caleb Brew-

ster Hackley Professor of Sociology,

Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion,

Meadville Theological School

IX. PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS 200

The Modern Minister: His Training and

His Task

Franklin Chester Southworth, D.D., LL.D.,
President and Professor of Practical The
ology, Meadville Theological School

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF RELIGIONS

If one were seeking a paradox, it might be said ,
with some approximation to truth, that the intel
lectual Western world of our generation has redis
covered religion almost in the act of losing it. Of
course we have always known that religion, including
even the non-Christian religions, has had a great
influence upon human life and human history.
But what till recently we have somehow missed is
the fact that religion is one of the most fundamentally
human of institutions; that it is not merely a col
lection of more or less extraneous and avoidable
beliefs, superstitions, and ritualistic acts, but is,
rather, a plant whose roots lie deep in the subsoil of
human nature. We are learning also that this is true
not only of religion as such, but, in a less degree, of
each of the historical religions; that each of them is
inextricably intertwined with the social institutions,
the political currents and crises, even the geography,
and most of all with the psychology of the various
peoples who have developed them and who have
been developed by them. This new realization of
the essentially human nature of religion and of its
enormous importance in the individual and social
life has in our day given to the study of the history

2 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

of religions a new impetus and a new direction.
Correlatively with this new interest in the history
of religions, partly as cause and partly as effect, we
have come into the possession of an enormous amount
of new material for our study — an amount so vast
that it both lures and inspires the student and at the
same time overwhelms and nearly discourages him
by its sheer immensity. Leaving out of account the
various religious ideas and practices of primitive
peoples, we have for investigation no less than nine
living and five dead religions, concerning all but two
of which our information, though not so great as one
could wish, is considerable and in some cases massive.
This mass of information pours in upon the
student of the history of religions from the traveler,
the missionary, the archaeologist, the philologist,
the historian, the geographer, the sociologist, the
psychologist, and must be worked over, sifted, and
co-ordinated. In this great and confusing work it is
plainly imperative that the student should have a
clear idea of what he means by religion, and what the
aim of the history of religion is to be. And though
writers on this subject are often too busy to formulate
these things into words, and when they do so often
verbally disagree, their practice is better than their
theory, and they will be found to have pursued a
fairly steady and consistent course in co-operation
with each other. Judging, then, not by their words
but by their deeds and their results we may, I think,
formulate the meaning of religion which the majority

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 3

of students have implicitly accepted or taken for
granted and acted upon in some such way as the
following: Religion is the attitude of individuals and
societies toward the Power or Powers which they
conceive as having ultimate control over their interests
and destinies. If we tentatively accept this defini
tion, we may add that the aim of the history of reli
gions is to find out what men have believed and felt
and how they have acted in relation to the Deter
miner of Destiny, and to understand why they have
so done.

While this may be accepted as a fair statement
of the aim of all the students of our subject, the
methods both of investigation and of exposition which
they make use of are by no means so easily unified.
The particular methods employed are of course
numerous, and properly so, and the leading ones
will engage our attention shortly; but before taking
them up in turn I wish to point out three divergent
general ways of viewing the subject and attacking
its problems, all of which may be found among
contemporary writers and among which it seems
to be desirable that the student should make a
deliberate choice. The first of these, for want of
a better term, I shall call the Inspirational way.
You all recognize what I mean. The Inspirational
school is impatient of details, uses facts merely for
illustration, is interested only in the " larger view/'
the "inner meaning," the "spiritual message," of
the religion under study, and, having squeezed the

4 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

juice quite easily from each of the great religions,
throws the pulp aside and passes on with graceful
stride to other sources of spiritual delight. The
second school, which I may call the Factual, is at
the antipodes of this. It cares not for juice but only
for pulp — and the dryer the pulp the better. Its
ideal is not that of spiritual delectation (which on the
whole it rather scorns) but that of scholarly exactness
and of objective truthfulness. Let values take care
of themselves, it declares; what we want are the
facts. And by the facts it usually means such
things as the minutiae of some ancient cult or the
superstition of some primitive tribe. With that odd
asceticism so frequently met with in the modern
scholar, it generally avoids, almost with suspicion or
fear, the philosophies and the poetry of the higher
religions, and with stern austerity focuses its attention
upon various minute or unrelated details, against
which at any rate the accusation of spirituality can
never be raised. I have of course exaggerated, and
purposely exaggerated, these two ways of writing the
history of religions; hardly any reputable student of
the subject could be said to employ either one exclu
sively. But they are two tendencies each of which
will be found fairly well exemplified in several fairly
distinguished writers on what is often referred to
by that astonishing title " Comparative Religion."
The third way of going at our subject is of course
the attempt to retain what was best in both of the
extreme methods and to avoid the limitations of

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 5

each. We might call this the Way of Scholarly
Insight. Those who adopt this middle way are
quite as empirical in their study as are the members
of the Factual school, but it cannot be said that they
have the same reverence for the isolated fact as
have their colleagues. They too insist on starting
with facts, but they are not satisfied to end with
them; they too want to accumulate facts, but they
desire also to understand them. They share with
the fact-collector something of the latter 's disdain
for easy generalization and for merely sentimen
tal gusto; but while they would scorn themselves
should they seek merely to suck the sweet juice of
their subject, they are by no means satisfied with its
dry pulp after all the juice has been sucked out.
In short, they seek neither concentrated juice nor a
sucked orange, but the whole fruit in its living
perfection. They insist that the facts of the world's
religions must be gathered and studied with patient
and scholarly care and exactness, but, though they
regard all the facts as worthy of study, they do not
regard them all as of equal value. And the most
important of the facts, the most worthy of scholarly
examination, they consider to be the fundamen
tal meanings, the ultimate conceptions, the moral
ideals and incentives, the emotional reinforcements,
which the various great religions have contributed to
the spiritual life of their members.

Of the various particular methods used by the stu
dents of our subject to formulate an exact description

6 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

of the myths and creeds, the cults, customs, and
ideals of the various historical religions, I need say
nothing, for they are obvious and known to all.
Since the days of Herodotus travelers have collected
curious religious facts, and historians have chronicled
them; and for the last two generations in particular,
the archaeologist and the philologist have vied with
the historian and the traveler and with learned
native adherents of the various religions in furnishing
the student of religious history with all sorts of
material out of which to construct as complete a
picture as he may of the present status of the nine
great religions, and of the whole life-story or natural
history which they and their five dead brothers
present.

But when the student of religion has finished this
part of his task, the most difficult and perhaps the
most important portion still remains to do. For he
should not, and the true scholar cannot, be satisfied
with merely a description of what the various religious
people of the world believe and how they act. The
mere fact-collector, or the fanatical zealot, or the
globe-trotter, or the smugly self-satisfied Yankee or
British reader, may, indeed, note with interest and
perhaps with glee the seemingly preposterous beliefs
and ritualistic actions of the " heathen" and will
care to do no more than to set them down for publi
cation in fat and learned volumes, or to advertise
them abroad for the edification of the faithful, or
to bring them out in conversation at home for the

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 7

greater glory of Anglo-Saxon common sense, as
the interest of each may direct; but the thoughtful
scholar finds in these facts only a new challenge, only
a new problem in need of a solution. For it is
civilized human beings, some of them of our own
Aryan race, men whose intelligence and sincerity
are really not to be questioned — it is often people of
this sort who actually accept these seemingly incred
ible creeds, who actually perform these seemingly
absurd rites. Surely it must be that though we have
the " facts" we do not yet understand them, we have
not yet begun to get at the bottom of the matter;
and our enormous erudition is but a kind of learned
illusion until we have found out what is behind and
underneath our " facts" and why it is that the
so-called heathen peoples believe and worship as
they really do.

The problem of explanation is not a modern one.
Nor does it arise only concerning religions to which
the student or questioner does not himself belong.
In many, and probably in all, of the great religions
the question was raised long, long ago as to the
explanation of its own creed and cult. In all of these
cases the first answers were identical: Both the cult
and the creed were due to some sort of authoritative
or divine revelation. This was simple and satisfying.
But when the problem arose of explaining some foreign
religion, plainly some other hypothesis was needed.
We know how our own Christian Fathers met this
problem — a very pressing one in their day. The

8 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

Pagan cults and myths, they insisted, were, like the
Christian Scriptures, to be referred to a kind of
supernatural revelation, but this revelation came not
from God but from the devils. In contrast to this
view, the Epicurean thinkers of the time had a much
more scientific form of explanation, and one which
they applied to all religions. These were due,
namely, to mere ignorance and fear. As everyone
knows, this view received its most elaborate exposition
in Lucretius' great philosophic poem, and its most
epigrammatic expression in Petronius' oft-quoted
assertion, Primus in orbis timor fecit deos. Later on
by a millennium and a half the same explanation crops
up again — at least as far as the non-Christian religions
are concerned — in the writings of the deists and of
their like-minded opponents. Priests and skilled
politicians, according to this view, in order to keep
the masses in subjection, invented the various
religions — and very likely most of morality as well —
and disseminated them among the people. Fortu
nately for the reputation of the eighteenth century
one of its greatest thinkers — David Hume — saw the
absurdity of such a view ; and the new historical sense,
which was the nineteenth century's chief contribution
to the intellectual life, forever put an end to such
mechanical methods of explanation.

The modern student of our subject feels that he
cannot fully understand a religion until he has had
recourse to a number of allied fields of investigation.
Among the most fundamental of these is geography.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 9

If the student confines his attention to one religion,
to be sure, he may not be greatly impressed with the
influence of geographical and climatic environment,
but if he makes a comparative study of religious ideas
and institutions he can hardly fail to note how the
beliefs and customs and symbols of the different
peoples have varied with the latitude, the altitude,
the rain supply, and the many other factors which
are studied by the modern geographer. Rain gods
and sun gods and sea gods, fearful and loving, benefi
cent, intriguing, indifferent, the divine wrath of the
tempest, the serene calm of Olympus — with what
almost pathetic eagerness have the sons of men
stretched out hands of faith to the details of their
physical environment for forms and symbols in
which to clothe the Determiner of Destiny!

The geographical influences are elemental but
somewhat elementary. For explanation of the devel
opment of a religion, especially in its intellectual
and moral aspects, one must turn to the political,
economic, and social experiences of the people who
profess it. The form of tribal or national organi
zation may have little effect upon the forms under
which they image forth their God, but will often have
a profound influence upon the inner nature of that
God as they conceive him. The forms of their
industry, the economic conditions of their life, will
modify to a greater or less degree many of their
religious conceptions. Other social influences will
go deeper still. The very sharp contrast between the

io THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

essentially moral Yahweh and the only partially
moralized Zeus or Indra is to be explained in part by
the difference in social or tribal organization between
the ancient Israelites, on the one hand, and their
contemporaries, the Greeks and Indians. It would
be superfluous in this presence to point out how
human kingship, political conquest, and above all
the historical development of the various peoples of
antiquity got themselves reflected in the developing
characters of their gods.

Many a scholarly work on some aspect of the
history of religions has been written with no other
methods of interpretation and explanation than
those which I have thus briefly sketched. With
such tools one can indeed find out what the various
peoples have believed and done and to some extent
can understand why their creeds and their cults have
developed in the ways we find. But a method of
investigation which goes no farther than this still
leaves much undiscovered which many of us would
gladly know. It goes indeed much farther than mere
description, but it fails to bring us to the heart of the
matter. We should like, if we may, to understand
the various non- Christian religions from within,
to catch at least a glimpse of the way they appear to
those born within the fold, to apprehend something
of their inner religious life, in short, not merely to
observe these religions from without, but to know
something of how they feel. To do this may be very
difficult, but until we have made at least a beginning

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS n

at it the " heathen" religions will still be in a large
sense incomprehensible to us. We shall understand
them, perhaps, as we understand molecules and
masses, but in no more inner and living fashion. For
such an inner comprehension we must turn from
geography and even from history and economics and
government to the psychology of religion.

The problem why people believe and worship as
they do is in part a social, in part an individual, one;
and the problem in the case of any given generation,
and therefore in all the generations, cannot be under
stood until we have studied the psychological pro
cesses by which tradition is handed on. It is easy,
of course, to say that tradition is handed on by educa
tion and imitation; but to stop with that would be to
satisfy ourselves with words. For a really enlighten
ing view of "the matter we must study in some detail
the nature of individual belief and of the social pro
cesses of imitation, suggestion, and sympathy. No
detailed examination of these things, of course, is
possible within the limits of this paper, but I may
perhaps in a few words indicate the general outlines
of the psychological processes involved.

As someone has put it, " belief is as natural as
breathing." The child accepts as real whatever is
presented to him. Doubt of its reality is not among
the conceivabilities. This native state of the human
mind has been called " primitive credulity, " a term we
owe to Bain and which includes within itself a whole
chapter of psychology. Yet while the tendency to

12 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

believe whatever is presented is by no means con
fined to childhood, but characterizes every doubting
Thomas when not on his guard, it is a tendency which
at times, even early in life, is balked by the divergent
nature of human experience. The child naturally
believes everything he sees and everything that is
told him. But there comes a time when something
he is told is flatly contradicted by something that he
sees. Doubt now arises as a new and perplexing
experience, and a choice must be made between
authorities. In the struggle between rival claimants
to belief several factors combine to determine the
result. One of the most important of these is the
vividness, strength, and prestige which sense per
ception invariably gives to every idea with which it is
closely connected. To see is to believe. Another
almost equally important factor in the psychology
of belief, especially with more mature and developed
minds, is inner and outer coherence. A view or
teaching whose parts obviously conflict with each
other is likely to dissolve, to analyze itself almost
automatically into its constituent elements — unless
indeed it possess sufficient authoritative or emotional
strength to force one to blink the inner inconsistency.
Outer incoherence, i.e., inability to fit into our
already accepted body of beliefs, is for every new
teaching an almost more serious weakness. The new
is judged by the old, and if its inconsistency with the
old and revered be recognized the chances of its
acceptance will be very poor indeed. The emotional

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 13

appeal of a given idea, moreover, and its tendency to
confirm or deny our desires are further elements to be
considered in explaining the acceptance and retention
or the rejection of an idea.

Of these various factors determining human
belief perhaps the most important is primitive
credulity, especially if we consider it in connection
with the enormous prestige which the social source of
information possesses over our minds — a force so
great as to be explicable only by the fact that it is
based on our gregarious instinct, back of which we
need not go. The child is born into the world of
grown-ups, and is as defenseless against the power
of their beliefs as he would be against the force of
their arms. Nature has endowed him both with the
suggestibility and primitive credulity which we have
been considering, and also with an irresistible tend
ency to share the contagious emotions which those
around him express, and to imitate their actions.
How, then, would it be possible for him even to
doubt the religious beliefs or escape the religious
feelings which all those older than himself unite in
forcing upon his plastic mind? "One generation
shall praise Thy works to another and shall extol
Thy mighty acts." Thus each generation works
upon its successor in irresistible fashion. This
process of religious molding of each young mind is
both deliberately explicit and unconscious and in
direct. The child is taught by its parents and by
the priest in the temple or the monk in the vihara

14 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

certain traditional ideas which the entire community
accepts; but the indirect influence of the tradition
upon his mind is even more massive. For the ideas in
question form the background and the presupposition
of much of the conversation and much of the action
and of the feeling of the whole community. The only
way in which the individual could come to question
them would be (as we have seen) by finding them in
some way incongruous either with themselves or
with an established system of belief. But it is only
a very few of the religious beliefs of mankind that
are really inconsistent with themselves, and such
inconsistency when it exists is usually evident only
to the exceptionally thoughtful. And as to outer
incongruity of the traditional belief, that is usually
out of the question, for the tradition is the first of all
ideational systems to get possession of the mind, and
it therefore becomes the touchstone by which all
other beliefs have to be tried and accepted or rejected.
When one understands the psychological process by
which the tradition is thus handed down to each
successive generation, one no longer wonders how it is
that the people of other lands than ours come to
believe such strange things. One, in fact, is put
upon inquiry whether the touchstone by which we at
first judge their ideas to be strange — namely our own
inherited mass of beliefs — might not rightly seem
strange to intelligent visitors from other faiths.

It might seem strange to them, we may reply,
because they would not really understand our faith.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 15

This is true. But the application of it works both
ways. Part of our difficulty in vitalizing for our
selves the creeds of other religions — in feeling our way
into the living heart of these faiths — is due to the
fact that we substitute for their actual beliefs the
form of words in which those beliefs have been cast
either by the believers themselves or by those who
report them to us. We take the outer symbol for
the inner life, and we do this because we have failed
to understand the psychology of symbolism. For
the forms of creed and of cult possessed by the more
intelligent and spiritual of the great historical religions
are always to some extent, and often to a very great
extent, symbolic. Doubtless the verbal symbol was
at the time of its origin an attempt at the literal
statement of some genuine belief, just as the material
symbol has probably developed from objects which
originally were regarded as somehow divine or
magically powerful in their own right. But much
water has flowed under the bridges since those early
days; and the symbol, whether material or verbal,
has inevitably come to mean both less and more.
Many of the devout and orthodox adherents of the
great religions care little and think little of the literal
meaning of their symbols; and even to the less
intelligent and the more literally-minded masses
the symbol has taken on during the course of ages
new meaning and a new emotional significance
which largely overshadow its literal side and have
quite transformed its total value. Thus it comes

i6 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

that to the outside observer the symbols of a foreign
religion seem always meager and usually unattractive
if not disgusting. For in the making of its symbols
each of the great religions usually takes some common
objects of superstitious regard or some expressions
of perhaps crude belief, wears off their edges by
centuries of loving use, pours round them the accumu
lating emotion of the faith of generations, purifies
them through all the fiery trials, the failures and
successes, the joys and the sufferings, of the race,
ennobles them by identification with the spiritual
ideals and aspirations of countless heroes and saints
who from their labors rest, and thus endows them
with a power over the imagination and the emotions
and the living faith of each growing individual mind
that can come only through the massive authority
and prestige of the entire community, both living
and dead.

Much of what I have been saying applies to cult
quite as well as to creed. A perfectly accurate
account of the ritual, say of Hinduism or Buddhism,
from the pen of the most scholarly student of the
history of religions may give us no more insight
into its real nature, no more apprehension of what is
actually going on, than we should get from a photo
graph. A photograph of a religious ceremonial may
be of considerable assistance to our understanding.
But where is the color, where the incense, where the
music ? The scholar's description shows accurately
the positions and the movements of the various

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 17

physical bodies, both inanimate and animate; but
it may leave out of account the fact that there are
minds and hearts inside some of those bodies, and
may give us no clue as to how intelligent people can
possibly say and do the things described. To
understand the cult we must, therefore, not merely
have it accurately described, we must not only be
able to trace its historical development and see what
•external influences have helped to formulate it:
we must also study the psychological function which
it plays in the life of religion. This function may be
said, in brief, to consist in keeping faith lively and
vivid, in stimulating religious emotion, and in fasten
ing the attention upon religion in such fashion as to
make it real and vital to the worshiper. This function
it performs in various ways. One of the most impor
tant ways in which the cult — particularly its "cruder
forms" — strengthens religious belief is by bringing
it new reality of feeling by contact with the senses.
In studying belief we saw how greatly the sense of
reality is stimulated by direct perception. The cult
seizes upon this fact and links up the divine object of
faith with immediately presented visible and tangible
things. Psychologically speaking, this is the chief
religious function of pictures, images, miracle plays,
relics, and even of so sacred a ceremonial as the
Christian Eucharist. The most widespread and
perhaps the crudest instance of this aspect of the
cult is to be found in idolatry. For nearly all human
minds, particularly for those of a relatively slight

i8 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

intellectual development, it is difficult to make either
a transcendent or an omnipresent deity a very living
reality. When, however, the religious imagination is
stimulated by the presence of a visible and tangible
object — an object not indeed completely identified
with the deity but regarded as one in which the deity
has consented mysteriously and graciously to dwell
— the sense of God's reality and of his very presence
becomes easy and natural, the prayerful attitude
of the soul is induced, and the worshiper may take
away with him something of the same reinforcement
to faith, something of the same spiritual uplift,
which many a Christian feels, and rightly feels, after
having partaken of the Lord's Supper. And again
let me repeat that a true understanding of symbolism
is essential for a true understanding of ritual. For
neither the idol nor any other object used in the cult
can be rightly understood if it be taken literally and
only so. The idol may be worshiped as directly as
you please; it may be identified literally with the
god; yet to the most unintelligent worshiper it is
not merely wood and stone, the work of men's hands.
He sees in it more, much more, than a camera can
see or a chemical analysis can discover, more, much
more, also than an unsympathetic though scholarly
observer can ever imagine. And to the more intel
ligent and spiritual worshiper of every religion the
wood and stone are consciously recognized as merely
incidental helps, to be prized and used only because of
our finite limitations.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 19

The contrast I have just referred to between the
two ways of using images is a part of a larger distinc
tion between two types of worship which, in another
connection, and for want of better terms, I have
called the objective and the subjective — a distinction
which, it seems to me, gives considerable assistance
in understanding the varying forms of different
religions. In its simpler and less self-conscious
forms, worship is an effort to thank or praise or in
some manner mollify or please the deity. It is
naively objective in its aim. This, for example, is
the leading purpose of much of the worship that one
finds alike in the Hindu temple and in the Catholic
cathedral. To produce any sort of psychological
effect upon the worshipers is among the last things
intended. The effect, however, is produced, as we
have seen — the faith is stimulated, the prayerful
attitude of mind is brought about, religious emotions
and possibly moral aspirations are induced in the
worshiping auditors. The more self-conscious and
reflective individuals and religions perceive this fact,
and some of them, therefore, make this subjective
effect of ritual the direct object of their efforts —
a situation which we find in the less sophisti
cated individuals and communities among Buddhists,
Jainas, and Protestant Christians. The two motives
are mingled in most cases, but one or the other
usually predominates; and it is frequently difficult
for an individual accustomed from childhood to a
form of worship which accentuates one of these

20 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

factors to see anything whatever in a religious cere
mony which emphasizes chiefly the other form. This
is an additional reason why the Protestant Christian
is likely to regard not only the Hindu temple- worship
but also the Catholic mass as mere " mummery and
superstition"; while both the Hindu and the Catholic
would wonder what there was really religious about a
Protestant church service, with its godless and altar-
less meeting house, its sermon, its " selection by the
choir," and even its "long prayer," all seemingly
addressed to the audience.

Prayer is another matter upon which the history
of religions needs light from the psychology of religion.
There is probably nothing in the actions of a strange
people which to an unsympathetic and unimaginative
observer seems more strange and unintelligible than
their prayers. Such an observer will get but little
assistance from reading the voluminous compilations
of prayers ancient and modern wrought out by the
labors of our archaeologists and philologists; nor in
his effort to understand why people actually pray,
and why they repeat such strange prayers, will he
be greatly helped by the ingenious theories of the
anthropologists as to how prayer originated from spell.
He will indeed get some light if he observes — it may
be by his own introspection — how spell tends to
originate from prayer. For by observing how
spontaneous prayer crystallizes, through the force
of habit, into formal prayer, and how formal prayers
which possess the prestige of long social usage come

TEE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 21

to be regarded as somehow sacred, he will understand
how inevitable it is that many ancient prayers
should gain a power over the unreflecting mind
quite comparable to that sometimes possessed by
magic formulas. Given the facts of primitive cre
dulity, habit, and the prestige of antiquity, it is
not strange that many of the less intelligent in every
religion should pray as if they were to be heard for
their much speaking. But this gives one only a very
partial understanding of the nature of prayer and
of the question why men pray. A deeper study of
the religious consciousness will be necessary if one is
to understand what real prayer — whether Christian
or heathen — is like on its inner side. For if one
asks prayerful people — and that means common
people — why they pray, he will probably be told,
not that it is from habit, but that they pray because
they cannot help doing so. The consciousness of
human weakness and the burning human needs com
bine to make men stretch out their arms in appeal
to the Determiner of Destiny. The longing is a
psycho-dynamic force and will get itself somehow
expressed, whether it be in a mere cry, in a consciously
formed petition, in a traditional prayer learned in
childhood and phrased in words not understood, or,
it may be, in a mere attitude or posture or motion
of the body. The bodily postures of prayer, often
so strange to the onlooker, are to be explained in
part as natural instinctive expressions of submission
and appeal, in part as habitual responses associated

22 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

since the plastic days of childhood with the mental
attitudes of reverence and supplication. Their reten
tion through the ages is not due exclusively nor chiefly
to superstitious conservatism, but principally to the
religious utility which they serve in aiding to bring
about the prayerful state of mind. In like manner
the formal prayers of nine-tenths of the world, which
cause so much disturbance to the self-satisfied
Protestant, have their very real religious utility.
The articulation of a definite form of religious words,
sanctified through tradition, has the same kind of
psychological effect as traditional bodily posture;
in fact it is usually of even greater importance. Only
for the mystically minded is wordless prayer possible;
and many a man finds in the verbal forms of tradition
a better means of focusing his religious attention
than in any poor words of his own extemporaneous
invention. This is true, strange as it may at first
seem, even of prayers the words of which are entirely
unintelligible to the worshiper. For words are often
—yes, often even in our best and most religious
moments — but the semimaterial forms in which we
clothe the spirit of our prayer, a spirit of longing and
of aspiration which is itself ineffable. It is a mistake
to suppose that our minds regularly follow the words
of our prayers, or that we fail to pray unless they
are thus nailed down to verbal meanings. And it is
quite possible, and it is frequently actual that the
most sacred associations of life begun in infancy and
carried on to the end may so weave themselves about

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 23

even meaningless syllables that these may come to be
the embodiment of reverence, confession, petition,
longing, aspiration. I spoke of them as "meaningless
syllables"; they are not that. They may be taken
from a foreign and unknown language and hence may
not convey to the worshiper the same meaning that
they did to the original author of them centuries ago;
but they may be brimful of meaning none the less
— a meaning, it may be, too vague, too emotional,
to be put into words; but for all that none the less
adapted for the bearing of that religious emotion
which fills the heart. I remember hearing the voice
of a Burmese woman in a Buddhist shrine in Man-
dalay, shrill and clear and impassioned, with the
heart's longing in every syllable, appealing to the
Lord Buddha and to the dark Determiner of Destiny,
repeating her prayer over and over, intensely, wildly,
rilling all the courtyard of the deserted vihara. The
prayer was in Pali, and I presume she understood
not a word of what she said. Not a word, perhaps;
but she understood the prayer. The seemingly
meaningless words sacred to her from childhood's
experiences she took and filled with a meaning of
her own. That meaning perhaps, like the meaning
of music, could not have been put into words. But
the prayer had a very real meaning for her; it had a
meaning even for me; and I am sure if the Lord
Buddha was for a moment roused by it out of the
supreme bliss of Nirvana — as well he might have been—
that he too heard and understood that woman's prayer.

24 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

If time permitted it might be of interest to continue
the application of the psychological point of view to
various other phenomena studied by the history of
religion, to such things, for example, as the belief in
God and the various forms of God, the belief in
immortality, the social religious upheavals common
to all religions, which in Protestantism we call revi
vals, to the conversion experience — also common to
the religions of all races — to asceticism, to mysticism,
and to the great values of religion in its bearing upon
truth, upon happiness, and upon the moral life.
These applications, however, I must leave each of
you to make out for himself. But the considerations
to which I have called your attention have, I trust,
been sufficient to indicate the importance of applying
to the study of the history of religions whatever of
psychological insight we can summon if we are to
make the objects of our study really comprehensible.
To put the whole matter in a sentence, the history of
religions ought to be plausible; plausibility is as
desirable for a book in this field as it is for a novel.
And without some imaginative insight based upon a
sound psychology, the religions of the non- Christian
world — and a large part of the religions of the Chris
tian world — will remain on their inner side almost as
unintelligible to us as they were to the Deists.

JAMES BISSETT PRATT

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

PHILOSOPHIC CONCEPTIONS ON WHICH FURTHER
RELIGIOUS PROGRESS DEPENDS

When, in the ongoing of that irreversible process
we call life, we reach the reflective stage, the products
of reflection become factors of fundamental impor
tance in further development. Instinct, the nai've
views of childhood, and the fool-killer have by this
time done for us nearly all that they can do. And of
these three the last is not the most insignificant, for
nature and society are constantly eliminating those
who hold unworkable theories of life. This is to say
that eventually, in the course of his development,
man becomes a creature in whom ideas, ideals, and.
philosophy count. He continues to be driven by
impulse and appetite, but he is no longer solely driven.
He is moved by attraction, lured upward and onward
by visions of the better, by a homesickness for the

perfect.

The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best.

As the world grows older, man is ever discovering
new values, while at the same time he is learning
more about his place in the universe. He seeks to
co-ordinate and systematize these values so that
they may be realized together to the maximum extent

25

26 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

in the individual and social life. As he becomes
aware of his place in the infinities, and has some
glimpse of the great frame in which his life is set,
the question inevitably arises as to the cosmic fate
of these values. Are they revelations of the nature
of reality or are they merely epiphenomenal, evanes
cent by-products of that which is physically real?
Is the universe congenial to our ideals, or is it hostile
or indifferent? What is the relation of the highest
values to the mechanism of the world? What is
reality ? Is it what physics studies or are Platonism
and Christianity substantially right ?

These questions cannot be escaped except by the
immature, and they must be answered correctly if
human life is to keep in its upward and onward way.
It has been truly said that philosophy is the unseen
framework of all that we think or do. General ideas
as to what is possible or practicable are powerful
stimulants or depressors. They act as tonics or
deterrents according as they legitimate or negate
our deepest longings and ideal strivings.

Of the many needs of our time, none perhaps is
deeper than that which can be met only by a philoso
phy of religion. By this term I mean a comprehen
sive, synthetic, synoptic view which includes what
science has discovered about the universe and which
also finds a place for religion. The average thought
ful man has reached some conclusions as to the relation
of physics to ethics, of the practically possible to
ideal aims, conclusions which influence him more

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 27

than he knows. He may not realize that he has
philosophized and he may even defame philosophy.
Nevertheless he always has an idea-system which in
some degree stimulates or paralyzes the higher
energies of his life. And the more unconscious his
philosophy is the poorer it is. For we either con
sciously and after some critical examination accept
a world- view, or we adopt it uncritically and become
its victims. Some scheme for their thoughts all
reflective men inevitably have. The only question is
whether it shall be philosophically arrived at and
continually revised in the direction of adequacy and
truth, or unsuspectingly adopted and dogmatically
held.

Man's philosophy, his comprehensive view of
things and values, is his only protection from one
sided ideas of life. Alas for him when it is itself
one-sided! Everyone who has conversed with others
on great themes must have realized in their case at
least, if not in his own, that a world-view affects the
weight of evidence and so determines the receptivity
of the mind in special ways. It is, for example,
useless to tell some things to some people, for they
simply have not any place to put these facts and
truths. The very possibility of them is excluded
from the classification their minds have made. A
complete demonstration would simply dumbfound
them. Their mental life will have to undergo a
plowing by deep experiences before they can
entertain the considerations which are now foreign
to their ideas of reality and possibility.

28 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

A very large number of intelligent, serious, and
sincere minds are suffering from a crude and narrow
naturalism, according to which the reality of the
universe is matter in motion, the ultimate truth of
which is physics and mechanics. Many of these
men and women are of deeply religious nature, but
all that they care most for, the intellectual, aesthetic,
moral, and religious values, seem to them but frail
and inexplicable phenomena, soon to be lost in the
nothingness of the past.

Some of them have become imprisoned in this
view before they were aware of what was taking
place. Not having been forewarned, and without
the protection which philosophic studies can give,
this depressing conviction that all is mechanism and
that religion deals with beautiful and comfortable
illusions steals over them while engaged in physical
researches. They form a conception of nature from a
consideration solely of her physical aspects and then
seek to make it include those values, those realities
that men live and die for, and that ought to have
influenced the conception of what nature really is.
The result is inevitable. If in framing our con
ception of nature we leave out certain realities, there
will not be and cannot be any place for these realities
in the conception so framed. What was ignored
will remain outside our philosophy and be henceforth
simply inexplicable.

Now all ignored interests avenge themselves. The
values of life are of one family. They belong together.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 29

To omit anyone is to detract from the rest. How
completely a naturalism of this kind negates what is
most precious to us is seen with perfect clearness in
the statement by Bertrand Russell in his beautiful
essay entitled A Free Man's Worship.

The world which science presents for our belief,
is, he says, a world void of meaning.

Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward
must find a home. That man is the product of causes which
had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs,
are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms;
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve the individual life beyond the grave; that all the
labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the
noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole
temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried in the
debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite
beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy
which rejects them can hope to stand,. Only within the
scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of
unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built.
.... The life of man is a long march through the night,
surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain,
towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none
may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades
vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent
death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in

which their happiness or misery is decided Brief and

powerless is man's life; on htm and all his race the slow, sure
doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless
of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way;
for man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow

30 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains to
cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble
his little day: disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of
Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built:
undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free
from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly
defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment,
his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary
but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have
fashioned, despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Those who have lightly accepted the current
naturalism but are hiding from themselves its ultimate
consequences would do well to ponder these words,
for, granting the writer's premises, the conclusion he
so vividly states inevitably follows and must some time
be faced. Within the scaffolding of these thoughts
the despairing, reality-defying attitude he advocates
is the only possible religion. A pathetic sympathy
for our unhappy race is all that remains of love,
while faith, hope, and joy, like the more transient
miracles and prophecies of early Christianity, must
now cease. Paul was mistaken, for they are not to
abide, but after surviving for a score of centuries
science is making them impossible attitudes, so that
they, too, are to be done away.

Thought along this line has evidently reached
an impasse. If there is no way of escape, it is obvious
that among educated men religion must soon be
numbered among the things that were. There is a
way out of the difficulty and we begin to walk in it
the moment we ask the question which Professor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 31

Russell does not raise — Whence this superiority of
man to the world which he condemns and defies?
Is he a native or an emigrant from some other universe
into this? It is very curious that a mind of this
order is content to accept an absolute break between
man's ideals and his world. But surely it is necessary
to remember that the human race and its ideals are
an outcome of the world-process and have their
foundations in the depths of reality. It is no longer
possible to regard the world as separate and out of
organic relation with the conscious lives in which it
culminates.

If we forget it, the result is tragedy. For a con
viction that we are strangers in an indifferent or
hostile world that is far stronger than we, is what we
inevitably come to if, in forming our conception of
reality, we neglect all but its physical aspects and then
seek to find in nature so conceived a place for the
highest values. If this imperfect conception were
the truth, Professor Russell's heroic attitude in facing
the tragedy of human existence would be ideal.
But it is not the truth. There is no such nature.
A purely physical nature is an abstraction. Empiri
cally we know nothing of it and theoretically it has no
justification. The only nature that we know is the na
ture that has produced man, human civilization, the love
and beauty, the worship, prayers, and ideal strivings
of the ages. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Athens
and Christ in Galilee and Jerusalem were just as truly
parts of nature as are rocks and trees, protoplasm,

32 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

nebulae, atoms, and ions or electric energy. In
deed, they were more truly representative than
things inorganic or than lowly forms of life. They
were the outcome of perhaps eighty millions of years
of evolution since life appeared on the planet, and
the fundamental rational principle of interpretation,
when dealing with matters of this kind, is that a
process is more truly judged by its outcome than by
its beginnings. This was stated by Aristotle in the
famous words: "For what each thing is when fully
developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking
of a man, a horse, or a family." (olov yap
effTi rrjs yeveaeais TeKeadeiarjs, ravr^v 0a/-tej> TTJV
elvat, e/cdorou, tiffirep avdpuirov, iWou, ol/das — Politics
i. 2. 8.) That is, we now think of the world in terms
of process and we know that "no process can be
truly described unless it is viewed in its complete
ness, " in the light of its final or latest result.

We cannot, of course, speak of the creation as
complete, but its highest product in our part of the
universe is human personality and human society.

All tended to mankind

And, mankind produced, all has its end thus far:
But in completed man begins anew
A tendency to God.

So Browning's Paracelsus, and laborious philoso
phy supports his swift and sure intuition. The logic
of this view is absolutely inescapable. It is not
merely permissible: it is imperative. He who
ignores or fails to use it leaves the highway of human

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 33

thought. Before its positive significance was per
ceived many minds shrank from the doctrine of
the continuity of life from its lowest beginnings to
the highest personalities, for it seemed to degrade
life by assimilating it to the non-living and to reduce
man to a part of nature conceived of as physical and
subhuman. Only later was it realized that in this
case, as in all others, the truth is good news, and that,
since nature includes humanity, our "thought of
nature must be made rich enough to make room for
spiritual purposes. "

It is rational, then, to conclude that " human
values constitute a part of the real ends of the uni
verse. " The power behind evolution is a power that
has produced the beautiful, the true, the good. Our
ideals are not aliens in the universe, but "genuine
realities organic to the whole of Being." What the
doctrine of evolution, of the kinship of all life, and of
the unity of man with nature has done has been to
transform the conception of nature. It is seen to be
not lifeless and foreign to our nature, but the matrix
of our highest life. It seems alien only when we
contemplate its physical aspects and ignore or
forget its values. We may still be appalled at the
extent of the universe in space and time and momen
tarily terrified at the conception that our universe of
stars strewn along the milky way may, from a suffi
cient distance, appear as a nebula, that it may in
fact be but one of the many thousands of nebulae
which have been discovered. We may be dizzy and

34 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

frightened at these celestial magnitudes and sidereal
ages, but only so long as we forget that the reality
which is so overwhelming in its physical aspects has
also produced our values, that out of it have come
millions of noble men and women with a passion for
the perfect and a longing for the conservation of the
best.

It is simple fact to say that a lily flower on its
stalk in June is not more truly a part of the plant
than the finest men and women, including Jesus,
are organic parts of nature. And since Aristotle was
right in declaring that processes must be estimated by
their outcome, we are bound to see in humanity at
its highest a revelation of the nature of nature, and in
lives like that of Christ a revelation of the nature of
human nature. In other words, thought justifies
what religion believes, namely, that reality is akin to
what we reverence and love. The humanly best
becomes the key to the cosmos, and the religious view
of the universe is true. The ideal has a natural basis,
and the natural is capable of an ideal development.
In the life that for Christendom has become the
symbol of the divine we see the heart of the world
laid bare, "the place where love breaks through.'7
He is not the Great Exception, but the Great Example,
the supreme revelation thus far of the nature of that
nature out of which we all have come. Christianity
and Platonism are essentially right: at the heart of
reality is the Good, and we ourselves are real in
proportion as we are partakers of that divine reality

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 35

which the religious nature feels to be behind phe
nomena and to which it knows, that it is akin.

If this is a just statement, it is clear that the unity
and spiritual outcome of the world-process is a con
ception on which further religious life and progress
depend. It is true that in the past the temples grew
as grows the grass, and that the religious thoughts and
feelings of men came in the same way, but that
cannot be any more. For, at a certain point this
spontaneous development is arrested, namely, at
the time when reflection begins. Religion has to
make terms with other interests in life. A problem
arises when religion is threatened, when, for instance,
there seems to be no place for it in the scientific view
of the universe. If men are henceforth to be at
once rational and sincere and religious, it is obvious
that they must attain to a world-view in which
religion has its place. In other words, for reflective
men religion inevitably comes to depend upon a phi
losophy of religion.

Besides those who are depressed and hindered in
their aspiring life by that halfway mode of thought
which we have called naturalism, there are many
others who live the religious life but support and
justify it by a dualistic philosophy which is constantly
being undermined and which is daily becoming more
untenable. They protect this philosophy from criti
cism as well as they can, for they suspect its inade
quacy, and they cling to it tenaciously, since they
have no other support for a precious faith.

36 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

According to this dualistic view, now obsolescent,
nature was out of harmony with God and the natural
was the antithesis of the divine. The realm of God
was the supernatural. He was not in the order of
nature but in exceptional, extraordinary, and miracu
lous occurrences. Nor was nature regarded as a coher
ent whole. As Sir Henry Jones concisely expresses it:

The physical sciences worked apart, their provinces did
not intersect. Physical life stood, apparently, unrelated to
its material substrate: it was taken as a clear addition to it.
Within the domain of the physical life itself there were fixed
species, each of them describable by itself: the problem of
their connection was not raised. Man as a rational and respon
sible being stood aloof from all — an exception and addendum
to the natural scheme. Even his own nature was riven in
two: his body was merely the tenement of his soul. On all
sides there were interstices, and rifts, and opportunities for
miraculous interventions — which came. For, beyond the
natural wo;rld and around it, ready to flow in upon it at any
moment, there was another. It was the object of faith rather
than knowledge, of spiritual rather than natural vision : it was
dogmatically asserted on the one side and meekly accepted
on the other. God dwelt in that remote region of moveless
mystery, in sovereign majesty inscrutable: "He made darkness
his secret place: his pavilion round about were dark waters
and thick clouds of the skies." But of intrinsic or rational
continuity between that world and this, there was none;
and experience here gave little clue to experience there: for
was not experience in this world merely natural, and spiritual
experience assumed to be a mystery ?x

Clearly, it is most unfortunate that the religious
values, faith, hope, love, joy, the fruits of the Spirit
1 Idealism as a Practical Creed, p. 236.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 37

of which the apostle Paul was constantly speaking,
should be associated with such a view of the world
as this — a view which the progress of thought has
doomed to extinction. For these interstices through
which God's revelation of himself were believed to
come are disappearing, and it is easy to understand
what the situation will be when the remaining lacunae
have been rilled, the last gap closed. Indeed, we are
not far from this now. For, as the philosopher just
quoted says:

Belief in the unity of the natural universe, including man,
is now practically universal in civilized communities. There
are neither interstices nor rifts; there are no causes without
natural consequences, and no effects without natural and
necessary antecedents — no mere accidents anywhere. The
whole scheme is compact and man is a part of it. His psychical
nature is inextricably intertwined with his bodily frame;
he is not spirit plus soul plus body; but spirit, soul, and body
interfused; a sensuous-rational being, continuous with the
world in which he lives. All being is of one tissue.

It is obviously useless for religious men who know
that the values they strive to promote are indis
pensable to civilization to minimize these facts or to
avert the necessary conclusion. What is needed is a
new interpretation. And this the philosophy of
religion is prepared to give. In these apparently
abstruse matters the average man has a great stake.
On the issue depends his view of life's nature and
meaning and possibilities, and the ultimate result
will be faith, courage, and hope, or black despair.

38 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

For

By uniting nature to man, man to man, and all with God,
Idealism has involved all that exists, or that man can conceive,
in one doubtful destiny. There is no picking of footsteps
any more, nor wary walking amidst the distinctions of artificial
schemes: the whole web has been torn. There is no salvation
now by partial issues; the question of the rectitude and sanity
of the whole order of reality has been raided, and there remain
but two alternatives — hope which cannot despair, or despair
which cannot hope.1

In this situation it is clear that no help is to be
looked for from compromises or hybrid schemes or
repairs to the old dualism. Hope lies in the frank
acceptance of the unity of the universe for which
science stands and the spiritual outcome of the
world-process which is the legitimate and necessary
interpretation of the facts and experience of human
life. When we fully realize that "God always acts
through nature, and that nature at its highest and
best is always the manifestation of God's character
as he reveals himself to us, that the Divine Spirit is
at work in the world in ways that are natural to the
world and to men," we have an interpretation of
nature, human life, and religion that is more beautiful
and significant than the dualism we are forced to
surrender, and that has besides the great advantage of
being true and concordant with the ideas that rule
the modern age.

Since God is in the order and not in the exceptions,
the distinction between sacred and secular is abolished.
All history becomes sacred and humanity a divine

1 Idealism as a Practical Creed, p. 247.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 39

incarnation. Man becomes divine in proportion as
he becomes a partaker of the true, the beautiful, and
the good. His religious experience is as natural,
from the point of view of science, as is his physical
life. It is as natural to be good in the higher stages
of development as it is to be animal and savage in the
lower. Man comes to himself as he grows. History
is the revelation of his nature, of the divine nature
that expresses itself in him. In the light of this
conception we must revise our idea of the Spirit.
It is not "an occasional afflatus," but the immanent,
ever present God in action, the "very warp and woof
of the web" of man's intellectual, moral, social,
aesthetic, and religious life.

Beside the naturalism and the dualism of which
we have been speaking, there are other views and
theories of life, both scientific and philosophic, which
are unfavorable to religion. Some of them threaten
its continued existence. It will be instructive to
consider briefly how religious values are affected by
certain current tendencies in psychology, the psy
chology of religion, theology, and the philosophy
implicit in the democratic aspirations of our time.
Take the case of psychology first. Those who are
engaged in research in this field are not inspired by
antipathy toward religion. They are seeking truth,
yet if we forget, as too many do forget, that the
behaviorists are studying only one aspect of human
life by certain methods appropriate to that study,
and if we assume that what they ignore does not

40 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

exist or has no significance, it is obvious that religion
will appear to be concerned with what is unreal.
It is not merely that in these studies of the responses
made by the human body to its surroundings there
is no question of a soul. Consciousness itself has
become irrelevant. Thus in his recent volume,
Psychology from the Standpoint of the Behaviorist,
Professor John B. Watson, of Johns Hopkins Uni
versity, explicitly says:

The reader will find no discussion of consciousness and no
reference to such terms as sensation, perception, attention,
will, image, and the like. These ter,ms are in good repute,
but I find I can get along without them, both in carrying out
my investigation and in presenting psychology as a system
to my students. I frankly do not know what they mean nor
do I believe that anyone else can use them consistently.

In other words, for psychology so understood,
consciousness can be ignored as having no significance.
Human ideas and ideals, loves, hopes, philosophy,
and the passion for perfection are ignored. The
values that men struggle for and for which they
gladly give up their lives are as if they were not in
this study of the physical mechanism, its tendencies,
and its responses. Now no one doubts that such a
study may throw light on human life, and everyone
wishes to see it developed to the utmost. The
serious mistake to which we are liable is the very
natural one of regarding as unreal what we are not
at present concerned with and so of drawing unwar
ranted negative conclusions. Because values and
that in man which appreciates values cannot be

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 41

successfully studied by the methods of physical
science it does not follow that they are not real and
supremely important. To be scientific is not the
only way to be intelligent. To claim that behaviorism
is the whole of psychology and that consciousness
may be excluded from its investigations is to make a
philosophy, a world- view, of a severely limited con
ception of life.

A colleague of Professor Watson, Professor Arthur
0. Lovejoy, has seen with the clearness to be expected
of a philosopher the real significance of this interesting
movement. He says:

Now behaviorism as a method of experimental inquiry in
psychology has its place and finds practical justification in its
results. But behaviorism as a metaphysics is simply natural
ism gone mad. It conceives the whole process of consciousness
in terms of physical stimulus and bodily response. It recog
nizes in the experience of an individual no elements which are
not, at least potentially, wholly open to the direct sensible
observation of other individuals — no elements, in other words,
which are anything more than visible or tangible movements
of the muscles or other parts of the animal mechanism. In
all this it incidentally stultifies itself; for the behaviorist
philosopher puts forward his doctrine as meaningful and true,
and as reached through logical processes — and yet truth and
meaning can have no place among the strictly behavioristic
categories, and the theory cannot recognize any such thing as
the determination of the action of an animal (even though the
animal be a philosopher) by logical reflection as such. If we
apply the behaviorisms principles to himself, we must treat
his arguments and conclusions merely as so much animal
behavior, that is, as movements of the muscles of (e.g.) his
throat or forearm and nothing more.1

^Harvard Theological Review, April 20, 1920, p. 193.

42 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

Life is behavior but it is not human life unless it
is more. It consists in part of adjustments to the
material universe, but the highest and best part of it
is a striving for values. Now values are not physical
things; they do not exist except for conscious beings.
Indeed, they would not exist for purely cognitive
beings devoid of emotional powers. They are per
ceived only when they are felt. This is as true of
religious values as of others, for all values are of one
family. If behaviorism is more than a method, if it
becomes a philosophy, a habit of mind, it is obviously
unfavorable to that life of the spirit which we call
religion, since this lies beyond the realm of which it
takes account.

Then, there is the psychology of religion which,
like behaviorism, is making a contribution to our
knowledge of human life. It studies the religious
emotions, the instincts, the order of human develop
ment, the evolution of man's sense of the divine and
of his thoughts about God. In this way it renders an
indispensable service. But occasionally the psy
chologist assumes the role of a philosopher and falls
into one of the pitfalls along the philosophic path. He
somewhat uncritically adopts the mistaken view that
consciousness knows only itself. The doctrine that we
cannot get beyond experience he interprets as meaning
that experience is only of itself, and that therefore we
cannot know anything about God. If he continues, as
he often does, to use the word God, he means nothing
objective, but merely a feeling or concept.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 43

But this is merely a relapse- into that seductive
but false theory of knowledge which has troubled
European thought for so long. Now to be a victim
of this illusion is no longer excusable. It is to live
as if clear-sighted men such as Santayana had not
written a page. After the whole matter has been
cleared up, it is pathetic to see men holding that
" theory of knowledge which proclaims that knowledge
is impossible. You know only your so-called knowl
edge, which itself knows nothing The mind

knows only the ideas it creates. " This " subjectivity
of thought, this philosophy which deliberately limits
itself to the articulation of self-consciousness, and
considers the embroideries it makes upon a dark
experience, and for which the self is shut up in a
closed circle of experience, admitting of no relations
with anything beyond," has played its unhappy part
in the world long enough. The psychology of reli
gion does not justify a man in taking a position
such that "when he speaks of anything — matter,
God, himself — he means not that thing but the idea
of it."

Professor Santayana, some of whose expressive
phrases I am using, says:

Evidently on this principle none of Leibniz's spirits could
know any other, nor could any phase of the same spirit know
any other phase. The unbridgeable chasm of want of experi
ence would cut off knowledge from everything but its "con
tent," the ideas it has of objects. Those fabled external
objects would be brought back into my ideas, and identified
with them ; my ideas in turn would be drawn in and identified

44 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

with the fact that I entertain them and this fact would condense
into the more intimate and present fact that intensely, vaguely,
deeply I feel that I am, or am tending to be, something or
other. My Will, or Spirit, the rumble of my unconscious
appetitions, thus absorbs my ideas, my ideas absorb their
objects, and these objects absorb the world, past, present and
future. Earth and heaven, God and my fellowmen are mere
expressions of my Will, and if they were anything more, I
could not now be alive to their presence.

Life is short and the number of fresh hours when
the mental sky is clear and the horizon wide, and
when we are therefore competent in philosophy, is
few, and we may naturally resent having to consume
some of them in showing the untenability and the
temporary character of theories which ignore con
sciousness or assume that we are shut up in it, which
deny the efficacy of ideas and ideals and explain
away the knowledge of objective existence and the
reality of Truth. But for the philosopher of religion,
it is a part of the day's work. The theories in question
are getting out among the people just about the
time their inadequacy is being perceived among the
thinkers, and the impression produced is unfavorable
to the higher interests of our race. For religion,
like education, does not promote itself. It is carried
on and advanced by organized effort. And the
difficulties we have been speaking of are part of what
makes the work of the churches so hard. They are
puzzling because they are so intangible and ill-
understood. The present slow progress of the
churches is not wholly their fault. Even if they had

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 45

fewer literal-minded men in the pulpit, if they
modernized their creeds and were more active in
social service, if they met all the just criticisms passed
upon them, they would find the promotion of religious
values in this age very difficult because of strong
thought currents which run in the contrary direction.
Of these counter currents the most important,
perhaps, is that which we must now attempt to
describe. The task is difficult because what is in
question is a view of life which has never been clearly
formulated or adequately expressed, but which is
nevertheless a living conviction at the heart of the
democratic movement of our time. It is implicit in
the efforts that are being made toward social and
political reconstruction, in "the latent assumptions
which underlie men's judgments, beliefs and ideals. "
In this complex of massive energies, of formative
forces, lies what Professor George Plimpton Adams
calls the "idea system" of our age. This writer's
Idealism and the Modern Age is the most successful
recent effort to state the problem and to show the
tremendous stake the average man has in its correct
solution. It is a definite contribution for which we
should be grateful, but it is perhaps possible to outline
the situation more concisely. Certainly he is right
in the main point, that until modern times Western
Europe has lived in the faith that there is an objective
moral order in which it is man's supreme duty and
privilege to find a place. For the ancient and even
for the medieval world the accepted idea was that

46 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

man's essential vocation was contemplation, the
knowledge of the truth, the beatific vision of beauty,
goodness, the divine reality. He was to find out
what is true and believe it, to discover beauty and
rejoice in it, to know the right and do it.

In Christian phrase, man's highest good was to
have his "conversation in heaven," to "live as seeing
the invisible, ' ' to take his place in the divine order by
living in love and the spirit of Christ. For Platonism
there was an objective truth, beauty, and goodness,
which man imitates and in which he participates and
into the likeness of which through adoring contem
plation he is transformed.

The new spirit is that which looks up at nothing,
which worships nothing, but which aims at remaking
the human world to the end that human desires may
be more fully satisfied. It definitely announced and
declared itself in "the French Revolution, the first
mighty upheaval motived by the conscious con
viction that the only social order fit for man is one
which he himself has made and can control, and
which he can also unmake if he so desires. This
conviction is but democracy, come to a full con
sciousness of its meaning and power." This aspira
tion to revise and reconstruct our social institutions
is one that we all share. We are in fact committed to
democracy, but we are not committed to its present
understanding of itself or to its denials. Granted
that the social order must be remade, the ques
tion arises as to the ideals that shall guide our

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 47

reforming activity and the values we are to incor
porate.

This question is crucial for the higher life of our
race. For the answer which is given by many
spokesmen for democracy, and by the instrumentalists
and pragmatists, is that we have nothing to consider
but the satisfaction of our desires. The problem of
life, they say, is to take account of instinct and
impulse, and through creative intelligence, to secure
their maximum satisfaction. "The mind is the
voice of the body's interests." It is in the same
class with the bodily organs, and its sole business is
to guide organic adjustments. It is useful to get
us out of trouble. But it is not for love, worship,
contemplation of truth and beauty, for the beatific
vision. To understand it you must look backward
at the interests it serves, not forward toward the
goodness and beauty men believe in and for which
they yearn.

The question upon which so much depends is not
whether this is a true account of the mind, for it is
obviously in part true, but whether it is a complete
account. If it is entirely adequate, if this is all there
is to be said, then it is clear that Platonism and
Christianity are wrong, for both have taught that
man's mind enjoys the privilege of "participating in
objective, significant structures"; that in its love
of the true, the beautiful, and the good it really loves
God; that the goal of our imperfect loves, is, as
Plato taught, the vision and adoring contemplation

48 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

of the divine beauty; and that in all our good is
"the Good, " which is our goal, so that in our striving
for the particular excellences that attract us we are
"like children chasing butterflies while still proceeding
in the direction of home."

Democracy is yet too young to have carefully
examined the philosophy by which it lives and which,
if uncorrected, will lead to disaster. This view of
the mind, according to which life is response, adapta
tion, behavior, and nothing more, concentrates its
attention on the beginnings of life and ignores or
denies the objective realities which are the concern
of Platonism, the most vital philosophy in the world,
and of Christianity, the religion of the peoples which
have built civilization. It is truly said that prag
matism is merely the denial of everything Platonic,
and the assumption implicit in much of our democracy
that there is nothing objective about ethical and
religious values is merely the denial of Christianity.
Rev. W. R. Inge is, therefore, entirely right in
saying that "for us the whole heritage of the past
is at stake together; we cannot preserve Platonism
without Christianity, nor Christianity without Platon
ism, nor civilization without both."

For to this insurrectionary spirit which proposes
to accept nothing and to make everything the
question must be put, Do you think freedom is
caprice and that emancipated modernity can do
anything it likes or that the majority decrees? Is
there nothing objective in the intellectual and moral

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 49

order? Did you make and can you change the
relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference ?
And how about the multiplication table? Now
what is true of these things is true of much else
besides, not only in the realm of logical relations but
in that of beauty and goodness, and this fact must
sometime be discovered by democracy when it has
put down all its opponents and set about the work of
construction. Until it realizes this truth it is like
the crew of a ship at sea which has dismissed its
officers and assumes that it can safely sail in any
direction so long as all agree or the majority directs.
The fact is that the most democratic people will
destroy itself as certainly as any other if it considers
only how it may satisfy its desires and fails to perceive
its ideal goal. There is one thoroughfare of life, and
when we leave it we are about as free as a locomotive
is when it leaves the rails and starts off across country.
The effect of this insurgent spirit on theology must
be noted in passing. We hear much of democracy in
theology. In the words of one able man, " God-head is
the infinite society of souls. " Men of this temper will
no longer sing Sir Robert Grant's magnificent hymn :

Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above!
Oh, gratefully sing his power and his love!
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise.

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!

50 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

It is to be recognized that this is not mere wilful-
ness, for there is another influence acting upon men
that affects them in much the same way. The
doctrine of the immanence of God has made a deep
impression upon the modern age, but in accepting it
many have drawn the unwarranted conclusion that
they must give up faith in transcendence. It has
been realized that a transcendent deity whose relation
to the universe and man is purely external cannot
longer be believed in. It has yet to be brought home
to our consciousness that a purely immanental view
leaves us without a God whom we can worship, since
it equates God and nature and lands us in an unmoral
pantheism. It is a corollary of the doctrine of
evolution that nature is lower than man, less personal,
less God than we, and that her processes are no
model for our imitation. It is not the function of
the philosopher of religion to solve all theological
problems, but he may properly point out that in
accepting the doctrine of the divine immanence it
was not necessary to give up that of transcendence,
and that both are necessary to the life of religion.
For it is as vain to try to worship a subhuman urge,
a God who gropes and struggles and whose purposes,
if he has any, are less clear than our own, as it is to
glorify a mere concept and enjoy it forever. He
surely has failed to read aright the Christian gospel,
the philosophy of Greece, and his own heart, who
does not understand that our Father is the Perfect
and that we live and advance by his worship and

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 51

that we can never really reverence anything else.
God is truly in nature and in man, but he is also
the perfect truth, beauty, and goodness that is above
our world, and by his lure draws the aspiring human
race up and on.

Although this truth is uncongenial to those who
do not like to hear of anything above them, a moral
order to which they must conform, a truth which
they do not make but must simply accept, or an ideal
which it is life to worship, to it men will eventually
return. The present apparent indifference to the
values represented by Platonism and Christianity,
values which have given human life whatever it has of
nobility and beauty, is due to a passing mood of a
vigorously growing but still immature democracy
which has not yet examined and criticized the implicit
philosophy by which it lives, and in part also to the
mistaken impression that science involves the view
that there is no reality except matter in motion.

This mood and this partial view may be expected
to pass with clearer and more sequent thinking. We
shall regain our sense of proportion and understand
that the significance of facts is not less real than the
facts themselves, however " brute" and material the
facts may be. As the meaning of a book is surely
as important and real as the paper and printing, so
the moral ends of life, its values and ideals, are not
to be set down as mere epiphenomena in comparison
with its physiology. There will always be men who
mistake the surface movements of thought for its

52 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

deeper current, and there will be specialists whose
legitimate business is to investigate one aspect of
reality at a time. But for the lives that count, for
the men and women who do the work of the world,
who maintain its homes and its institutions, facts
will continue to be symbols and their value will be
estimated by their meaning. Aspiration is the
promise and potency of all progress, and aspiration
perishes when it ceases to have a sense of the reality
of that to which it aspires. And when it ceases to be,
humanity will be dead, for "we live by the passionate
attempt to return to our perfection, by the radical
need of losing ourselves again in God."

GEORGE ROWLAND DODSON

THE OLD TESTAMENT

OLD TESTAMENT STUDY TODAY

In surveying the field of theological study we
come now to that part which deals with the Old
Testament. The formulation of the subject implies
that here as elsewhere the present is different from
the former status of the study, in other words that
theological science is progressive. It is in regard to
the Old Testament, however, that this assumption of
progress has been most energetically opposed. Here
if anywhere it has been felt that what was good
enough for the fathers ought to satisfy the sons. The
book with which we deal has been the object of
serious and intensive study for two thousand years.
Jewish Rabbis made it their life-work to understand
and expound it; the Fathers of the church searched
it for light and knowledge; Schoolmen and reformers
found in it the source of their doctrine. It seems
an arrogant assumption to say that the results of all
this study are not sufficient for men of our time, and
that they must be subjected to fresh examination.
Yet this, as I have said, is the implication of our
topic, an implication which will be clear to anyone
who has followed the course of theological discussion
during recent years. Here as elsewhere it is true that
science is not static but dynamic.

S3

54 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

This antithesis of static and dynamic seems now
to be in many minds. The Great War brought home
to us the fact that we are living in a world of change,
and that many institutions which we had looked upon
as fixed and stable are subject to the great law of
flux and flow. In some minds the result has been to
produce a certain impatience with anything which
claims to have permanence. To contrast a static
church with a dynamic world, for example, is to
condemn the church. How much of truth there may
be in such a verdict lies outside the limits of our
present inquiry. But we may carry the antithesis
over into our present domain, and suspect that some
are ready to assert that a static Bible cannot be the
subject of a dynamic, that is to say a progressive,
science. Hence they would remand the Bible or at
least the older half of it to the scrap-heap, and turn
to something of more modern interest. On one
hand, then, we have the conservative, insisting that
not only the Bible itself, but our view of it (the view
formulated in the past), must be accepted; on the
other hand we have the radical who will have nothing
to do with anything so old. Let us mediate between
the two by affirming that a science may be pro
gressive although it deals with facts which are fixed
and unchangeable. In truth all the historical scien
ces are in this class, whether they deal with the
world of nature or the world of man. Pardon me
if I illustrate by examples which are perfectly
familiar.

THE OLD TESTAMENT 55

The fossils to which the paleontologist devotes
his life are static, if anything deserves the name.
For untold millenniums they have been what they
now are. They bear witness indeed to changes
which took place in the past — these bones were once
alive and attest the fact. But as an object of study
they are fixed and unchangeable. Yet the science
which deals with them is changing from generation
to generation and reveals to us things of which our
fathers did not dream. It is the same with our
study of human history. The documents on which
we base our inductions come from the distant past,
and it is beyond our power to change them. To
tamper with them is indeed to violate the scientific
conscience. But the history that deals with them is
re-written by each new generation of inquirers. And
in spite of the eagerness of our younger scholars to
deal with live issues and to let the dead past bury its
dead, one thing stands out pretty clearly: that
historical study was never more alive than it is today.
To a great extent the intellectual effort of our time is
devoted to the study of origins. It is not without
reason that the most influential book of the nineteenth
century bears the name The Origin of Species.
Progress consists not in ignoring the past but in the
more intensive study of it, leading to a better appre
hension of the path along which humanity has moved
in reaching the state in which we now find it.

These general remarks will be seen to bear directly
upon our subject when I say that the best adjective

56 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

to describe the Old Testament study of our time is
just the adjective historical. To put it succinctly,
let us say our study is historical rather than dogmatic.
The time is not very remote when the chief interest of
those who studied the Bible was, strictly speaking,
dogmatic. Samuel Hopkins, the well-known leader
of New England thought something over a century
ago, began his series of published sermons with this
statement: "The Bible contains a system of con
sistent important doctrines which are so connected
and implied in each other that one cannot be so
well understood if detached from all the rest. " This
sentence might stand as the motto of almost all the
works devoted to biblical science throughout the
Christian centuries down to the present time. It
implies of course that the duty of all right-thinking
men is to ascertain and accept the philosophy, that
is, the system of important doctrines, revealed in the
sacred book. Down almost to our own time this was
the accepted view. Men came to the Bible, perhaps
not with the only purpose, but at least with the
main purpose, of discovering the philosophy divinely
revealed therein. Here in this book they expected
to discover all that they needed to know about the
nature of God, the nature of man, the method of the
divine government of the world, and the law which
the divine Ruler has promulgated for the conduct of
his creatures. To put it somewhat crudely, the
Bible was regarded as a collection of prooftexts for
the teacher of dogmatic theology. It did not seem to

THE OLD TESTAMENT 57

shake men's confidence in this method of treatment
when the result was found to be that each theologian
found his own system confirmed by the sacred book,
in other words that each one brought his system with
him, and sought to discover his leading ideas in the
text he was studying. This fact could not altogether
escape observation, however, and it was a Swiss
theologian of the eighteenth century who uttered the
well-known epigram :

Hie liber est in quo sua quaerit dogmata quisque

Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.

In the majority of theological schools of this
country the necessity of a purely historical study of
the Old Testament is now so fully recognized that it is
difficult for us to realize how comparatively modern
this method is. Oral tradition ascribes to Lyman
Beecher this remark, addressed to his class in theology:

So long as men came to the Bible to find support for their
own doctrines it was impossible to get right views of what the
Bible really means. It was only when the Germans began to
investigate the book as they would investigate Homer, not
caring what doctrine it contains, that we began to get light on
its meaning.

This declaration indicates the dawn of more correct
views concerning biblical study, and it must have been
made about the time of the founding of the Meadville
Theological School. At any rate, the change from
the dogmatic to the historical treatment of the
Bible (so far as this country is concerned) has taken
place during the life of this institution. It was in

58 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

the year 1843 that Theodore Parker published a
translation of De Wette's Introduction to the Old
Testament, almost the first, if not quite the first,
book to call the attention of American scholars to
the critical problems presented by the Hebrew
Scriptures. The book to be sure made little impres
sion at the time, and almost a quarter of a century
passed before theological professors and students had
their attention again called forcibly to critical ques
tions. But at least a beginning was made as early
as the date I have named, and when the first inertia
was overcome progress was rapid, until now we may
say that the historical method is fairly established.
Going now a little more into detail and attempting
to define what we mean by historical study we note
that history begins with criticism. To say that
historical research is critical rather than traditional
is but a commonplace. But it needs to be said
nevertheless, for reluctance to apply critical methods
to a sacred book is openly expressed or secretly felt
by many to whom the Bible is a treasured possession
and just because it is a treasured possession. The
misapprehension of what criticism is may be attrib
uted in part to the currency of the phrase " Higher
Criticism," which as it happens was first used of
modern biblical study. This phrase seemed to
assert some sort of superiority on the part of those
who used it, as though they arrogated the right to sit
in judgment on the authors of the Hebrew books.
The simple fact is that criticism is only the careful

THE OLD TESTAMENT 59

examination of the facts on which any science is
built up. Reflecting on the progress of the natural
sciences we see that astronomy, for example, has no
new phenomena at its disposition — the heavenly
bodies are just what they always have been, certainly
what they have been ever since man came upon the
earth. The progress of astronomy has been due to
the more careful examination of the phenomena.
In like manner the fossils of the geologist are, as we
have already noticed, the same that they have been
for ages. If we no longer adduce them as evidence
of the Noachian deluge it is because we have examined
them more carefully. This careful examination of
the facts when carried over into the domain of
archaeology and history is criticism. Ancient docu
ments must submit to it as well as ancient remains of
organic life.

Let us frankly admit that in a certain sense
criticism is apt to be destructive. In the case just
supposed our modern science has destroyed the
argument for the universality of the deluge, so far as
that argument was drawn from certain fossil remains.
This is what we mean when we say that our study
is critical rather than traditional. About an ancient
document, especially one that has been the object of
affectionate interest, there gathers a body of supple
mentary matter which seems to possess authenticity
because of its connection with the original nucleus
to which it has attached itself. The incurable
curiosity of men concerning their own past leads

60 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

them to supply gaps in their information by products
of their own imagination. Thus the early history
of Rome became an interesting story by the inter
mingling of fact and fancy, and the task of the
historian who took himself seriously was to separate
the two elements and indicate the true nature of each.
The result was to a certain extent negative, and the
sentimental reader might be inclined to sigh over
the loss of romance in the narrative. Something of
the same effect is produced by the application of histor
ical methods to the Scriptures. These Scriptures have
been the object of devoted study for two thousand
years. It was to be expected in the nature of the
case that a tradition should attach itself to them.
Especially when they were used for edification and
furnished texts for sacred oratory, the endeavor was
made to fill out the silences of the narrative by 'use
of the imagination. The preacher who stimulates
the zeal of his hearers by holding up the example of
Moses may not be content with the simple Scripture
statement that the Hebrew boy was adopted by the
princess who found him among the bulrushes; he
may describe at length the luxurious surroundings
into which the boy was introduced in the royal palace,
and even intimate that the Pharaoh became so fond
of him that he destined him to be his heir and suc
cessor. Undoubtedly the self-sacrifice of the man
who chose to suffer affliction with the people of God
rather than to enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season is
brought into a stronger light by this embellishment,

THE OLD TESTAMENT 61

but a sober criticism will compel the hearer to dis
tinguish between the material of the original nar
rative, and that which the orator has added from his
own imagination. The history of Old Testament
interpretation shows that this sort of imaginative
exegesis has gone on in each succeeding age. Each
age has had its own method of study, and a certain
amount of accretion has been handed on from one
age to another. All this material has its value, of
course, and has its place in the history of human
thought. But the historian must discover its true
nature and not confound it with the text on which
it is based. To do this he uses the critical method,
and while I have allowed that the result is in a
certain sense destructive, it is nevertheless true that
the critic does not actually destroy anything. Text
and tradition are all there; all that the critical
method does is to bring the different elements into
their proper relations of space and time.

In a truly historical treatment of an ancient text
criticism is the first requisite. In the second place
let us notice that this method is comparative instead
of segregative. You do not need to be told that in
the view of earlier scholars, and even of many at the
present day, a sharp line of demarcation must be
drawn between the Bible and all other books. This
book received the name Holy or Sacred, and all that
was connected with it was described in the same way.
Thus we had a sacred history, a sacred archaeology,
a sacred geography. The land of Israel became the

62 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

Holy Land. The implication was that while Israel,
its literature, its land, and its institutions were made
the object of a special divine activity, all the rest of
mankind was left without guidance, to struggle on
by the meager light of nature which, although suffi
cient to insure the condemnation of those who neg
lected it, could not lead men to any real virtue or
true happiness. At the present day we cannot thus
isolate Israel from all the rest of the world. In a
sense the isolation has never been as complete as the
adjectives I have quoted might suggest. It has
always been known that the external history of
Israel was connected with that of other nations — so
much is revealed by the Bible itself. In it we read
of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as of the
smaller nations with which Israel came into immediate
contact. To this extent the comparative study of
the Old Testament is nothing new. Eusebius made
a serious attempt to bring the history of Israel into
connection with that of the other nations, and many
later authors have treated the connection of sacred
and profane history (as the phrase was). The
advantage of our own age is that we have a greatly
increased amount of material by which to judge the
closeness of the connection. The decipherment of
the Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions has not
only enriched our knowledge, but has compelled us
to modify our view of the reliability of the Hebrew
text. In the matter of chronology, for example, we
are no longer able to make the Old Testament data

THE OLD TESTAMENT 63

furnish the framework into which the chronology
of the other ancient writers can be fitted. Conscien
tious students of the Bible, while not yielding all the
claims of the pan-Babylonians, must take cognizance
of all the material now within our reach, and decide
how far it compels a modification of Israel's external
history. Even more serious than the reconstruction
of the external history is the light thrown by these
researches on the social evolution. It is now seen
that those social institutions which the Hebrew
writers themselves regarded as something established
by direct divine command were in many cases the
product of the same economic and political forces
which were at work among the surrounding nations.
The view of the Hebrew writers concerning the
divine origin of their institutions, especially of their
legislation, is now seen to have been the view of
other ancient authorities. Moses claims that the
Law comes to him from Israel's God; in like manner
Hammurabi asserts that Anu and Bel called him to
cause justice to prevail in the land, and to this end
he promulgates the code which will accomplish the
purpose of the gods. Nor is this the only way in
which ancient literary methods are seen to be common
to the Hebrews and other nations. The attribution
of sacredness to a book is now known to be a frequent
phenomenon in literary history. The sharp distinc
tion between sacred and profane is fundamental to
all religious thinking, from the most primitive to the
most advanced. Not in Israel only do we find sacred

64 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

places, sacred rites, sacred persons, sacred implements,
and sacred books. And in many cases the sacredness
of Israel's rites originated outside of Israel. Circum
cision is a rite found among many peoples, as in fact
the biblical writers knew. The stone which Jacob
set up as a House-of-God was one of many similar
menhirs which are found all over the Eastern Con
tinent. The sanctuary at Gilgal was doubtless
marked off by a circle of stones belonging to the
class of cromlechs, of which the most conspicuous
example is known to us by the name of Stonehenge.
The sacred dance about the altar, the hair-offering
of the Nazirite, sacrificial worship — all these we
find elsewhere as well as in Israel. So with the
literature. The story of the creation and of the
deluge were borrowed from sources outside of Israel.
The biblical writers, like Homer, took their material
wherever they found what was suitable for their
purpose, and did not find it less sacred because it
came from a foreign source. Even the compilatory
method by which many Old Testament books reached
their present form, and which many readers are
disposed to ridicule as the invention of the critics, is
paralleled by what we find in other ancient literatures.
The most serious modification of traditional ideas
comes when we thus apply the comparative method
to religious beliefs and custom. So far as the paral
lels between Israelite and gentile rites were observed
by earlier scholars, these scholars were able to entertain
hypotheses which we find no longer tenable. They

THE OLD TESTAMENT 65

were able to affirm either that the institutions of
Israel were the originals, and those of other nations
were borrowed; or else that the devil had been God's
ape, imitating his ordinances in order to lead men
astray. Later the theory was advanced that God
made some concessions to the Israelites, allowing
them to continue certain customs with which they
had become familiar in Egypt, lest the prohibition
of them should drive the people away from their own
sanctuary. Modern biblical science finds itself unable
to adopt either theory. It recognizes that the
religious development of Israel followed the lines
traced by other religions, and that the religious
impulse which was the underlying motive in Israel
is the same which we recognize in the history of other
peoples. It is no longer possible, therefore, to make
a sharp division between true and false religions,
putting our own (with its preliminary stage in
Judaism) in one class and all the rest in the other.
We do not, however, confound all religions in one
indistinguishable mass, as though they were of equal
value. The complaint is sometimes heard that the
comparative study of religion smothers our God
in the cloud of incense offered to all the divinities
of all the nations at once. There are degrees of
value even in objects of the same class. He who
investigates all religions need not be disloyal to his
own, any more than he who writes the history of
foreign countries needs to lay aside his affection for
the land in which he was brought up. This is not

66 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

the place to enlarge upon this theme. All that we
are now concerned to notice is that the biblical science
of today, if it is to be a real science, must use the
comparative method.

From what has been said it will appear in the next
place that modern biblical science must be evolu
tionary rather than catastrophic. If anyone has a
repugnance to the word evolutionary let him say
developmental. What is important may be illus
trated again by the science of geology. In the early
stages of that science it was thought that each epoch
of the earth's history was marked off by a convulsion
of nature which wiped out the existing fauna and
flora, and that the next period was ushered in by a
new creation. Today, although the occurrence of
earthquakes and tornadoes is not ignored, changes in
the earth's surface and in its inhabitants are not
supposed to have been wrought for the most part
by these violent convulsions. Much more effective
have been the less noticeable forces which are con
stantly at work both in the inanimate and in the
animate world. Biblical science has passed through
similar phases. The older view, which indeed found
support in the Bible itself, was that violent inter
positions of divine power marked the different stages
of Israel's history. The beginning was made by the
act of creation, which was compressed into a single
week of time. Then the world of man was left to
its own devices until its condition demanded another
signal display of divine power at the deluge. This

THE OLD TESTAMENT 67

was followed by some centuries of what we should
call natural development, terminating in a new act
of God — the call of Abraham to inaugurate a new
dispensation. A third stage was marked by the
even more startling episode at the Exodus, and by
this a complete and perfect constitution was set
before the people by divine fiat. From this time on
there seemed to be no possibility except that the
people should either be obedient to the divine statutes
or recreant to their trust. In fact the biblical
writers, or rather the latest editors of the history,
believed that the course of events showed nothing
like what we call progress; it was a succession of
backslidings and revivals, culminating in the great
disaster which put an end to the national existence.
How incomprehensible this scheme is to men trained
in modern methods of inquiry I need not point out.
And on examining our documents we find abundant
evidence that this emphasis of a few decisive inter
ventions of Providence is only the theory of a few
late writers, and that reading between the lines we
can get a juster view. While there were certain great
crises in the history, progress (for there was real
progress) for the most part was due to the constant
action of unobtrusive social forces — the same that
we discover in the advance of mankind elsewhere.
Here also the rule was: First the blade, then the ear,
then the full grain in the ear.

This does not mean that the development was
without conflict. The developmental theory itself

68 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

assumes that progress is by struggle and the survival
of the fittest. But the struggle was not the single
dramatic campaign by which later writers liked to
think that the land of Canaan was swept clear of
the earlier inhabitants and given to Israel. Battles
there were of course; once or twice the tribes gathered
all their forces and inflicted a defeat on their enemies.
But for the most part the conquest was by a com
paratively peaceful penetration, extending over a long
period of time. Politically this is of less importance
to us than the interplay of social forces by which
the religion of Israel reached its full development.
The elaborate legislation of the Pentateuch, as we
now see, was not revealed all at once, a complete
code, ritual and moral, promulgated at the beginning
of the nation's life. It was a growth, the result of a
struggle between higher and lower conceptions in
ethics and religion, a struggle carried on for a thousand
years. And, as in other communities, the fact of
struggle involved alternations of ebb and flow.
Progress was not continuous nor was it in a straight
line. Early ideas persisted even after higher ones
seemed to have triumphed. At almost the latest
period we learn of members of the community who
engaged in the crude superstitions of their ancestors;
who ate swine's flesh and had the broth of abominable
things in their vessels, who lodged in the sepulchers
and sat among graves, evidently devoted to the ani
mistic and totemistic rites which characterize the re
ligion of primitive society.

THE OLD TESTAMENT 69

Our interest, I need hardly say, is in the distinct
ness with which the religious struggle is set forth in
the documents we study, and this struggle is revealed
to us by our modern method. In the history of
Israel as we now read it we see more clearly than
anywhere else the process by which ethical mono
theism triumphed over the lower forms of religion.
And this history brings home to us the fact that
spiritual leadership is necessary to any real advance
in religion and morals. The heroes of Israel are not
great captains with their swords and spears, though
here as elsewhere the soldier who risked his life in
defense of his home and clan received due recognition.
Greater heroes are the prophets who, in the strength
of a good conscience and in reliance on a God of
righteousness, throw themselves against a false
religiosity and the social evils of their times. Such
are the prophets whose works we study, and we
appreciate them, or at least we appreciate them
fully, only when we get the true course of history
before us. I do not wish to make extravagant
claims. No doubt pious readers of the Bible have
always had a sympathetic appreciation of these
great preachers of righteousness. Yet it remains
true that in the traditional biblical science the
personality of the prophets was obscured by theo
logical prepossessions. If the Bible is regarded as a
series of prooftexts, divinely given to establish a
system of doctrine, then differences in the human
personalities through whom the revelation is given

70 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

sink into insignificance. The systematic theologian
seeks for the faith — the dogmatic faith — once for all
delivered to the saints. If this faith is necessary to
salvation, then it must have been revealed, at least
in substance, to Adam (if indeed Adam was saved),
certainly to Abraham, then to Moses, after him to
David and the prophets. On this theory the function
of the prophet is to act as a commentator on the
revelation already given to his predecessors. In
fact Jewish expositors, followed by some Christian
scholars, regard the work of the prophets as wholly
subordinate, secondary to that of Moses.

How foreign to a real historical apprehension of
the Old Testament is this theory of a system of
doctrine — quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
— I need hardly point out. To the modern student
the great outstanding fact in the history of Israel is
the originality of the prophets. These great religious
geniuses gave Israel the ideas which have made
Israel's book a power in the hearts of all right-thinking
men, and which made that book a part of the Christian
Bible. And the ideas which they set forth are not
abstract propositions, the product of philosophical
speculation on the nature of God and man. They
are the result of an inward struggle in which faith
contends against the obtuseness of the great mass, or
against temptations to doubt concerning God's
righteous government of the world. This faith it is
which makes these men leaders and reformers.
Elijah battles single-handed against the Phoenician

THE OLD TESTAMENT 71

Baal, yet not altogether single-handed, for there are
seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the
knee to the foreign god. Isaiah stands forth against
king and people, but a little band of disciples cherishes
his words and hands them down for a treasure to
succeeding generations. Jeremiah seems an alto
gether solitary figure, pathetic in his yearning for
understanding and sympathy. Yet even he has a
faithful friend and scribe by whom the master's
example is preserved for the encouragement of faint
hearted believers through the ages. The gain that
may justly be claimed for the historical method is
the clearness with which these great and often tragic
figures are revealed to us.

We have already noted that the prophets have
been misapprehended because they were made
simply expositors of the Law of Moses. Our dis
cussion will not become complete unless we notice
another view of them which has become traditional in
the Christian church, that is the view that their chief
office was to predict the coming of the Messiah.
The literature on messianic prophecy must amount
to some thousands of volumes, and in its most highly
developed form it discovers all the details of Jesus'
birth, life, death, and resurrection adumbrated or
distinctly described in the Old Testament. The
promise to the mother of the race that her seed shall
bruise the serpent's head is interpreted as the First
Gospel. The whole series of sacrifices is supposed to
point forward to the great and final sacrifice on the

72 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

cross. Jacob's two wives are types of the Jewish
and the gentile churches. Where the literal meaning
of the text gives no hint of referring to the future,
resort is had to type and allegory to discover the
desired prediction. That much of this exegesis loses
its force when we use a really historical method must
be evident. Are we then to discard the Old Testa
ment as in no sense preparatory to Christianity?
In attempting to answer this question let us notice
first of all that from the nature of the case reformers
look forward. He who denounces the evils of con
temporary society must have some hope of a better
social order to come. It is natural to suppose that
the prophets had such a hope, especially when we
recall the firm faith in a God of righteousness which
motived their preaching. In the earlier period the
hope was kept in abeyance, because the people to
whom they preached were indulging optimistic
dreams which must not be encouraged. There were
plenty of prophets to flatter the people by saying
all was well, when in fact all was not well. It was
when the great calamity came and the Jews in their
exile were tempted to give way to despair that the
prophetic message changed to one of hope. To this
extent there was prediction of a good time to come.
Nor is this all. The Old Testament development,
as we have seen, culminated in the triumph of the
Law. This triumph came about by a series of com
promises which would not have satisfied the demands
of the greater prophets for a religion of the heart.

THE OLD TESTAMENT 73

What actually had come was a religion of formality,
and from the nature of the case this was narrow and
exclusive. A religion for the Jewish community,
one which ignored the mass of humanity, could
never be the final religion. By its very imperfection
therefore the Old Testament system prepared the
way for something broader.

In another direction and in a very different manner
the way for Christianity was prepared. When the
voice of prophecy was silenced it was succeeded by
apocalyptic. Since the main literature in which this
movement is embodied is outside the bounds of our
Old Testament it need not be discussed here. Suffice
it to say that the older view, according to which the
Old Testament canon was closed by Ezra and suc
ceeded by four centuries of silence, is discredited by a
really historical view of the Old Testament itself.
Development did not stop; it was not even suspended
between Ezra and John the Baptist. The alleged
four centuries of silence are vocal with hopes, fears,
aspirations, and prayers. But it is impossible here to
trace the development which led up to the proclama
tion of the gospel.

What I have now attempted to do is to sketch the
present state of Old Testament study. The topic
assigned includes also the prospect of this study.
On this it is difficult to speak with confidence. The
whole question of the function of the church in modern
society is now under discussion. What theological
study is to be depends of course on what the work of

74 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

the minister of religion is to be. The school of
theology professes to train men for this work. The
future of Old Testament study depends on the
value of this study for the minister. If the discussion
of today has shown that the value of the study is not
now what it has been supposed to be in the past,
I trust that it has yet shown that it has other values
equally important. Emphasis is laid today on social
reconstruction. If the Old Testament shows any
thing it shows that religion has been the moving
spring of social progress in the past. It reveals
moreover the method by which religion has wrought
for social advance. This being so we can hardly
avoid the conclusion that Old Testament study will
hold its place in the curriculum.

HENRY PRESERVED SMITH

THE NEW TESTAMENT

NEW TESTAMENT STUDY TODAY

The Meadville Theological School came into
being when New Testament study was receiving
perhaps the most vigorous shock of its entire career
in the radical contributions of Ferdinand Christian
Baur and his followers of the Tubingen School. It is
a commonplace that Baur began a new era in our
science; the history of this School is coincident with
that era. The time-spirit whose hand is so obvious
in the devious course of biblical science can be traced
not less clearly in the development of the School's
curriculum and methods. In 1843, but a few months
before this institution of learning began its career,
the redoubtable and misdoubted Theodore Parker
had introduced "destructive German criticism "
into America by publishing in Boston a translation of
De Wette's Old Testament Introduction. But it
was not read in the first years at Meadville. In
1858 followed the New Testament part of De Wette's
Einleitung, also published in Boston, and made by
another Unitarian minister, Rev. Frederick Frothing-
ham. This came to Meadville apparently without
question. Fifteen years is a long time in such matters.
Where minds are really free and open to the light,
movement of thought is rapid and closely follows

75

76 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

the progress of science in any chosen field. A genu
inely liberal institution of learning is sensitive to
advance in any part of the intellectual world and
faithfully registers it. It is instructive to go into
our library and look over the succession of books on
the life of Jesus, for example, and note the dates
at which they came to our shelves. We have there
an epitome of the development of theological science
and an impressive testimony to the loyalty of the
School to the ideals of freedom and progress on which
it was founded. Strauss 's Leben Jesu was still a
nine days' wonder when the School was born, and
came out in George Eliot's classic English translation
two years afterward. Thus the whole course of the
attempt to construct a purely historical picture of
the mission of Jesus is practically coincident with
the life of our School.

But I am concerned on this occasion not so much
with any resume of the past as with some registration
of the present status and method of inquiry into the
problems of New Testament study. That there is an
enormous difference between the New Testament
study of 1844 and that of 1920 needs not to be said to
anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the field.
And this great difference is not so much in the subjects
of inquiry and the answers propounded as in the
method and motive of the inquiry. How and why
do we concern ourselves with these problems? So
soon as we ask this question, the situation is clear.
We are no longer dominated by the spirit of Baur

THE NEW TESTAMENT 77

and Strauss, much as we owe to their labors. There
is a new spirit abroad in our discipline. The phe
nomena of primitive Christianity are no longer for us
philosophical phenomena, occurring in conformity to a
scheme of logical development; they are no longer
dogmatic phenomena, intended to serve as the sup
port of doctrines of theology or even capable of so
serving; no longer literary phenomena, the writing
and editing and collecting of documents; no longer
even simple historical phenomena, to be listed as
mere data in the chronicle of the first century. As
all these, singly or in combination, has the primitive
tradition been treated, and so treated in vain. Not
thus has it yielded up its real secret.

Now we are approaching the origins of Chris
tianity as a group of phenomena in the human
experience of religion, and we begin to know their
significance. Even the writings are not ultimately
documentary phenomena: they are religious phe
nomena. Men wrote as they were moved by a holy
Spirit, not by a furor scribendi. It is a very simple
thing thus to describe the rationale of our inquiry,
but it is a very profound and far-reaching observation
that we have thus made. And the realization of this
truth means the greatest transformation in attitude
toward the materials of the Christian tradition that
the Christian mind has ever undergone. The investi
gators of the literary process have too often failed to
ask why the literary process at all, or to recognize
that the driving-power lay outside the bookroom.

78 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

We are beginning to see more clearly. To use a
single example, the question as to the authorship of
so-called " Ephesians " by Paul is not finally a question
of hapax legomena and style and agreements of text
with Colossians and comparison of ecclesiastical
terms. The writer of Ephesians was a man, with a
profound experience of religion awakened by the
impact of the Christian gospel. The writer of Romans
and Galatians and Corinthians was a man, in vital
and direct reaction on a religious experience. Our
question is ultimately: Are these two experiences one,
the reactions of the same personality ? For all these
documents get written only as the embodiment of a
religious experience and have as such their sole
significance, have here the one norm for their inter
pretation. Of course they came to be by a literary
process, but that process was used by something
more ultimate and sovereign than itself. That
philosophical and theological considerations played
their part who would dispute? That all alleged
facts must meet the test of historic evidence, with no
more exemption or concession in the field of religious
history than in that of science, is of course axiomatic.
But we are sure that in no one of these aspects lies
the ultimate importance and significance of the
materials of New Testament study.

A survey of the various departments of research
within our field, and of the various problems that
call for solution, in each, would give us impressive
confirmation of this position. The New Testament

THE NEW TESTAMENT 79

meets us today as a volume, a collection. Who
collected it, and when? Above all, why? What
inner unity is there among these seven-and-twenty
documents that precisely they, and no others, found
place in this canonical selection ? And when we dis
sect the volume into its component elements and
face the problems of New Testament introduction,
the situation is the same. These documents are
obviously not books, prepared for a publisher, from
the sales of which royalties might be drawn. Quite
other motives prompted those who wrote. One-
third of the documents are anonymous; who were
these men, unlettered some, professional writers none,
whom an overmastering religious impulse drove to
the pen? We ask their names, their dates, their
circumstances, their motives, for no reason save that
we may get nearer to the experience which created
their little pamphlets and made them immortal.
Questions of authorship may be quite idle; they are
certainly so if they spring from no interest beyond
the purely literary or historical curiosity. From any
such point of view, it matters not a whit who wrote
the Fourth Gospel; let us say an anonymous Asian
Christian of the early second century, and be done
with it. Only from the standpoint of an under
standing of the gospel of Jesus is it of supreme impor
tance to learn whether this writing presents a personal
disciple's trustworthy account of the Master's actual
words and deeds. So whether the " Epistle of James "
is an early writing, from the first or second decade

8o THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

after Jesus' death, or is one of the latest works in
the canon, from a time when the movement of Jesus
is perhaps a century in being, is not a chronological
problem at all, for those of us who study it. Save
for our interest in this writing, one date is as good as
the other, since absolute dating is impossible. But
our interest; yes, that makes the question important
•whether this somewhat prosaic, practical homily,
with its excellent if somewhat domestic morality,
with its bare mention of Jesus in two formal phrases
only, represents the first fresh impact of the gospel
upon the Master's own generation, indeed, upon his
own flesh and blood, who drank from the same
mother's breast with him, or sets down the ethical
counsel of a preacher in the more sober days of the
next century. Whether the Apocalypse of John is a
literary unity becomes for us the question whether it is
a spiritual unity, whether it sprang in its entirety
out of the mind of Jesus' own beloved disciple, who lay
upon his breast and heard his words and breathed in
his spirit. Or have we the work of a fiery and loyal
devotee, who out of Jewish apocalyptic shapes a
vision of the return in glory of that messianic Lord
whom he can picture only as the seven-horned Ram
from whose wrath the peoples flee in terror, or as the
mighty warrior on the white steed of victory, fur
nished with the sharp two-edged sword? Have we
here the influence of the historic Jesus on a soul that
knew and loved and understood him, or the influence
of one aspect of his eschatology on a passionate

THE NEW TESTAMENT 81

hater of oppression and lover of the people of God, a
poet and a seer to whom not only the heavens and
the abyss were open, but the treasures of a hundred
prophetic books as well? Such questions are the
real questions of New Testament introduction. We
do not always, indeed, raise them in just this form,
but if this were not their real significance for us, we
should not raise them at all. As having only a
literary or historic interest they would not compel
our attention beside a thousand questions of this
kind of vastly greater importance. But because
behind all our study lies the insistent urge of the
religious interest, every detail that brings the writer
and the writing nearer to our comprehension is of
vital concern. We look back at the men — a dozen
or more of them — who penned the writings in the
New Testament, and we see them, not as writers at
all, not as theologians, still less as philosophers, not
as historians or chroniclers or biographers; we see
them as simple men who have been laid hold of by an
overmastering impulse of religion. To its service
they give themselves; these bits of writing, letters
for the most part, are by-products of their Christian
life. They would surely now be surprised to learn
that they survive in human memory as writers;
their writing must have been so secondary in their
consciousness that they might have forgotten it
altogether.

The biblical criticism of the past was at fault here.
It almost completely depersonalized the writers,

82 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

with its talk of "the apostle," "the evangelist,"
and in practice made the men coterminous with the
written fragments preserved in our canon. Paul,
for example, was equated with the handful of thirteen
or fourteen "epistles" there ascribed to him and
dominated Christian imagination as a letter-writer,
a man of the pen, always at the desk. So lamentably
was this most vital man of affairs misconceived!
Baur and the Tubinger made him into an idea, the
idea that is most prominent in the polemic of the
letter to the Galatians. Of Paul beyond the driving
concern with that idea there was practically none;
of letters, indeed, there were acknowledged only
those four which served in some degree as vehicle for
that idea. For many exegetes, Paul has been the
theologian, and the only question of importance about
him that as to the Lehrgehalt of this or that epistle.
The very word "epistle" has connoted documents
whose prime purpose was to serve as the medium of
dogmatic instruction. We have at last learned that
Paul was not primarily a letter-writer. That a
dozen or so letters survive bearing his name is nothing
extraordinary; you and I have doubtless written
more within the past week. Even as the writer of
these letters he is not author, composer, still less is he
theologian or ecclesiastic. He is the most human of
men, carrying on a tremendous enterprise to which a
letter now and then is incidental. The discovery of
many other letters in the vernacular Koine of the time
has dispelled the solemn fiction of "New Testament

THE NEW TESTAMENT 83

Greek," but it has shown also that the biblical
periods of the Pauline letters are the customary
epistolary courtesies of his age. We have recovered
Paul the man; in this matter we are much indebted
to Professor Deissmann of Berlin and Professor
Weinel of Jena, as well as to English scholars like
Percy Gardner, who has given us an admirable study
of the Religious Experience of St. Paul.

When the letters are relegated to their proper
place and seen in true perspective, we can for the
first time judge intelligently as to their authenticity
or pseudonymity. As vehicles of "Paulinism,"
they can offer no reliable testimony on this point.
If the four-epistle Pauline canon of Baur has been
enlarged to contain at least double the number, it is
not on purely literary grounds nor on dogmatic
grounds; it is because the same human being, engaged
in the same gigantic task, with the same religious
experience and the same reaction on his human
problems, meets us in all. In our application of the
human, religious, psychological test we do not, of
course, ignore the literary tests. It goes without
saying that vocabulary and style and indications of
literary relationship with other documents are as
important in our study today as at any previous
time; it is only that such criteria are no longer the
only ones, or the ones which necessarily dictate the
final decision. The purely literary tests need to be
used with great caution in dealing with occasional
letters, which are not systematic treatises or books,
and with not more than a dozen such letters available

84 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

for comparison. Who would venture to fix the style
and vocabulary of any modern writer, for example,
from a dozen of his letters ? I Corinthians has more
than two hundred hapax legomena, Romans more than
one hundred. Zahn once drew up a list of eighty-
six ''suspicious " words and phrases in Galatians. Yet
such data, however multiplied, cast no shadow of
doubt on the Paulinity of these letters. In the case
of letters dubious from the personal side they would
have their weight.

The Synoptic Problem has for us of today been
transformed into the synoptists' problem; it is not
a problem of documents, but of men. What we
really want to know is not how Mark's text is related
to the hypothetical Q-text, but how the human
experience of the religion of Jesus that found expres
sion in the gospel- writing traditionally called "accord
ing to Matthew" is related to that other experience
registered in the writing to which Luke's name is
attached. These two writings are different, not
primarily because the documents on the editorial
desk were different, but because the men at the pen
were different. The traditional usage of speaking
of one of the first four writings in our New Testament
as a gospel (language which would have shocked
immeasurably a Christian of the first generation)
has blinded us to the fact that each means to be
the gospel, the very Christianity, the heart's religion,
of some earnest believer. That he set this gospel
of his forth for the spiritual quickening of others is

THE NEW TESTAMENT 85

not a literary fact, but an item of his religious life.
Of course he used such written sources as were at his
disposal, but the important thing is never his appro
priation of sources, but his own contribution, the
stamp of his own religious experience which lies across
it all. That it was which impelled him to write;
that it is which kept his writing alive and makes it
worth our study today. The instructive thing is to
inquire what was going on in the soul of this devout
and nameless man whom literary tradition incor
rectly calls Matthew. His literary procedure is
fairly obvious, but no one of his sources nor their
mere combination expresses his gospel. That becomes
visible in what he does with his sources, how he
interprets them, how he adds to them or quietly
passes over certain of their passages. The two-
document hypothesis is now practically certain, but
we lack as yet a completely satisfying exegesis of
these three gospel-writings which will reveal the
true inwardness of their variations. Such an exegesis
we are just ready to prepare.

The Acts of the Apostles is just now a battle
ground of literary criticism. Its sources are being
eagerly sought, and perhaps the most interesting of
the purely literary problems lie just now in this field.
Professor Torrey finds Aramaic sources for a large
part of the work, a thesis which has divided New
Testament students. Here again the purely literary
argument seems inadequate. Grant that the linguis
tic phenomena of the first half of the work indicate

86 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

an underlying Aramaic text (which is far from certain),
the theory must be tested as a whole with its corol
laries and consequences. Here its enormous diffi
culties become apparent. The reactions on the work
and word of Jesus which it attributes to believers of
the middle of the first century, the impulse to write
compends of the gospel which it dates long before the
death of Paul, throw the whole picture into psycho
logical confusion. If anything is clear it is that the
gospel was from the first an oral magnitude on its
teaching side. Its original course is vividly pictured
in that primitive word: "What I tell you in the
darkness speak ye in the light, and what ye hear in
the ear, proclaim upon the house tops." Of course
the gospel was not primarily teaching at all; it was
living, and was propagated by the contagion of
personal example. Spirit kindled spirit. Christi
anity spread from mouth to ear, but it also spread
from life to life, and in its propaganda "gospel" did
not primarily suggest a new teaching to be learned,
still less did it mean a new book to be read; it meant
a wave of blessed religious experience to be appro
priated. Propagated as a life through the medium
of an oral teaching which was but the commentary
on that life, it came ultimately to find expression in
a medium natively foreign to it, in the written word.
Yet that written word was but the sketch of what
was still conceived as essentially oral; it was but
the preacher's notes, the compend of sermon-stuff.
And it came only when it was absolutely necessary

THE NEW TESTAMENT 87

that it should come; the living gospel resisted fixation
in the written text as long as possible. As the
first generation of missionaries passed away, those
who had seen and heard Jesus himself, or caught the
message from his personal disciples, the oral tradition
was in danger. It was being preached at second,
third, fourth hand, in new lands and new tongues,
far from its original enunciation. Propagated in
preaching only, where the form of words was governed
by the audience and the occasion, as Papias says in
his comment on Mark, the tradition began to lose
fixed outline and fidelity to its initial content. The
gospel could not go on forever as an oral proclamation.
To preserve it, ere its essential form was lost, it
must be written. The newer missionaries needed
it as a manual to guide their own preaching. The
rapidly multiplying churches needed it to nourish
their faith in the absence of an apostolic teacher.
For obvious reasons of this sort the gospel got written
down by men of the second generation of believers,
as the writer we call Luke points out in his candid
preface, as the gospel tradition was " handed down
to us by them who from the beginning were eye
witnesses and ministers of the word. " Not in the
earliest days, when the tremendous impression of
Jesus' personality and proclamation is still so vital,
when no one thinks of the gospel as anything but
personal and oral, which must be spoken in the ear
and upon the housetops to all men, whether they
will hear or whether they will forbear. Not in those

88 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

early days when Christians lived in daily, hourly
expectation of their Master's return as Messiah to
establish the Kingdom of God. His career had been
but just begun; the days of his flesh were but the
briefest opening chapter of the story of Jesus the
Master. Spread his message; prepare men for his
return; but write books about him? The thought
does not arise. Busy missionaries like Paul, when
they wrote, wrote practical letters in the furtherance
of their work, which excite surprise today for their
precise omission of "the gospel." The time of
gospel-writing is approximately the time succeeding
Paul's death. That primitive gospel Q doubtless
belongs to the later sixties; Mark follows at the
beginning of the seventies, Matthew and Luke
probably in the last decade of the century. As a new
generation comes on the scene, as the advent expecta
tion cools and fades, as the message grows to have
more values for this world and life continuing here,
as those elements in it not directly bound up with the
hope of Messiah's coming in heavenly power come
more and more to their own, then the gospel is writ
ten by one ardent Christian teacher after another.
And the time when it is written down has profound
importance for its form as written. As we read,
we can see clearly how the gospel mirrored itself in
the soul of each writer in turn, see also how it was
making its way in the environment of his own Chris
tian life. The gospels are extraordinarily naive and
candid documents; expositors have gone greatly

THE NEW TESTAMENT 89

astray in thinking them clever and subtle, their
writers with skilful art so manipulating language
as to make capital for favorite views. Nothing
could be less accurate. What the gospel was to them
they show, and all their motives lie on the surface.
To turn to that amazing Apocalypse of John, in
these latter days so much perturbing the vulgar
Christian brain. It had its era of literary criticism,
which, indeed, is not yet over, for it offers a great
number of extraordinarily tantalizing literary prob
lems. Its original language, its unity, its dependence
on Jewish predecessors, its date and authorship — on
all these and many similar problems there is more
light yet to be sought and found. That it is a
literary product is clear; it is no spontaneous tran
script of a single ecstatic experience. Quotation
marks should thickly sprinkle its pages; it smells
of the lamp. And yet it is profoundly original;
an elemental spirit has laid hold of its somewhat
heterogeneous sources and welded them into a
compact whole, and in the process they have under
gone a sea change into something new and passing
strange. But our generation has seen that the
riddle of the Apocalypse is not to be solved by literary
analysis alone; back of their literary history the
images and concepts have a history in the religious
thinking of mankind, in diverse ages, among diverse
peoples. The Apocalypse is the New Testament
document where the religions geschichtliche Methode
has the freest field and has won the most undoubted

go THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

victories. Here in very truth we cannot go far
without falling back on the study of the history of
religious ideas and their visualization in the imagina
tion of primitive man. Gunkel and Bousset, Charles
and Case, have taught us here, and we have still
much to learn. Not that John himself borrows
directly from Babylon and Persia and the myths of
Greece, but that he takes up current concepts and
pictures which have behind them a long history of
which he is unconscious. For him they are a part
of the Jewish apocalyptic coin of the time. But no
Jew before or after our John made such magnificent
use of the material. It is all very well to say that this
is an apocalypse like any other; it is assuredly an
apocalypse unlike any other. Use all the methods
of eschatological interpretation, of literary analysis;
search mythology and folklore for the origin of
dragon and serpent and white horse and ram, but
the final clue is given by the fact that the ram is
Christianized and made, with whatever of grotesque-
ness, into the Messiah who had been slain. Though
here we have eschatology in its most florid develop
ment, it is dominated and controlled by a wonderful
religious experience. It is not always that eschatol
ogy and religion go hand in hand; here, as nowhere
else, they are inseparable.

The name and tradition of John of the Revelation
have been widely borrowed for the writer of a com
pletely antipodal work, the Fourth Gospel. No two
writings could more definitely face in opposite

THE NEW TESTAMENT 91

directions, and yet there is a baffling, elusive Johan-
nine suggestion clinging like an odor about the
Gospel. Time was when to name the anonymous
author, and to name him John of Zebedee, was the
most important thing to do with respect to this work.
Now it is less important to name him than to fathom
what manner of man he was and to understand his
reaction upon the gospel of Jesus. After all, if he
were the apostle John, then the apostle John wrote
that sort of work and shared this well-defined con
ception. The identification would throw light on him
and his processes of thought, but none at all on the
gospel, which stands there stronger than all theories
and traditions. It is what it is, and any theory
must fit it, not dominate it. Only gradually has the
church yielded her conviction that here a beloved
disciple of the Master spoke out the very heart of
Christ. That tradition is today, however, yielding
on every side. It yields with frequent reservations,
to be sure, but it yields. It is difficult to suppose that
the next generation will believe either in the Johan-
nine authorship or the historical character of the
work. But that is far from saying that the next
generation will fail in any degree to appreciate the
full worth of this anonymous masterpiece. The
work from its earliest appearance struck readers of
the synoptics as in sharp contrast to them, and has
therefore been a problem. It was natural to inter
pret it negatively, in terms of what it was not, what
it lacked, of its divergence from its predecessors.

92 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

So in our day we have elaborate tables of these
discrepancies and find ourselves placed squarely
before the alternative: either the synoptic presenta
tion of Jesus or the Johannine. They are mutually
exclusive. Sentiment and doctrinal considerations
apart, this judgment will stand, and will more and
more compel the conviction of every disinterested
student. But it is an enormous misfortune that the
synoptics were ever made the standard for estimating
this gospel, that it has from the first been seen in a
negative light, as different from something else.
For it is an intensely positive work and demands to be
judged on its own merits, for its own peculiar and
highly valuable presentation. That it is discrepant
from its predecessors is relevant only if it aims to be
what they are. But this aim it not only nowhere
professes but at every point disavows. It does
not mean to give the facts over again, or to sub
stitute a new set of gospel facts for those already
familiar; it means to give the significance of the
facts for the faith of the church of the early second
century. The Jesus who here speaks is not the
historic Jesus of Galilee in the year 30; he is the
Jesus of the church's faith nearly a century later.
He is represented as declaring what he was actually
saying through his church in those years. He is
made the protagonist and spokesman of the church
in its debate with the world, in its debate especially
with the Jews. He is, by a bold but singularly
felicitous device, let to say of himself what the church

THE NEW TESTAMENT 93

says of him. The strange egotism of the gospel, a rock
of offense to some, is here explained. The seven
great "I Ams" are just the church's repeated "He
is." To understand the Fourth Gospel we have
learned to turn all the utterances of Jesus into the
third person. But how effective is the first! The
author might say of him: He is to our souls the Bread
of Life, he is the Good Shepherd, he was before
Abraham in the bosom of God his Father. Instead,
Jesus boldly declares: "I am the living bread that
came down out of heaven; he that eateth my flesh
and drinketh my blood hath eternal life." Could
the evangelist have discoursed so effectively about
the Eucharist ? He means to lift the veil of historic
circumstance and let the heavenly visitant shine
through in his proper glory. Every reader is put in
the place of the three disciples in the synoptic incident
of the Transfiguration, an incident which fails in this
gospel save as it has its equivalent in the gospel as a
whole. Or we are like the disciples of Emmaus:
our eyes have been holden. Now, of a sudden, they
are opened, and he is known of us in the earthly
setting for a dweller in another sphere. We see what
he really was, what his words really meant, what his
deeds signified, what was implicit in him, what was
involved in his very being here, the divine reality
back of the human phenomenon. The eternal val
ues assert themselves. The Fourth Gospel is the
faith of the church put into the mouth of Jesus and
into symbolic deed at his hand. It is not a true

94 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

record of the Galilean Jesus whom Pilate crucified;
it is a marvelously true picture of the Asian Jesus
of the early second century, the Lamb that removed
the sin of the cosmos, who had long ago died and risen
and ascended up where he was before, the eternal
Logos, who by the twin sacraments of the incarnation
and the excarnation had redeemed the world.

The actual historic life of Jesus we study today
as a phenomenon in the history of religion. All
other aspects of it are subordinate to this, indeed,
are unintelligible save in the light of this. The great
fact itself and the various legendary accretions that
gathered round the fact serve this interest and this
alone. Something happened there in Palestine 1900
years ago that cleft human history sheer in two.
It was that a young man had an extraordinary
experience of religion; nothing save this. His words
and his behavior were but the outward flowering of
his religion. His life was obscure enough and without
notable incident; it left its unparalleled impression
not at all because of what he did, but because of
what he was. Of incident in Jesus' career there is
practically nothing in the records save those benevo
lences to which a later age attached the name and
dogmatic conception of miracles. But even such of
these as seem clearly historic incident and not legend
ary embellishment had no such uniqueness and in
terpretation as later dogmatic necessity put upon
them. It was not, in any large sense, a notable
career; it was, in every sense, a notable experience

THE NEW TESTAMENT 95

of religion. It was as a religious man that Jesus
worked what we call miracles. Not as Messiah, not
as Son of Man or Son of God, not by virtue of any
unique status, did he go about doing good, healing
alike the bodies and souls of the people. Healing
and helping the poor was no part of Messiah's task;
Jesus' compassionate heart, his deep sense of brother
hood, drove him to meet the piteous need, and his
profound faith in the power and the love of God
made him able to serve as the efficient mediator of
that power and love to suffering men and women.
There can be no historic question that Jesus was
endowed with notable powers, especially powers of
calming disordered minds and restoring diseased
organisms to health. It is precisely modern science,
with its researches into pathological psychology and
its revival of the ancient practice of psycho-therapy,
which has made us believe that the stories of healing
by Jesus and the apostles rest on a solid foundation
of fact. Colored, enlarged here and there in the
process of oral tradition, the list of cases has inevitably
been, yet in the main the things happened. The
sick were cured, the demoniacs were relieved of their
possession, not always permanently in either case,
perhaps, but often or commonly so. If Jesus were
not a successful spiritual healer of this type, the
Gospels could hardly make any claim to historicity,
and many a modern therapeutist would leave him
far behind. As to the four nature-miracles recorded,
they are either legend or the outgrowth of simpler

96 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

happenings. As legend, we can see and appreciate
their homiletic point; in a story like that of the fig tree
blasted by Jesus' curse we can see a parable turned by
repeated and vigorous homiletic use into a narrative
of outward fact. We are far today from that rational
izing treatment of the miracles which, as Matthew
Arnold well said, got rid of all the poetry without
removing the difficulty. We do wish to give them
rational treatment, but reason tells us that when
Jesus "went about doing good and healing all that
were oppressed of the devil" it was truly because
"God was with him"; it was a phenomenon of
religion. And when these narratives became a part
of the synoptists' record, it was for their religious
significance; they were gospel for these writers, texts
for preaching, not "miracles," not "proofs" of
anything. The "evidential" use of these narratives,
foreign to their origin and fatal to their religious
effectiveness, is fortunately passing away. As A. B.
Bruce said as far back as 1892, "Men do not now
believe in Christ because of His miracles: they rather
believe in the miracles because they have first believed
in Christ." Jesus himself, long ago, when he vehe
mently repudiated the kind of sign the Fourth
Evangelist presents with such zeal, evaluated cor
rectly the worth of conviction based on evidential
miracle. " It is an evil and adulterous generation that
seeks after a sign, and no sign shall be given unto it. "
William Temple asks (Mens Creatrix, pp. 311-13),
"What could be further from discipleship than one

THE NEW TESTAMENT 97

who was convinced that Christ is the revelation of
God, while wishing all the time that he were not?'7
The powers of Jesus evidence a great, ardent, vital,
kindling, religious personality, who moved and
spoke with an authority that even his enemies had to
acknowledge, to which minds normal and abnormal
were submissive. This is the great outstanding
phenomenon, which demands our recognition and
our reverent study. But the issue is only beclouded
by trying to save any meaning for the term " miracle"
which can be valid for the twentieth-century mind.
The eschatology of Jesus is another element in his
religion which only in our own recent day has come
to be correctly esteemed. From the latter part of the
first century, when its literal fulfilment began to
appear dubious, it has been a difficulty, something to
be explained away, as meaning something else.
Dogmatic theology had little trouble in giving it an
ecclesiastical interpretation, and the latter-day " lib
eral" theologians, with their social and ethical
predilections, found the Kingdom of God on earth
the key to his ministry precisely in the same sense as
it was to their own. The Jesus of their presentation,
who belonged to the nineteenth century as much as
to the first, and rather more to Berlin and Oxford and
Boston than to Capernaum, was not the Jesus of the
gospels any more than was the Jesus of the creeds.
In our generation we have once more become content
to take him as he was and to find in the actual first-
century Jewish artisan apocalyptic teacher something

g8 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

of the measure of religious emancipation which
his contemporaries found in him. We have reluc
tantly consented to give up our efforts to explain
away his eschatology and are trying to see it as a
genuine part of his religious experience. This at
once simplifies enormously the task of the interpreter
of the gospels, and lets him for the first time deal
candidly with his sources. Johannes Weiss opened
our eyes here, and Albert Schweitzer gave us a still
more vigorous arousing; English and American
scholars like Lake and Burkitt and Scott and Bacon
and many more have commended this understanding
to ever-increasing numbers. Of Weiss's epoch-
making little book (Die Predigt Jesu wm Reiche
Gottes, 1892) Schweitzer says

It posits the third great either-or in the investigation of
the life of Jesus. Strauss posited the first: either purely
historical or purely supernatural; the second the Tubinger
and Holtzmann fought out: either synoptic or Johannine;
now the third: either eschatological or noneschatological.1

This third " either-or" may now be said definitely
to have been decided; Jesus' mission was definitely
eschatological in the contemporary sense. He did
expect the coming of the Kingdom in his own genera
tion, and he did go to his death believing that beyond
the gates of Hades he would return as the apocalyptic
Son of Man to inaugurate the reign of God. But
having said this we have said nothing as to the
essential contribution of Jesus. This program he
1 Geschichte der Leben-Jesu Forschung (2d ed., 1913), p. 232.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 99

found ready to his hand, adopted it, and adapted it to
his particular situation. The "consequente Eschato-
logie" of Schweitzer errs not in its main positions, nor
in its consistency, but in its sometimes limited vision.
That Jesus fitted into this framework is true; that
he was no larger than it is untrue. That he teaches
the ethics of the Kingdom is true; that his counsels are
merely interim-ethics, of significance only as the special
requirement for admission to the Kingdom, is untrue.
In a word, Jesus dreamed that God destined him
to the messiahship, but that destiny he accepted
only with hesitation, not as exaltation and glory, but
as a great and solemn task, a supreme service. He
soon came to see that the Jewish leaders meant to
have his life; shame, suffering, and death, then, he
accepted as steps to his messiahship, involved in
the obligation his Father had laid upon him. The
realization of that exaltation, therefore, and his
entire messianic career consequent upon it, he sets
over into that future period beyond his death. It in
volves resurrection and exaltation to heaven, whence
he shall come as the Son of Man, with heavenly
equipment, to fulfi.1 his appointed task. Thus the
messiahship is entirely absent from Jesus' earthly
life; here, though he has prematurely discovered the
career that is in store for him, he realizes it only in
anticipation; in no sense and in no degree does he
function as Messiah before his death. His work here
and now is simply that of the prophet, announcing
the coming crisis and preparing men for it by moving

ioo THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

them to change of heart and purifying of life.. He
is here, in Holtzmann's felicitous phrase, his own
forerunner. He is not Messiah, he is to be; the
Kingdom is not present, but future. But all his
counsels as to the conduct of human life have inde
pendent validity; they represent the ethical ideal
of this religious genius. For his bidding is: Prepare
to enter the Kingdom by turning about and living
the Kingdom-life now. The way to get in is to live
as if you were already in. The kind of life which is to
characterize the Kingdom, perfect in its filial relation
to God and brotherly relation to men — put on that
kind of life now and when the Kingdom dawns you
will be prepared to enter in and live as its citizens.
Interim-ethics would be the counsel to do some
strange thing, to fast or be baptized or do penance.
Jesus' ethics are the ethics of eternity; their constant
undertone is: Live as a child of God. So soon as we
eliminate the Kingdom and the messiahship from
Jesus' present life, and set them in that expected
future beyond the grave, we shall see that he thought
of them in contemporary fashion. His original
contribution is not here; his great work, where his
heart is, is his present work of preparation. He was
not establishing the Kingdom, but only gathering a
citizenship for it, a people purified, prepared, and
waiting. When he died the Kingdom had in no sense
or degree yet come; for Paul and the earliest genera
tion it was in no sense behind, but before, an object
of longing and hope, and their work, like their

THE NEW TESTAMENT 101

Master's, was to increase that body of citizens. The
eschatology of the primitive church was that of
Jesus; he had not been, but. was to be, Messiah, and
they looked up into heaven for his advent, not his
second coming. As the first generation passed away,
and all things remained as they were from the founda
tion of the world, the promise of his coming grew
dim and dimmer and the faithful began to look back
at the Master's single sojourn upon earth and to
messianize that as the only messianic period possible
for him. Whereas for Paul and the earliest genera
tion Jesus' messianic status began only with his
resurrection or ascension (the two are one), and his
messianic functioning only with .the still future
parousia, for Mark he is Messiah from the baptism on;
so for Luke, who, however, carries some of the
messianic dignity back into the infancy. Matthew
with his narrative of virgin birth (an element lacking
in the original text of Luke) makes Jesus' birth into
humanity his birth as Son of God, and so his whole
life from the cradle the career of Messiah. The
Fourth Gospel goes farthest in this direction, making
Jesus the Logos-Messiah from all eternity, so that
the supreme status belongs to the whole period of
his incarnation and equally to the eternities which
precede and follow it. Yet it is notable that none
of the evangelists can successfully messianize any
period before the actual ministry. In substance all
follow Mark: the beginning of the gospel of Jesus
the Messiah, the Son of God, John came baptizing.

102 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

But all such intermingling of the messianic career
with the earthly life of Jesus is wholly foreign to his
own conception and promise, and to the clear under
standing of Paul and his contemporaries. We thus
eliminate from the mission of Jesus that eschato-
logical element which has been so great a stumbling-
block to some by transferring it, in accordance with
his own mind, to the time subsequent to his death.
His actual life is left free for that work of spiritual
renewal which has made him the supreme servant
of the ages. Doubtless his evaluation as Christ was
necessary to carry his person and his influence down
to succeeding generations, but it is Jesus who saves
you and me, not Christ, just as it was Jesus who
saved countless penitent men and women who fell
at his feet and received his assurance "Thy sins,
which are many, are forgiven," before he was ever
known or dreamed of as Christ.

The eschatologists are right; Jesus shared literally
the messianic hope of his time. He expected literally
the realization of the Kingdom within his own genera
tion; he devoutly and humbly believed that when
Messiah should be sent to transform this present evil
world into the new heaven and new earth wherein
should dwell righteousness, it would be upon his own
shoulders that the awful burden would be laid. He
did not "reinterpret," or "spiritualize" these con
ceptions in any essential way; it being always
remembered that they were by no means fixed and
stereotyped programs, but fluid plastic expressions

THE NEW TESTAMENT 103

of an ideal hope. What his hearers meant and
understood him to mean by his language was what he
did mean. But this exalted career lies for him beyond
the cross, and none of its elements are mingled with
the task God gave him to do as Jesus the prophet of
Nazareth, the friend of sinners, the task he accom
plished so supremely that those whose lives he had
re-created could not choose but accept his evaluation
of himself, and in the face of his death and the
prospect of their own, though the heavens remained
obstinately shut and no sign of his longed-for advent
came to cheer them, could still affirm in unwavering
confidence, "God hath made him both Lord and
Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified, and we know
that he shall come, even as he said. " Thus what
Wrede calls "the messianic secret in the gospels" has
been revealed, not indeed in precisely Wrede's fashion,
nor wholly in Schweitzer's, but through the working
together of these and other seekers for the truth.

Thus, in one department after another of New
Testament study, scholarship today is approaching
a common method and a common understanding.
Wide differences in detail there still are and must
necessarily continue to be. But one by one the
great fundamental conclusions are being established,
and our science moves on to new positions, once
sighted afar off by pioneers, now the secure ground of
all forward-looking scholars whose work is done in
freedom and with an eye single to the truth. The
great accomplishment of our day, the thing which is

104 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

going to make fruitful the researches of the
immediately succeeding generations, is not the
settlement of any specific vexed question, but that
realization that the New Testament is purely and
simply a phenomenon of religion.

There used to be a department of our science
called the Theology of the New Testament — a curious
phrase, as if documents could have a theology. And
it was so studied and so taught: the theology of
Hebrews, the theology of the Apocalypse. We
demanded the dogmatic content of impersonal texts,
without concerning ourselves with the experience
of the man who wrote them, who might be unknown
or doubtful and therefore need not bother us. Even
where the writer was best known, " Paulinism " was
more important than Paul, and might be extracted
from documents whose writer was certainly poles
asunder from Paul in religious temperament. All
this anomaly is changed today, we may gratefully
bear witness. Titles are stubbornly conservative,
as witness those in the Revised Version of our Bible,
which represent tradition rather than the conviction
of the revisers. Our seminary catalogues still offer
courses in the Theology of the New Testament.
Heinrich WeinePs great work, published in 1911, is
called, in accordance with the previously arranged
scheme of the editors, Biblische Theologie des Neuen
Testaments, but Weinel himself gives it the subtitle
Die Religion Jesu und des Urchristentums, which is
the subject of which it actually treats. The whole

THE NEW TESTAMENT 105

book is written out of the new attitude. He writes in
his introduction:

From a real "biblical theology," the preaching of Jesus
would have to be excluded entirely; a theology Jesus simply
did not have, he was an unlearned man of action. Even Paul
is falsely understood, though after the fashion of his people he
was a trained theologian, if he is considered primarily from this
point of view. He is a missionary, and all his letters stand in

the service of his mission The place of the biblical

theology of the New Testament must be assumed by a presen
tation of the religion of the earliest Christianity.

Wilhelm Wrede of Breslau as early as 1897, in his
brochure, Uber Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten
neutestamentlichen Theologie, had already set forth
this approach to the subject in words extraordinarily
fruitful for the future. He asks:

What are we really seeking ? In the last analysis what we
actually wish to know is this: what was believed, thought,
taught, hoped, demanded, striven for in Christianity's earliest
day, not what specific documents contain on the subject of
faith, doctrine, hope, and the like.

This is a comment upon the caption : ' ' New Testament
Theology/' But it may serve to sum up the status
and prospects of New Testament study in our time.
It is not today, still less will it be in days to come,
study of the New Testament as such at all, but study
of the religious experience which those precious docu
ments enshrine and of the human personalities in which
that experience was kindled by the life-giving touch
of Jesus, from which it was transmitted by spiritual
contagion to be the supreme treasure of succeeding
ages, down to our own, and after us, world without end.
CLAYTON RAYMOND BOWEN

CHURCH HISTORY

HISTORY IN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

The two generations covered by the life of this
school of sacred learning have witnessed the progress
of one of the most momentous changes ever wrought
in the history of mankind. If we are willing to divest
ourselves for a moment of all unessential details we
may readily convince ourselves that since fire was
brought down from heaven, from being the plaything
of the gods to be the most important of the servants
of man, there have taken place on this earth only
two changes of the first magnitude in the processes
of human life. The first of these was when some
unknown genius conceived the idea of subjecting the
wild beasts of the field to the purposes of human
industry. That change occurred so long ago that all
memory of it has faded from the minds of men.
History has no record of a time when the horse and
the ox were not ploughing the field or moving the
weights too heavy for men. The earliest pictorial
records of civilization show us chariots of war drawn by
noble horses splendidly caparisoned, and back of these
there must have been a long, long story of struggle
leading to the final domination of man over beast.

The second great material stage of human prog
ress is marked by the application of the long-known

106

CHURCH HISTORY 107

expansive force of steam to the mechanical needs of
the modern world. Between these two epochs it is
not too much to say that the fundamental processes
of industry had not essentially changed. The
plough which turned the virgin soil of Ohio was not
greatly superior to that which had scratched the
furrows of the Euphrates valley. The rate of trans
portation of goods over the roads of this country
before 1840 was slower than that obtainable on the
ancient Roman roads, because those ancient roads
were better made.

But it is not merely, nor even primarily, with these
vast transformations in the material world that we,
as students of human history, are concerned. Paral
lel with all material and industrial movement goes
on also a movement of human society adapting itself
to the ever shifting forms which these applications of
power are sure to take. The control of physical
resources by one man, or by a group of aristocrats, or
by the organized workers themselves gave rise to
those political structures, monarchies, aristocracies,
or democracies, the story of whose rise and fall makes
the substance of that unending record we call in a
special sense history. And once more, during this
whole long period, from the beginning of recorded
time to the opening decades of the last century, these
political adjustments and readjustments went on
in a society not essentially changed. Privilege at the
one end, slavery at the other, and in between such
shifting associations of free industrial and financial

io8 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

groups as could win a foothold for themselves and
prove themselves useful to society as a whole.

Then came the greatest, and, so far as we are
concerned, the final change. Within the memory of
men now living this astounding development of human
energy we call the modern industrial movement has
gone on. It furnishes us with one of the backgrounds
for the consideration of every phenomenon of the
modern world, but it is only one. There is another
of equal, perhaps even of greater, significance. In
the years during which the first steam engines were
doing their pioneer work in industry a group of eager
experimenters were making those first observations
which were to result very shortly in the proclamation
of what we now know as the development theory of
all life. How vast and how complete a transformation
in the thoughts of men upon every subject this new
doctrine was to make only we of the elder generation
can now appreciate. To younger men who have
grown up in the atmosphere of what the elder Agassiz
used to call " devilopement, " it came as a matter of
course, but during the earlier years of this School,
the battle raged with a fury unequaled in any sub
sequent encounter of ideas.

On the one side were ranged all those forces
which seemed to find support only in what we now
recognize as the " spasmodic" conception of life, of
life, that is to say, broken up into periods of time and
into forms of existence to be accounted for only on
the theory of arbitrary interruptions, coming in from

CHURCH HISTORY 109

some vague region known as "outside" and regulated
by some still more vague personality, whose essence
was arbitrariness, and whose methods were inde
pendent of human volitions. That is a conception
of life that dies hard. It is far from dead yet. It
appeals to all that sense of utter dependence upon
something outside ourselves which to many minds
is only another way of expressing religion.

On the other side of this great debate were enlisted
from the start all those other elements of society
which found the chief satisfactions of their thought
in the idea of unfailing and unending law. To such
minds the movement of all life seemed to be only
the unfolding of one vast design. They were not
greatly concerned with definitions as to final causes
and still less with ultimate purposes. What cap
tivated them in the new presentation of the vital
processes was its suggestion of a law of being working
itself out through the development of new forms and
new capacities out of those already in existence.
To them the statement that God made man in his
own image contained no fantastic implication of an
artist building an image after his own reflection in a
mirror and then, as it were, winding up this image to
run its brief course in the infinite procession of things.
It meant rather that man, built up through the natural
processes he was now just beginning to observe and to
interpret, was himself a part of the universal life and
contained within himself a share of those potentialities
to which in our despair we give the name of " divine."

no THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

The issue of the conflict could not be long in doubt.
Assailed at first with a blind hostility, the new ideas
gradually commended themselves to an increasing
number of thinking men until now it is only in the
last strongholds of reactionism that they are nomi
nally condemned, and even there they are being
restated and appropriated to the purposes of orthodox
propaganda. At first too these ideas were captured
by over-ready champions and presented with a
crudeness and a confidence foreign to the scientific
spirit of Darwin and his like. They had to be pruned
and fostered by judicious disciples before they could
be set free to do their noble work of clarifying and
ordering the thought of men.

But what, you will be asking by this time, has
all this to do with the condition and the future of
church history ? I will try to answer. The leaven of
these transforming ideas began to work in a world
already deeply absorbed in an entirely new enthusiasm
for historical studies. One of the most obvious
reactions against the French imperialism of Napoleon
was a revival of nationalist zeal throughout Europe,
and one of the first expressions of this nationalist
spirit was the impulse to investigate every detail
of the past experience of every country. Where
political activity was frowned upon and promptly
suppressed, this more subtle form of nationalist
propaganda was directly encouraged. Vast enter
prises looking toward the collection and publication
of the historical records of Germany, France, Italy,

CHURCH HISTORY in

and England were inaugurated and maintained, and
this activity goes on to the present moment, in
diminished volume, but with unabated energy.

And not in the collection of material alone.
Monumental histories, covering not merely the
nations then in existence, but including every country
and every phase of the ancient world, were produced,
and the great European countries vied with each
other in the scope and magnitude of these under
takings. What especially interests us, however, is
the new spirit which animated all this eager activity.
Wholly in harmony with the character of the investi
gations of Darwin and his followers, this new historical
school introduced a working principle that was nothing
less than revolutionary. Or rather, if I may put it
in this way, they elevated to practical importance a
principle known to every historian from Herodotus
down, professed by them all and violated in greater
or less degree by them all. That is the principle,
so simple that it hardly needs to be expressed, that
the historian should make no statement not based
upon the kind of evidence by which such a statement
can be proved. No one doubted the soundness of
this theory of historical writing; but until the period
we are speaking of very little had been done to bring
it into effective practice. Take, for example, Gibbon.
There is no doubt whatever that Gibbon read faith
fully the original materials on which his narrative is
based, but he nowhere analyzes in detail the whole
body of this material. He by no means swallows

112 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

it whole; he accepts here and rejects there, but his
concern is more with assimilating his material so
that i£ will reappear in a new and impressive form
than in weighing and measuring it according to any
principles of criticism. Gibbon published his great
book in the year of American Independence.

Now it is precisely this process of critical analysis
that distinguishes the work of the nineteenth-century
historical school. Niebuhr wrote his history of Rome
between 1811 and 1832. He was the first to lay
profane hands upon the sacred traditions of the early
period and to do this in pursuance of a definite theory
of historical criticism. It was his merit to make
clear once for all that it was the first business of the
historian so to examine and co-ordinate the whole
body of his material that his narrative should be able
to stand the test of the most rigid inquiry. It was
the method of all true science applied to a subject
that until then had hardly been reckoned among the
sciences at all. The Muse of History had heretofore
been represented with a pen; henceforth the spade
was to be added to her necessary equipment.

It has been customary to speak of this new epoch
as a German contribution to civilization, and there is
no doubt that the qualities of the modern German
people were peculiarly adapted to the working out
of all the detail of the process. But the work has
been done by all the civilized peoples of Europe with
such variations as the national genius of each natu
rally produced. The method has been one, and the

CHURCH HISTORY 113

result is a magnificent volume both of material and of
interpretation, upon which all future production will
have to be based.

Let us ask ourselves for a moment what has been
the permanent content of this result. It has given
us in the first place a new conception of the meaning
of the word "historical. " At a conference of teachers
and writers of history I was engaged in conversation
by a person whom I judged to belong to the race of
so-called "Educators" and who proceeded to enlighten
me with his views about history. "The trouble with
our history now-a-days, " he declared, "is that it is
too retrospective," and during the rather bad quarter
of an hour which he gave me this phrase kept recur
ring like a refrain in his monologue: "Our history
now-a-days is too retrospective!" Precisely what he
meant I did not discover. Whether he had some
vague idea that history ought to concern itself more
with the present or with the future was not clear,
nor in his case did it greatly matter. He had got
his phrase, and that for him was the main thing.
In his vacant fashion he was expressing the notion
that the attention of the educators of our day was
turning too much to the past and to that extent
neglecting what he would doubtless have called "live
issues." I refer to this only as an illustration of a
prevailing error in the definition of the historical.

To say that history concerns itself with the past
is to indicate only one of its distinctive characteristics.
Another of these is that history deals with an endless

H4 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

series of sequences of cause and effect, and it is this
aspect of the historical that specially interests us here.
For it is in this law of sequence that historical study
found its closest analogy with the scientific movement.
A new canon of historical criticism was set up and,
allowing for human frailty, fairly rigidly maintained.
That canon was that in this chain of sequences there
can be no breaks, nowhere and nohow. This is by
no means to say that the connecting links between
the cause and the effect are always to be discerned.
If human insight could accomplish this feat we
should be gods, not men. What was demanded was
that we should recognize the fact of such connection
and then in all humility go as far as we can in trying to
understand it. Above all else the teaching of this
new school was that in this attempt to understand
there was no room for fear. No matter to what
unforeseen results our boldest inquiries might lead,
there was only one thing to do, to accept them and
fit them in as best we might into the whole volume
of discovered truth. The historian and the scientist
were to work by the same methods and be guided by
the same faith in the permanent value of careful re
search and honest judgment.

A colleague of mine in the field of geology sent out
one of his most promising pupils to teach in a remote
institution of learning. On his arrival the young
man was assured by his departmental chief that the
institution justly prided itself upon its liberality.
He was to expound the principles of geology absolutely

CHURCH HISTORY 115

as he believed right, but — with a certain hesitation — •
when he came to explain the creation of the earth
he would do well to consult the president! No such
feeble faith could long resist the assault of true
learning and invincible courage, and these were si
lently doing their revealing work!

Occupation with the past and a method depending
upon the sequence of cause and effect — these are two
of the elements which go to make up the definition of
the historical process. There is a third of no less
importance, touching upon the nature of the evidence
upon which the so-called truth of history must rest.
That evidence is absolutely limited to the witness of
human beings. No matter whether this witness be
borne orally or in writing, by document or by tradi
tion, it becomes historical evidence only so far as it
relates to things knowable by ordinary human powers
and transmissible by ordinary human means. It
takes no cognizance of revelations or miracles or
dreams or visions, of honest intentions, sincere
hallucinations, rumors however confidently believed
in, or legends however widely accepted. The chal
lenge which the historian must face is the same as
that presented to the witness in a court of law.
Hearsay evidence will be refused. A legal colleague
of mine tells a story of a witness who said: "I was
sitting in my office, when I heard some one in the
corridor, and I said to myself . . . ." "Stop!" said
the opposing counsel "I object! That is hearsay evi
dence. " No less rigid is the standard of the historian.

n6 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

But it will be said that truth reached by this
method must always suffer from the frailties of human
nature. Perfectly true; the same is true also of the
decisions of every court of law. The honest historian
knows that what he calls truth is only a high degree of
probability, but just as the civil community finds its
safeguard in the acceptance of the decisions of its
lawfully constituted courts, so the world does best
when it accepts the results of the highest historical
scholarship it can command. It is only a savage com
munity that tries to even things up by shooting the
judge.

So far I have been speaking of history in general,
meaning thereby what we all mean in ordinary dis
course, the record of political and social institutions
as they have been shaped by economic and racial
struggle. I come now to that phase of history which
is my special topic, the history of the Christian
church, and, if some of the considerations to which
I have already called your attention have seemed to
you so obvious as to be mere commonplaces, I fear
I shall only be adding another of the same sort if I
remind you that the history of the church is only one
chapter in the history of mankind as a whole. Well,
commonplace or not, it is true that to bring this fact
to the conscience of the thinking world has been the
hardest struggle of the last two generations of scholars
and teachers. To apply to the records of the church
the same hard, cold standards of critical judgment
that were being applied to the records of other forms

CHURCH HISTORY 117

of institutional life seemed to the men of the early
nineteenth century to be a kind of blasphemy. To
ask in regard to these records: When were they
written? Who wrote them? Were their alleged
authors in position to know whereof they were
speaking? Were they likely to be actuated by any
personal or partisan motives in preparing their
accounts? Have these records come down to us as
they were made, or have they been tampered with
by ignorance or partisanship? All these questions
seemed like an impertinence to multitudes of faithful
souls.

The beginnings of your School coincide pretty
nearly with the early stages of this bitter conflict.
Strauss's Leben Jesu appeared in 1835. The monu
mental activity of Ferdinand Christian Baur extended
from about 1840 to 1860. Many names, laudatory
and abusive, were given to the school of criticism of
which he was the founder, but the name by which its
members specially elected to be called was the
" historical school." They claimed above all else to
be working historically, and by that they meant just
what I have been here trying to suggest, the appli
cation to the documents of Christianity the same
tests as to trustworthiness which were being applied
in every other field of human organization.

It was inevitable that the methods of this new
process should have been exaggerated, and this
exaggeration was still more emphasized by the sys
tem of philosophy which was dominating the most

Ii8 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

advanced thought of the day. The fascinating propo
sitions of the Hegelian School found one of their
most brilliant illustrations in the sweeping deductions
of Baur and his associates. The records of early
Christianity, it was said, must be studied in the light
of that invariable process of conflict and reconciliation
that formed the shibboleth of Hegelianism. Not
theological discussions, but historical antitheses were
the stuff out of which the only solid structure
of history could be built. And here were the
antitheses ready to hand. Christianity, as everyone
knew, was preached by a Hebrew to Hebrews and
only in a comparatively later stage and in face of
bitter opposition was it so interpreted that it could
be made acceptable to the gentile world. Here then
you had the perfect field for the Hegelian formula.
First the conflict between Hebrew and Gentile, and
then the reconciliation. Consequently here was the
key for the understanding of all early documents.
It was not very difficult to sort out such of these as
were distinctly Hebrew or were distinctly Pauline,
but there were others as to which this sharpness of
distinction could not be maintained. What about
these? Why, obviously, these must be attempts at
reconciliation between the two. Further, since the
Hebrew writings were likely to be the older, the
Pauline later, and since there could not be recon
ciliation until there was something to reconcile, it
beautifully followed that here was a chronological
scheme into which the whole of the early Christian

CHURCH HISTORY 119

literature could be fitted with quite satisfying
completeness.

It was a pretty game and it worked out to an
astonishing measure of success. The fault with it,
as with so many other feats of German ingenuity —
or ingenuousness — was that it was too complete.
It laid itself open to the charge of violating the very
principle it professed to illustrate, and it needed
only the mole-work of far inferior minds to show
its weak points. No one, I suppose, would now
undertake to defend the critical results of the Tub
ingen Historical School in their entirety, and yet I do
not hesitate to say that it marks by far the most
important moment in the whole progress of church
history studies. It established once for all the
foundation on which all future study and teaching
were to be built. It is not too much to say, as Adolf
Harnack said of himself, that every writer on church
history since 1860 stands on the shoulders of Ferdi
nand Christian Baur. The foundation has been
broadened, but it could hardly be deepened, for it
touches the bedrock of a truly scientific method.
Through its support church history has made its way
into the company of the sciences.

It would be going too far to say that there have
been no backward steps in this general movement
forward. The acceptance of a truly historical method
in church history has often been a grudging one.
Many devices have been adopted to save the remnants
of the ancient spasmodic doctrine of life and to

120 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

employ the language while denying the spirit of
fearless and unsparing criticism. Men are still play
ing with definitions of the miraculous, definitions
of a thing which does not exist. Belief in the miracu
lous exists indeed, as it has always existed, but that
is a problem of human psychology, not one of physical
science. The Roman Catholic church is enjoying
one of its moments of jubilant expansion over the
belated discovery that Joan of Arc was — or is, which
ever may be the correct tense — a saint, and everyone
knows that the final test of official sainthood is the
performance of a required number of miracles duly
attested by the witness of persons who, simply because
they are human, are absolutely incapable of bearing
witness to anything not perceptible by ordinary
human faculties.

Such phenomena as this are for the moment
discouraging. They prove how reluctant people are
to follow out any chain of rational thought to its
inevitable consequences — to use the language of our
present interest — how hard it is to get people to
think historically. And yet, taking the large result,
it is certain that the historical achievement of the last
half-century has been one of its greatest triumphs.

The reaction of these European discussions upon
American thought could not be long delayed. The
extraordinary political, economic, and social advance
of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War attracted
to her all those young, eager spirits who were dis
satisfied with the academic opportunities at home

CHURCH HISTORY 1 21

and were seeking for the something better they
vaguely desired but were too immature to formulate
for themselves. They joyfully embarked on the
Great Adventure, and came back, some of them with
a blind enthusiasm for everything German, others
with a better balance of judgment between the
really good things Germany had given them and the
overblown national conceit which nullified so much
of the good, in other words, a reasonable mingling
of admiration for German accomplishment and detes
tation of the German national character.

I was one of the earliest in this company of ardent
youths who came home to challenge the academic
world of America to give them a chance. When I
began my service in 1876 the conditions of historical
instruction in America had but one encouraging
aspect, namely, that there was a great work to do and
very few workmen ready to do it. In one of our
most important Eastern colleges the only teaching of
history was given during one-half of the Senior year
by the professor of the harmony of science and
religion! Any respectable gentleman with a reputa
tion for much "reading" was fitted to sit behind a
book and hear the recitations of reluctant under
graduates.

As to church history, the situation was, I think,
a little better. The very necessities of theological
controversy compelled a certain acquaintance with
the general course of historical events, and a certain
familiarity with at least the great fundamental

122 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

documents of the Christian faith. It meant a good
deal that the first history of the church to be written
with a truly historical purpose, the still useful treatise
of Neander, should be translated by an American
scholar as early as 1847 and should be widely
accepted as the basis of instruction in theological
schools. The fatal thing about this instruction was
its isolation from the study of history in general.
As a rule the teachers of church history were men not
specially trained in historical study. They were
almost without exception clergymen, and in far too
many cases were clergymen who had ceased to be
useful in the proper work of their profession.

Where the first impulse to better things came
from I am unable to say, but certainly one of the
earliest indications of a change is to be found in the
terms of foundation of the Winn Professorship at
Cambridge, of which I had later the honor to be the
first incumbent. This foundation took place in
1876 through a decree of the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts allowing certain trustees under the
will of Jonathan Bowers Winn, a Unitarian layman,
to devote a portion of his bequest to this purpose.
The bequest had been made to the trustees for the
benefit of the Unitarian denomination, and the decree
of court sets forth among its numerous "whereases"
that " Ecclesiastical History is an essential department
of study for Unitarians, as well as other ministers,
and is of the highest value in the religious education
of Unitarians, as of other youths." In enumerat-

CHURCH HISTORY 123

ing the duties of the professor to be appointed the
decree says:

He shall also give instruction .... on such subjects
as the religious history of the world; the relations of secular
and church history; the influence of Christianity on the
Roman Law, of pre-existing institutions, religions and philoso
phies on Christianity; and the origin, history and scope of
the canon Law.

Quite a sufficient program, you will agree, to engage
the best endeavors of at least a half-dozen professors,
and needless to remark that the later incumbent
never succeeded in wholly fulfilling its require
ments.

I quote this interesting document here as a sig
nificant indication that, at least so far as Harvard
University and the Unitarian denomination were
concerned, the traditional separation between so-
called secular and church history was at an end.
My own appointment to the Winn Professorship
six years later, in 1882, I felt to be a still further
expression of this purpose, for I had been during just
that interval of six years a teacher of European
history, dealing with the church only as one among
the institutions of European society. So far as I
have had any influence upon the young men now
veterans in the pulpits and the academic chairs of all
Christian denominations throughout the country, it
has been in this direction of a purely historical con
ception of the origin and progress of Christianity,
both on its institutional and on its doctrinal side.

124 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

There is one further aspect of the Winn decree of
almost equal, perhaps in its results of even greater,
importance. Several times in the course of its
specifications it repeats the provision that the instruc
tion given under its endowment shall always be open
to all students of every department of the University.
That is only another way of saying that the history
of the church is an essential part of a knowledge of
history in general, without any special reference to
professional equipment. In pursuance of this pre
scription the courses in church history were accepted
by the faculty of arts and sciences and incorporated
with the offerings of the department of history. The
attendance of arts students has ordinarily been
distinctly larger than that of theological candidates,
and, so far as diligent inquiry could discover, the
mingling of the two has been acceptable to both.
In this past generation there have been few can
didates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
history who have not chosen some topic for their
general examination from the field of church history.

I speak of these personal observations only as
illustrating the progress which the study of church
history has made as an essential element of American
education. I need only to remind you that the man
to whom all of us look up as the most distinguished
American historical scholar of his time, Mr. Henry
C. Lea, worked almost entirely within this field.
Today there are no more profound students of Euro
pean church history here than James W. Thompson,

CHURCH HISTORY 125

of Chicago, Charles H. Haskins, of Cambridge,
Rufus Jones, of Haverford, and George L. Burr, of
Cornell, though none of these is technically a pro
fessor of the subject.

In the year 1884 I had the privilege of being one
in a little group of historical students who met
at Saratoga and organized the American Historical
Association, since grown to be the central organ of
historical scholarship in the country. One of the
most interesting problems of its early years was the
question of church history studies in their relation to
the work of the Association as a whole, a question
which became more acute through the action of the
church historians themselves. Not long after the
founding of the Association, in 1888 it was again my
fortune to be present at a meeting of teachers of
church history at the house of Professor Philip
ScharT of Union Seminary, called to consider the
formation of a Church History Society. It was my
opinion at the time, and in this I was supported by
Professor George P. Fisher, of Yale, that the wise
policy would be to join with the Association as a
separate section, but this opinion was perhaps for
tunately overruled, and under the vigorous leader
ship of Dr. Schaff the new Society went on for several
years as an independent organization. Later it was
incorporated with the Association, but meanwhile
this body had grown to such portentous dimensions
that the Society felt itself crowded into corners and
cramped in its activities, and again it separated and

126 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

enjoyed for a time the devoted service of Dr. Samuel
Macauley Jackson as its guiding spirit. Since his
lamented death it has been once more placed on a
new footing and is doing efficient work in bringing
together professional students and teachers of church
history and in publishing their results.

So far as organization goes we may, therefore,
regard the present conditions of our subject as most
encouraging. It holds an honorable place in academic
programs, it is professed by men who have usually
had a long and technical preparation for this special
work. As a rule these men are duly impressed with
the importance of maintaining a sound relation
between church history and other historical pursuits.
What then shall we say as to the prospects for the
future ? Prophecy is not the business of the historian
and I am not concerned here with giving any glowing
picture of what the coming years may bring. It is
always the tendency of the historian to measure the
future by the past and to restrain the natural impulse
of sound human nature to see it with the eyes of
hope and faith rather than with those of experience.

One thing is certain: organization and equipment
may do much in stimulating an interest already
existing, but they can do little to create such an
interest. The real problem is: to what extent his
torical studies are going to attract the best minds
among our academic youth, and we may be fairly
sure that such attraction will represent well enough
the interest of our community in general for the

CHURCH HISTORY 127

historical view of present problems. So far as the
schools of theology are concerned, it must be con
fessed that two other interests have crowded upon
the more distinctively historical studies with almost
crushing effect, during the past generation. These
are the speculative and the humanitarian, especially
the latter. "Social ethics," the application of the
Christian morality to the relations of man with man
in everyday contact, has claimed the attention of
many of our most promising youth almost to the
exclusion of every other consideration. There have
been times when it required all the faith and courage
one had to maintain the due proportion of values
for the historical foundations without which the
theological speculations and the humanitarian enthu
siasms of the moment are floating about in a nebulous
twilight of ineffective vagueness.

Especially has this question been forced upon us
by the incredible catastrophe of a world-war. In
the early part of the year 1916 I found myself saying
to an audience of Harvard graduates that the most
surprising thing about the war was the number of
impossible things that had happened. The war was
impossible because mankind had become too highly
civilized; if war should happen it could last only a
few weeks because the combatants would all be
killed off by that time; it could not go on long
because the frightful cost would beggar all the nations
engaged, and yet here it was after a year and a half,
going on with increasing bitterness and intensity,

128 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

and, as we now know, destined to go on for three
years longer.

It would seem as if this were enough to make men
see the futility of all prophecy; but the too ready
tongues of our talking people still wag bravely on
telling all who will listen how things are going to be.
On the one hand we are told that the historic instinct
has been so keenly aroused among the nations that
for a generation to come there is going to be no more
active interest than the study of the past as the
final justification of national aspirations. On the
other hand we are assured that the Great War marks
an epoch between all the outworn traditions of the
past and a golden future based upon a new con
ception of social order, of social rights and social
obligations. Into this new world religion is to enter
as a necessary guaranty of its most important rela
tions, or else it is to disappear entirely among the
rubbish of the discarded past.

My own judgment is that, as has always been the
case with oracular utterances, these widely differing
prophecies mean only that the ancient conflicts are
to go on, under new forms, it is true, but with essen
tially the same real issues. In the future, as in the
past, it is going to be the perpetual function of calmly
thinking men to utilize the lessons of experience in
judging the problems of the present as they offer
themselves for solution. What we have to insist
upon is that a rational balance be maintained in our
institutions of learning between these two extremes.

CHURCH HISTORY 129

If we depart too widely from the heritage of the past,
neglect our studies of language and history, and let
ourselves be led astray by the will-o-the-wisp of
" practical efficiency," then our youth will find
themselves playing about with the loose ends of a
sham science and an impotent philosophy. If, on
the other hand we sit back in a dull insistence upon
tradition without making clear to our youth its vital
relation to the pressing problems of their immediate
present, we shall find ourselves left high and dry on
the arid heights of our own self-satisfaction while
they wander without guidance in the alluring valleys
of untried experiment.

This present anniversary has a peculiar significance
in this respect. It is the anniversary of a school
which does not hesitate to call itself by the honorable
name of Unitarian, and there is no better definition
of the Unitarian mind than this: it is the historical
mind. It builds its faith, not upon the fine-spun
theologies of Greek ingenuity, nor upon the majestic
institutions of Roman administrative genius, but
upon the actual historical facts of the mission of
Jesus of Nazareth. It studies the history of the
expansion of Christianity from the beginning to the
present day by the method we have been defining
as the historical method, that is, by collecting and
co-ordinating all available materials and then weigh
ing and measuring them by the standards of human
evidence. It accepts with reverent submission the
idea of a single central Power making for righteousness

130 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

throughout the universe of things, but it sees the
working of that Power in human affairs only through
the instincts and capacities of our struggling human
nature. It rejects with scorn the degrading con
ception that human nature is essentially base, and
emphasizes at every point all that it has of nobility
and of kinship with the divine.

There cfan be no better preparation for young
men in facing the infinite perplexities of the modern
world than a thorough training in the spirit and
method of this historical process. It will help to
keep their feet upon the solid ground of well-tried
experience, and it will kindle their imagination also
with the possibilities of new adjustments. It will
defend them against the flippant promises of a
nearby millennium and help them to recognize as
they appear the signs of a true progress toward
higher and ever higher ideals of life upon this earth.

To such a future the traditions of this place point
with no uncertain prophecy. Remaining faithful
to the spirit of its past, it may look forward with
renewed hopefulness and courage to wider influence
and a success measured only by the resources,
material and spiritual, that shall be placed at its
command.

EPHRAIM EMERTON

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

THE MODERN THEOLOGICAL METHOD

Fortunately a large part of the organism of
studies which constitutes theology has won a scientific
method, with the result of a widespread agreement
as to facts and the meaning of facts. The exegesis
of the Bible was once so arbitrary that, as Dean
Colet said, theologians could prove a point of faith as
easily out of a fable of Ovid as out of John's gospel or
Paul's epistles. Gone now is the fourfold exegesis,
literal, tropological, allegorical, anagogical. Gone,
too, the arbitrary methods which made the contents of
Scripture mere wax to be shaped for the uses of the
Lutheran or Calvinist creed. A critical historical
method, justified to students of the most diverse
ecclesiastical affiliations, has brought them to common
results, so that the more recent literature of Bible
study is undenominational. Similarly church history
is no longer the naive uncritical narrative of medieval
times or a polemic argumentation after the manner
of the " Magdeburg Centuries." Historical science
has won the day. The Protestant scholar delights
in the church history of the Abbe Duchesne or the
Histoire des Dogmes of the Abbe Tixeront. The
work of Harnack, Loofs, Seeberg is assimilated by
theological schools of every name. Certainly in

132 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

these large areas of the total field the scientific spirit
and method have made final conquest, and with
regard to the historical data there is a unity more
real than was ever procured by an ecumenical council.
We are therefore led to inquire what progress has
been made or is in prospect for the establishment of
an accepted and fruitful scientific process in securing
and formulating the convictions which make the
matter of systematic theology. A unity of method
here would promote the spiritual unification of the
Christian world.

This is obviously a more delicate and difficult
enterprise. Escape from the constraint of institu
tional creeds has been found by changing the meaning
of words. The terms are fixed. The new thought
has to wear the old dress. Evasions and ambiguities
have delayed the development of a genuine scientific
treatment of the convictions of faith. Some theo
logians have sincerely and bravely essayed the task,
and the success of the critical historical movement
has given them a measure of popular support. In
addition, the emancipation of philosophy from eccle
siastical control has made possible a large and
un trammeled utterance on the subject of religious
faith, contributive to the development of a scientific
method of approach without the hindrances of
accommodated language. In particular the scien
tific examination of religious experience by William
James has given great impetus to those whose hope
it is to work out for systematic theology a method

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 133

which by its general acceptance and the production
of commonly shared results can renew the passionate
hope of an ultimate Catholicity.

The progress already made can be measured by
observing the older method of Protestant scholasti
cism which without paradox can be illustrated by
the work of one who was an odious radical in his time.
Joseph Priestley's Institutes of Natural and Revealed
Religion (1772-74) is typical enough of the older
procedure. The work has three parts. Part I deals
with " natural religion. " Part II proves that we have
a supernatural revelation in the Bible. Part III
gives a systematic statement of the doctrines of this
revelation as a rationalist mind understood them.
In Part I we learn that the existence of God, the
rules of morality, the life to come, are truths fur
nished by reason, necessities of thought, or inevitable
inferences from the world as we observe it. A theo
logian like Priestley was comfortably secure in this
fundamental proposition at a time when even the
skeptical Hume maintained that "the existence of a
Deity is plainly ascertained by reason" and that
"the order of the universe proves an omnipotent
mind; nothing more is requisite to give a foundation
to all the articles of religion." By natural reason,
then, according to Priestley, we know a being who is
"an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the
world around us and a Being who was himself
uncaused." Since uncaused, he is eternal and im
mutable. The effects of his causation compel us

134 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

to ascribe to him power, wisdom, goodness. Since
the powers of nature are his divine energy, we know
him to be an omniscient, omnipresent providence,
unseen and therefore immaterial in being. From his
goodness we deduce his holiness, justice, mercy,
truth, characters which we can, indeed, conceive only
imperfectly through the medium of his work in
nature, but comprehend more justly by the aid of
his special revelation. Our first parents thus by
reason possessed the fundamental religious knowledge,
but thereafter came a corruption of reason and
conscience which made necessary an assisting revela
tion. This is in the Bible, evidenced as supernatural
revelation by miracles and prophecies. From the
biblical revelation, then, is drawn the additional,
fuller, clearer light of knowledge concerning God,
duty, and the future life.

So far as the method is concerned, it can be traced
back to Paul's Epistle to the Romans. It was in
fact Paul who founded for all Christian tunes this
dual appeal to reason and revelation. Reason view
ing creation discerns the eternal power and god
head (Rom. 1:20). The moral law is a natural
law (Rom. 2:14). But there is revelation in the
law given by Moses and that direct personal revela
tion afforded to each believer by his union with the
risen Lord, a revelation which in PauPs case contains
a dynamic power for the will and the emotions of
the heart, while our sturdy, self-reliant, eighteenth-
century rationalist needed only a revelation of

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 135

information to the understanding. Scholastic orth
odoxy and rationalists alike used the method which
has been outlined, differing chiefly in the scope and
content of doctrine drawn from the supernatural
revelation.

To the modern man, this method has become
untenable. Since the time of Kant it is not com
monly enough admitted that the existence of the
supreme object of religious conviction is rationally
demonstrable from the natural world. The claim
that primitive man began with this clear rational
knowledge and by a fall or degeneration suffered
corruption and confusion of insight and conscience
is belied by our modern knowledge of the slow rise
of man from low undeveloped unspiritual beginnings.
The critical historical examination of the Bible has
invalidated the older way of conceiving revelation.
Altogether, the former method for securing and
formulating religious convictions has been made
impossible.

For an effective new start, the world is indebted
to Schleiermacher. In place of a dogmatic discussion
of the objects of faith, a doclrina de deo et rebus divinis
obtained by reason and scriptural revelation, he made
faith itself, the religious apprehension, the object
of study. This is a revolutionary change of method.
Instead of beginning with the existence of God as
proved by natural theology, given by the necessita-
tions of logical thought, the new school began with
something which all men may be expected to admit,

136 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

the fact of religious feeling, the fact of that attitude
or functioning of the human spirit which we distin
guish from other functionings by the name religious.
If a logically derived and logically defended con
ception of God as the one omnipotent and all-
intelligent cause of the universe is the defining fact of
religion, the term religion could hardly be extended
to the awe and reverence and worship seen in primitive
peoples or to the original form of Buddhism. If on
the other hand we are considering man's thrill of awe
and humility in the presence of any superhuman
might felt to be sacred or holy, we deal with a phe
nomenon universal and essential in human life,
something indisputable as fact. But the advance
made by Schleiermacher can be best appreciated by
observing the situation left by Kant. In his three
Critiques Kant had elucidated three different types
of apprehension. In the first he had studied the
logical theoretic apprehension of science. Given the
raw material of the data of sensation, the logical
understanding weaves it into that network of relations
which make the world as scientifically known. Our
rules of logical construction are restricted in their
application. They apply only to the data perceived
in forms of space and time, to a phenomenal world.
The transcendent divine cause of a universe is there
fore not found by scientific knowing. Exit the old
rationalism. In the second Critique, Kant dis
tinguishes another functioning of the human spirit —
the ethical. This is specifically different from theo-

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 137

retic reason. In this the human spirit as will —
the reason we live by rather than the reason that
merely thinks and knows — penetrates beyond phe
nomena to the absolute discerned in the form of
universal, necessary moral law. We have thus a
clear distinction between two original, ultimate,
irreducible activities of self, the cognitive or scientific,
and the ethical consciousness. In the third Critique,
the Critique of Judgment, Kant considered still a
third type of apprehension, a third activity of con
sciousness, the aesthetic. This again is independent,
not to be resolved into either of the others. Kant
thus analyzed human apprehension into three distinct,
independently valid types: the cognitive, the ethical,
the aesthetic. How then does he deal with religion ?
He resolves it into the ethical functioning. The ideas
of church doctrine are symbols of the- struggling
experiences of the moral will that finds itself on
the verge of two kinds of reality, the order of the
causal nexus of the phenomenal world and the order
of ultimate and sovereign worth. It is just here
that Schleiermacher takes a significant step. He
differentiates religious experience as a fourth valid
functioning of the human spirit. It is not, as the
rationalist meant, an act of metaphysical thinking
and a proper moral consistency with the content of
the thought.

It is not to be reduced, as Kant would have it,
to the ethical attitude of the will. It is a fourth,
ultimate, irreducible, original, spontaneous functioning

138 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

of the human spirit. Furthermore, just as the
ethical consciousness finds the absolute which is
moral law, just as the aesthetic consciousness glimpses
a complete and perfect unity shimmering through the
broken and multitudinous things of nature, so the
religious consciousness, and that alone, really finds
God. The object found is God because it is the
religious consciousness that finds and possesses the
object. The case is not that of first procuring by
cognitive reason an idea of an omnipotent intelligent
cause of nature and then proceeding to invest the
idea with emotional interest. Our reason may pre
suppose or require such an idea, but God is given,
is found, is met and possessed by the religious
consciousness. It is that Glauben or consciousness
which Schleiermacher makes the object of study as
a systematic theologian in order to elicit from its
contents convictions concerning God and the world
and the redemption of man.

Unquestionably the new method is illuminating
and revivifying. Rationalism whether orthodox or
heterodox conceived religion as idea for the under
standing with logical results in conduct. The
eighteenth-century rationalism had banished all the
mysteries. It had contempt for "enthusiasm" — for
the illusion of an immediate personal communion
with the present divine, for that which history
reveals as the elementary beginning and the ulti
mate quest of religious movements. Schleiermacher
restored the religious phenomenon to its rights,

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 139

restoring grace, revelation, communion to the present
experience.

It is not necessary to halt with Schleiermacher;s
particular exposition of the religious consciousness
and its implications. Since the days of the Reden
and the Glaubenslehre, we have obtained a vast
body of knowledge concerning religious experiences,
religious practices and ideas from the world- wide
and age-long survey of comparative religion or, as it
is now more commonly called, the general history of
religion, and we now view Christianity itself in this
general setting, however exalted may be its com
parative place. We have in fact returned to the
true and generous view of Clement's school in Alex
andria of the second century, believing that the
heavenly light shines on every creature that comes
into the world, however confused and erroneous are
the accounts given of that light, believing that the
grace of God is indeed universal and that the religious
experiences of all human beings represent a contact
of soul with him whom we are privileged to dis
cern as the Universal Father, however clouded and
irrational and unwholesome have been the images
projected by the devout imagination for the power
that was found in experience. Inevitably the scien
tific method of the modern systematic theologian
must be in some sense a religions geschichtliche
Methode. Not that however in any merely exter
nal historical fashion. The historical survey has
been deepened by a more refined and penetrating

140 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

psychology. A religious psychology yields a more
accurate and scientific statement of the human
religious consciousness than Schleiermacher could
give. This union of a complete historical study and
psychological method marks the arrival in the field
of systematic theology of the scientific spirit and
method which is the most recent achievement in
theology.

Certain changes of procedure are obvious. As
Soderblom (Naturliche Theologie und die allgemeine
Religions geschichte) has so clearly indicated, we
have put the general history of religions in the
fundamental place once occupied by what was called
natural theology. Our evolutionary view compels
us moreover to affirm the rise of man where once the
fall of man was proclaimed, and we are brought
frankly to the view that the Christian religious
experience is a historically educated form of the
general human religious consciousness. We no longer
view the Bible as a miraculous interjection and ex
pansion of ideas once known to natural reason but
afterward obscured and perverted by man's fall.
Nevertheless, we use it, no less eagerly and devoutly,
as a wonderful record of that supremely privileged
path of development by which the general human
awe of the adorable Holy Power became the clear
and purified recognition of the power that is holy
through righteousness (Isa. 5:16) and finally as
holy through that righteousness which is equal, im
partial, redemptive Love. Jesus proclaims that such

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 141

authoritative, sovereign, righteous Love purposes
for his children the realm of life which is the goal and
the loadstone of the Christian soul, making Christian
ity, when it is a real experience, a passion of missionary
endeavor for the spiritual unification of all man
kind in a brotherhood of life wherein the spirit that
was in Jesus shall be regnant in all. In place of
using the Bible as a codex of revealed information,
we use the Bible and Christian history for the deter
mination of that dynamic essence of spiritual energy
which we inherit through the forms of our historical
religious inheritance — inheriting it and re- experiencing
it — and which bears us on to the church which
shall be at last the Holy Catholic Church. For
natural theology we substitute comparative religion.
For man's fall, we substitute the rise of man. For
the supernatural canon, we substitute the dynamic
substance of the Hebrew- Christian evolution. In all
these substitutions we are studying a religious con
sciousness that finds God, a record of grace and
revelation.

But we have not adequately expressed the debt
of modern systematic theology to Schleiermacher.
He was attempting a systematic statement and
co-ordination of the convictions belonging by time's
last result of historical development to his own
circle, the Evangelical Church of Prussia. He must
refuse to hold these convictions as mere deductions
from some contemporary speculative philosophy —
a hazard of thinking. They must be convictions

142 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

held on the basis of a religious experience which was
the final matured form of the human religious con
sciousness evoked and educated by the pure and
supremely kindling consciousness of God possessed
by Jesus. The systematic theologian was not there
fore pursuing a speculative venture of metaphysi
cal thought. He was studying religious experience
and he ought to have a genuinely scientific method,
as clearly scientific as the method of the natural
scientist who deals with those very different experi
ences known as physical, chemical, biological facts.
The scientist does not deduce these facts or the
meaning of them from metaphysical premises. He
attempts an accurate determination of them by
inspection, and any theory or doctrine or belief which
he arrives at is one implicated in the experience of
these facts. It was just such a positive scientific
method that Schleiermacher sought for the production
of a systematic theology, one strictly analogous to
that of the laboratory scientist but proper to the
specifically different kind of experience vouchsafed
to the religious consciousness. The doctrines thus
obtained would be either descriptions of that experi
ence, propositions, as we now say, of religious psy
chology, or convictions about God and his relation
to the world which are found involved and implicit
in the religious consciousness, relative to it as
the physicist's assertions about the world are rela
tive to the data of his field of observation. This
was Schleiermacher 's intention and ideal. Doubtless

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 143

the performance did not equal the intention. His
description of the religious consciousness was in fact
determined not so much by psychological observation
as by his own metaphysical presupposition. One may
say votum probo, opus non probo; nevertheless the
systematic theology of today is a fresh effort of the
kind which was his ideal.

Following Schleiermacher came a transitional
period in which the method used was an unstable
union of empirical observation and philosophical
deduction. Then came Ritschl, who once more
made the question of method all important. Ritschl
would eliminate any reliance on metaphysics — mean
ing essentially to repudiate the old basis of natural
theology. He therefore resorts to the alternative
basis of revelation and in so doing is at least super
ficially in conflict with Schleiermacher, since he seems
to draw only from a past historical revelation given
first to Jesus and through Jesus impressed upon the
earliest apostles. The apparent gain was that the
data used were objectively given instead of being
capriciously selected from individual experience,
but the difficulty was in showing how the present-day
believer appropriates the truth thus historically
given. Apart from this Ritschl advanced matters
by his analysis of the data of the historical revelation
to a central essential idea, the idea of the Kingdom
of God correlate to the fatherhood of God. To
make this the central organizing idea of dogmatics
was to shift the center of gravity from Paulinism

144 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

to the synoptic preaching of Jesus. Something of
great importance survives thereby even with the
passing of Ritschlianism. Ritschlianism had to
pass. The rapid development of interest in com
parative religion, due in part to the international
influence of the Hibbert Lectures, forbade this
isolation of the apostolic revelation from the rest of
history. The religions geschichtliche interest latent in
Schleiermacher's process began to come powerfully
to its own. At the same time the remarkable under
taking of William James in his Varieties of Religious
Experience, though devoid of the historical element,
acted powerfully to revive Schleiermacher's positive
scientific method. The present situation then is one
in which the theologian appeals to the data of religious
history in general with supreme reliance on the
Hebrew-Christian experience of God, deepening the
historical, treatment by a psychological penetration
to the essence of such experiences, and meeting the
demand for truth in the convictions thus exhibited
by a critical theory of religious knowledge. It is this
last phase of the process which is of peculiar present
urgency and if one may hazard an estimate, the
theory in prospect will be not unlike the so-called
" mystical empiricism" expounded in Lossky's Intui
tive Bases of Knowledge. The effort to parallel
Kant's method and exhibit a religious a priori in
order to anchor experience in a universally valid
rational element has not arrived at any clear result or
general acceptance. Some theory of knowledge is

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 145

needed to protect faith against fear of illusion when
men are persuaded that faith or religious apprehension
is not the logical cognitive activity of the intellect
which lays such exclusive claims to dictatorship
but an apprehension of another type, analogous to
our non-logical aesthetic apprehension though dis
tinguishable from it. The act of religious faith is
conscious of laying hold of reality, of truth. It is
not mere blind feeling. As Schleiermacher said in
the Reden, it is Anschauung und Gefuhl, and the
fault of his Glaubenslehre lies in the suppression of the
element of Anschauung. The mere feeling of passivity
to absolute causality could not, in fact, explain
religion as we actually know it. There must be a
recognition of the absolute worthfulness of feeling's
object in order to justify all the emotional values of
Schleiermacher 's own religion. There is a " know
ing" in faith, but the knowing is immediate, an
intuition, not inferential thinking. When Tuckwell
(Religion and Reality) insists so strongly that a
judgment is not a comparison of ideas but a reference
to a reality given; when Wobbermin (Die Religions-
psychologische Methode in Religionswissenschafi und
Theologie) urges so strongly that Ojfenbarung is the
very criterion of religious consciousness, the consti
tutive thing in it; when James characterizes religious
experience as "a conviction, not merely intellec
tual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an
Ideal Power," "a sense of Presence of a higher and
friendly Power," we may surely see the tendency to

146 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

understand religious knowing after the manner of a
higher realism like Lossky's. This is a view that,
refusing to limit experience to sense perception,
argues that in every case — sense perception or other —
the object is contained in the knowing as immedi
ately as when the self knows its own conscious states.
We may at least hopefully declare that a theory of
religious knowledge necessitated by the method of
religious psychology is announcing itself. The psy
chology and the theory of this knowing must alike
interpret the fact that religion's form of expression
is symbol and not logical concept. When it does
that some of our conflicts with science are over.
With symbol, if it be inevitable and really congruent
even though it do not suffice fully to express the
object found in this sacred experience, religion is
content. Who can fathom the deep things of God ?
Exeunt in mysteria can be said without alarm of all
our most passionately held convictions about God
and divine things as truly as for the highest and
purest convictions about human souls when love
reveals them to us.

And dearer than all else besides,

The tender mystery
That like a veil of shadow hides

The light I may not see.

The mystery belonging to the moment of awe and
adoration in the unseen presence hovers too over
the forms of doctrine elicited from that solemn privi
lege of communion.

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 147

It is profitable to give something like concrete
illustration to this formal account of method and
procedure. In the first place let us make sure of the
discrimination between a logical scientific explanatory
treatment of reality and other dealings with it which
must wear other names but are equally inevitable
and equally valid. Consider the lilies, said Jesus.
We may consider the lilies in more than one way.
A man may ask to what family of plants the lily
belongs. He may enumerate and describe the various
elements of the plant in its root and stem and blossom.
He may explain the functioning of these parts in the
life of the organism of the plant. He may study the
biochemical processes involved in its life. He may
account for the origin of various types and species
and show the linkages to larger inclusive groups of
plant life. By all this classifying and relating he is
explaining the lily. He satisfies our logical curiosity.
That is one way, the botanist's way, the scientific
way of considering the lily, for purposes of explanation.
We may do all this without remembering that Solomon
in all his splendor was not arrayed in so much beauty
as the lily. But there is another person than the
scientist who may deal with the lily, or the scientist
himself may forget his botanical interest and respond
to the lily with a simple joy in its exquisite beauty.
In that attitude he ignores class relations and bio
chemical laws and all other explanations. There is
nothing to be explained. He is satisfied. He has
joy. He will utter this experience in exclamations

148 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

or poetic words or song or painted representations.
The scientist's consideration, the artist's considera
tion, these are independent one of the other. Neither
can be reduced to the other. One is logical, theoretic;
the other is aesthetic. The lily means both these
things. Both accounts of it are justified. The
judgments involved are not of the same kind. In
the one case we can distribute our attitude, our
dealing with the object into various steps: such and
such characteristics belong to this object; these
characteristics define a genus of things; therefore,
this object belongs in that genus. In the other case
we take but one step: this flower is beautiful. As
the Kantian would say, it is subsumed directly and
immediately under an "idea of the reason." It is a
non-logical or aesthetic judgment. It is intuitive.
But let us desert the lily and choose for our reality
a man. Him too we may consider scientifically,
applying anatomy, physiology, chemistry, anthro
pology, psychology, and various other explanatory
processes, to pluck out the heart of his mystery. We
may also ignore all these interests completely and
simply yield to the heightened emotional thrill
roused by his beauty. Lovers and friends do not
feel in terms of biochemistry or ethnology. But the
man as a part of given reality may have still another
meaning to me. He may excite a very different
response. He represents a possibility of action. He
provokes impulses of conduct. I may deal with him
in one way or another, but I am aware that one way

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 149

is right, the other wrong. Neither the scientific
account of the man or the beauty or ugliness of the
man are involved in this ethical response. It is
independent. I am facing another worthfulness in
the sum of experience. The word for it is not " true"
or "beautiful," but "good" or "right." Here again
is an ultimate irreducible attitude of the human self
to reality.

It took a long time for humanity to become
scientific or artistic or even moral, but there was
another primal susceptibility which was easily
evoked in the depth of time. Roaming in a scene
half-realized, man found some striking and over
awing object or situation that evoked another height
ened emotional thrill — not mere emotion however.
There was perception, there was the impulse to
action, but there was especially the solemnity of
awed emotion. The storm, the burning bush, the
forest stillness, the majesty of mountains, the grotto's
gloom, the teeming prodigality of life and power in
various beings — all these were occasions for glimpsing
a vast and subduing wonderful might that drew and
claimed and obligated his shrinking humility of
consciousness. Man had a word for what he thus
discerned through the provocations of things strange
and great. The word was "holy." The very scene
where he had experienced this humbling and exalting
attraction was ever after "holy" ground and was
made a shrine for the revival of the great experience.
But whatever object or situation evoked it, the

150 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

experience was not a discovery of logical relations,
or of beauty, or of mere duty. It was the discovery
of the sacred, the holy, the divine. That man, says
Soderblom, is religious to whom something is holy.

The story of religion is the story of the education
of this primal religious experience which did not wait
for science or aesthetics or ethics. It was not a case
of a man saying argumentatively: There is a God.
Something had occasioned and evoked a sense of a
presence to which he said: Thou art my God. It was
a case of revelation. God was there and the man
gave himself to that presence with that complex of
fear and loyalty, of humility, and of an exaltation
through the yielding submission, which has found its
own specific word for the presence so affecting man.
The word is holy. Holy art thou, Lord, God!

The history of religion shows that in this attitude
there was not mere fear, not a sense of a terrifying
power, but a sense of power exercising a not unwel
come claim, a sense of being "tied" or obligated, a
vague sense of "ought," which expressed itself often
in what to us are senseless practices, but was to
culminate in the saint's rapture of self-surrender with
a consciousness of elation and freedom in the perfect.
The greatest forward step taken in religious history
was that which especially characterized Hebrew men
of unusual religious susceptibility and energy who
in a clash of human relations, a strife between unjust
greed and brotherhood loyalty, penetrated to a
deep meaning in the religious experience. Why this

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 151

dread of violation, this impulse to yield self to the
holy power as if therein were found the law and
authority for man's life ? What was this constraint,
this obligatoriness, this sovereignty ? These Hebrew
prophets knew intuitively that the awe-fulness of
the divine was its mandate of ethical righteousness,
that its holiness was the exaction of justice. "The
Holy God shows himself as holy through righteous
ness" (Isa. 5:16). This was the beginning of
ethical monotheism. It was established that the
authority of God over man was the universal, uncon
ditional ethical authority. With that new insight
into the spell of religion, man rose to new levels.
The beginning was such a case as Jacob dreaming of
angels ascending and descending and wakening to
fear: How dreadful is this place! this is none other
than the house of God. And he vowed a vow:

If God will be with me and will give me bread to eat and
raiment to put on, then the Lord shall be my God, and this
stone shall be God's house [Gen. 28].

Such was a beginning. And the end is this :

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my
soul after thee, O God! My soul is athirst for God, for the
living God! When shall I come and appear before God?
[Ps. 42].

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul
thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and
thirsty land, where no water is. To see thy power and thy
glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. Because thy
loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.
Thus will I bless thee while I live [Ps. 63].

152 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

The systematic theologian deals with this religious
consciousness in its highest developed state, educated
by the intuitions of ethical prophets, exalted and
refined by the communions of Jesus, enabled indeed
to discern the holy divine presence through the
personality of Jesus himself, through him discerning
the kind of being which can have the absolute sanctity
and divinity, through him seeing the Father. The
theologian must indeed be guided by his own religious
sensibility, but he escapes any individual caprice in
defining the experience which he studies and eluci
dates by surveying the whole development of Chris
tian consciousness, by seeking truth, as Dr. Oliver
Stearns expressed it, "in the light of the Holy Catholic
Church, purifying his judgment by searching the
thought and experience of saints, ancient and mod
ern. " Let us then outline what knowledge lurks
for the student in the religious consciousness so
determined.

"My soul is athirst for thee, O God. Thus will
I bless thee while I live." This is the utterance of
the quickened religious consciousness. It is not an
effort to explain anything whatever. It is man
seeking, man finding, man meeting, man possessing
God in the intuitive religious consciousness. It is
not spoken to a material object. It is spoken to an
imageless presence. And it is tense with the con
sciousness of the supernal worthfulness of that
presence. The words are a cry to utter an experience,
not to give a definition of the reality experienced.

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 153

The words embody the feeling of being affected in a
particular and wonderful manner by the unimaged
presence. That is the positive of this consciousness.
You and I contemplating it can say various things
about it. We say it is the experience of a spiritual
reality. That is more negative. It says that this
positive sense of a supremely worthful unseen is not
the sense of a material object. This is a negative and
inadequate way of expressing the peculiar constraint
or authoritativeness of worth which the worshiper
has experienced. But it helps: God is spirit. We see
that this worshiper was aware of an authoritativeness
unconditionally valid and we say that he experi
enced an absolute. This is not the positive experi
ence which had no concept. It is our contrast of his
experience with the experience of less exalted long
ings and impulses. It has a negative in it: not an
object of relative worth, but "absolute." But it
serves to use this concept negatively obtained: God
is spiritual and absolute in worth. And we go on at
once to say: not then an experience of things natural
but of a being more than natural. The direct ex
perience did not indulge in the act of contrasting.
We are doing it — as we must. God is in this sense
"supernatural." The concept and the immediate
experience are not the same thing. The concept is
no positive expression of the experience. We note,
too, that the worshiper is affected by a reality met
in intuitive experience. It is given — it is other than
he, other than the concrete scene about him. It is

154 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

transcendent. But equally it is clear that the soul
possesses it. It is immanent in his experience. He
is surrendering, yielding, merging self into another,
a spiritual, absolute, overarching, and yet kindred
being — athirst for it, rejoicing in it, praising and
blessing it. We who contemplate him can only say
that for him the worthful supernal being is personal
to him. The worshiper seems to share in that
being and indeed when he himself tries to utter this
he cries: "Thou in me and I in thee!" Such inter-
penetration we can parallel only in the contents of
our consciousness. In the world of outer perception
there are juxtapositions, not interpenetrations. The
kindred case for the worshiper's felt relation to his
God is the relation of elements of my consciousness
to myself. It is true, therefore, that this worship and
communion find a worthful transcendent and yet
immanent being in a relation that must use the
terms of personality.

I am only illustrating hastily and inadequately
that, using a truer determination of the religious con
sciousness than Schleiermacher used, but pursuing
much the same method, we obtain as inevitable neces
sary elucidations of the religious consciousness itself
a series of formulated convictions — truths about God
as the religious consciousness apprehends him. We
have not got these propositions by borrowing from the
logical explanatory dealing with reality but from
the religious experience itself. We simply explicate
the contents of that experience and we are enabled

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 155

to say that God experimentally known is one spiritual,
absolute, supermundane, transcendent, immanent
being. We say that he is known as such by the
knowing that is not scientific inference from the
world, but is the direct intuitive religious knowing.
These are great primary convictions about God
which are thus won, and there are others that are
developed as the presuppositions of such experiential
knowing. For example, the conviction that the
earth is the Lord's, that God wills the world. Prob
ably enough, this cannot be got as the content of a
simple, unanalyzed intuition, as a direct sense of
world-dependence on God. But legitimately we can
reflectively reason to the presuppositions of the
experience and find there the necessity of the affirma
tion that the world is God's world and serves his
purpose. All the primary knowledge is by a single
step, for all is but explication of "Holy art thou. "
The relation of the Holy One to the universe requires
another step. It is inferential knowledge. We are
therefore led to seek assistance from any justified
rational construction of the world which exhibits it as
held in an ethical teleological system. This may
illustrate the remaining question of the relation of
systematic theology to metaphysics. Our dogmatics
has explicated the meanings of the Christian religious
consciousness, and it presents them not as mere
statistics of belief but as convictions of truth. It
is therefore concerned with the question of the
validity of these faiths. That is a part of the

156 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

enterprise. But now to proceed to prove the validity
of these faiths from the results of theoretic reason
would be a desertion of the principle fundamental
to the method which systematic theology has now
adopted. That principle is, trust in the normality
and independence of the religious consciousness.
The proper apologetic, therefore, is first of all to
disclose the grounds of validity inherent in the
religious consciousness itself. When moreover we
find the religious consciousness crying out, "Whither
shall I flee from thy presence?" or affirming, "The
earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof," we may
rest content with the inevitability of this intuition,
but we may also better invite the co-operation of
theoretic reason, as ally not as dictator. When we
have fully explicated the Christian complex of faith,
the Christian world-view, we cannot refrain from
asking whether it furnishes a satisfactory answer
to the general question: Why a world at all? We
shall ask whether the results of theoretic explanatory
reason stifle our Christian faith or give it possibility
of breath. How far this interest will lead the expo
nent of faith into ultimate philosophical discussions
must depend on the degree of confidence which he
has in any total philosophical construction and
interpretation of the sum of reality known by all
the modes of human apprehensions. If there is a
system of metaphysics which commands unaltering
universal assent, well and good! The systematic
theologian will show the consonancy of what he

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 157

elucidates for the religious consciousness with that
universally valid and acknowledged system. If there
is no such system, he will still gladly show that
there is philosophic support for his content of faith,
only being on his guard that he does not construct
the faith as a deduction from the philosophy and
thus constrain the plastic vital experiences of a
soul which has other functionings than that of an
explanatory understanding.

FRANCIS ALBERT CHRISTIE

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

EDUCATION IN WORSHIP

Worship is any technique by which we stimulate
those characteristic emotions that we recognize as
religious. I am not attempting to define religion.
Let each one do that for himself. But when he has
made his own definition, or without any definition has
recognized a certain experience as religious, he knows
that there are states of feeling which are most char
acteristic of that experience. It is the production of
those states of feeling which is the purpose of worship.

In origin and in theory worship is something very
different. It is homage toward deity. Its signifi
cance is found in its object. The subjective state of
worship is supposed to be entirely incidental. The
primitive worship was undoubtedly a do itt des. The
great always demand adulation and tribute, pre
eminently therefore the god must desire to be praised
and to be enriched. The worshiper makes obeisance,
presents sacrifice, pours out his libation, expecting
that his god will reward him, or at least will refrain
from hurting him.

The resultant feelings of expectancy and of
satisfaction are testimony to him of the value of
his service. This is most clearly seen in such
ceremonials as the war dance, the fast, the vigil.

158

RELIGIOUS EDUCA TION 1 59

The warrior has worked himself into a frenzy by his
wild dance, in which he has simulated the actions of
battle and in imagination slain his foe. He goes out
to the fight all aglow with the excitement and attrib
utes his rage to the inspiration of the god of battles.
The value of worship is measured by the resultant
feeling of the worshiper. Again, he fasts and afflicts
himself in penitence or in self-abnegation to placate
his deity and when the famine produces the charac
teristic light-headedness with the tendency to halluci
nation and abnormal visual experiences he thinks
himself the recipient of unusual spiritual privilege.
His own subjective state is the basis of his evaluation
of his worship. But the worship is always thought
of as objectively significant.

The worshiper is sure that God wants what he
offers. He is sure that definite results are obtained
by means of worship which would come in no other
way. He regards the particular acts which he
performs as significant in and of themselves. The
technique is prescribed by God just as the court
ceremonial is prescribed by the king. So the
elements of worship are always divinely ordained.
The tabernacle is made according to the pat
tern that was shown in the Mount. The priestly
prescriptions come through inspired channels. But
the authentication of this objectivity is always in
the subjective appreciation of the worshiper.

It is interesting to note that the prophetic deroga
tion of ceremonial is also subjective. The worshiper

160 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

says, "This ceremonial must be from God because
I feel the awesome presence. I know in my own
experience that God is in it. " The ethical Protestant
says, "The ceremonial cannot be from God because
it does not make you behave as God desires." He
evaluates the worship in terms of its ethical motiva
tion, and he does so because his religion is ethical.
The only feelings which may be called religious are
those which stimulate him to the ethical life. He
generally, therefore, rejects the elaborate ceremonial
and falls back on simpler exercises which help him to
feel the Divine presence in the common relationships
of life. He has only developed or rediscovered another
technique by which to stimulate those characteristic
emotions which he recognizes as religious.

To our modern religion the distinction between
subjective and objective values is unimportant.
God who is spirit and seeketh those to worship him
who worship in spirit and in truth cannot be con
cerned about a particular etiquette. Whether the
bread of the sacrament is leavened or unleavened,
whether the water of the sacrament is much or
little, whether the prayer is formal or extemporane
ous, whether the worshiper kneels or sits — none of
these things can matter to God except as they matter
to us. Tom Paine with a fine sarcasm suggested as an
amendment to the Act permitting Quakers to worship
God according to their own conscience that it would be
more fitting to enact that God should be permitted to
accept the worship which Quakers should offer him.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 161

The worthship is ultimately in ourselves. It is
what will make us worthy that is important. It is
the motivation of our lives in which the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is interested, not in
any homage that is due to himself.

We come then to the question of the place of
worship in the motivation of life. It is wholly a
practical question. Can worship do us any good?
In the spirit of most utter reverence and of a simple
faith in the God whom we know through Jesus we
must evaluate worship in terms of its subjective
effect upon ourselves. How can it be so ordered as
to help us to feel toward God and toward men as we
believe it is desirable for us to feel? Let me here
state parenthetically my own conviction that worship
will not outlive the faith in the object of worship.
However much our psychology may teach us that
worship has subjective value we should not be able
to continue the practice simply for such value.
Only if there is a real God with whom I am united
in the exercise of worship shall I be able to carry on
the exercise.

Believing in God as fatherly, as infinitely under
standing and sympathetic with his human children,
we cannot, as we have already noted, think of him as
concerned with any particular technique of worship
for his own sake. That must be what Jesus meant by
worship in spirit and in truth.

The question of technique then applies to our
selves. What kind of exercises will stimulate the

162 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

desirable emotions? Thus we get away from a
metaphysical problem to an educational problem.
What are the exercises of worship that people need to
develop in them the right feeling-attitudes toward
God and toward men, and how shall we train them
in the practice of those exercises ?

Let us attempt an analysis of the religious feeling.
Without raising the question of primacy among the
religious emotions, certain it is that a most funda
mental one is respect. This is an elemental impulse
having its origin in the animal order. Biologically
its value has been in the acceptance of leadership.
It is the counterpart of the instinct of mastery.
The development of a devotion to the stronger, the
greater, the chief, patriarch, king, has been of high
importance in social evolution. Naturally this atti
tude was carried over into the relations with deity
and became the awe and reverence which have had
so large a place in religion.

Correlated with the feeling of respect or reverence
for greatness and goodness is the feeling of humility,
the recognition of one's own inferiority to the object
of respect. One is less than the chief, and one is
infinitely small in the presence of his God.

The question arises whether the feelings of respect
and of humility are desirable in a democratic society.
Do they not belong to the old aristocratic regime?
Superficially democracy answers the question at
once in the affirmative. Children may be rude to
parents and to teachers, inasmuch as they will not

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 163

be beaten. Servants may be impertinent to their
employers, for it is easy to get another job. Youth
may jeer at age, for the dead line is at fifty. The
people may lampoon their rulers, for have they not
elected them, and can they not turn them out of
office ? The congregation may criticize the minister,
for have they not " hired " him ? And why should we
even have respect for God, for we are not quite sure
that the philosophers will allow him to exist. As
for humility, perish the thought! "All men are born
free and equal." We bow to no one; "one man is
as good as another. "

Such a democracy would produce a vulgar world.
It has no sanctities, nothing higher than its own
stupid mediocrity. It would be profane.

But that is only a sham democracy. The very
essence of real democracy is respect for personality,
mutuality of respect and of humility. Said Emerson,
"Every man is my master in something." Said
Jesus, "He that is greatest among you shall be your
servant." The King stands bareheaded beside the
casket of Nurse Cavell.

Democracy needs more reverence, not less, until
we shall have respect for every goodness and great
ness, for every ability and skill, for every devotion
and faithfulness. And for God. We shall not
tremble before him; we shall not call ourselves
worms of the dust. Perfect love casteth out fear,
but it never weakens reverence. There is a demo
cratic religion which finds God in the experiences of

164 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

common life, and not in superimposed authorities.
But it is not therefore less reverent. God is not
less wonderful because we find him in common life.
Tennyson was humbled by the flower in the crannied
wall.

Perhaps the decline in worship has some con
nection with the decline in reverence. They may
develop together. Doubtless worship must be rein
terpreted. Men have given up prayer because they
did not believe in trying to tease God to interfere
with the order of nature. But if prayer is meditation
on the spiritual meaning of life it may come back with
more power and may help us to escape from the
vulgarities and profanities into a sense of the sacred-
ness of ourselves and of our world, instinct with God.
The sacraments have seemed futile, and sometimes
even superstitious, as if some magic efficacy could
reside in them. Baptism is a subject for new jests.
But if the sacrament is a symbol of the sanctity of
all life, if the sacred supper speaks of the Divine
presence in men's eating and drinking, then it may
help us toward insight, and that is the great need of a
democracy.

If we can practice our people in the symbolisms,
the poetry, the rich appreciations of a genuine wor
ship, we may get back into life that reverence, the
loss of which must make us poor indeed.

But religious feeling has ever been even more
self-depreciatory. It has included the sense of fail
ure. In primitive religion this may be fear that

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 165

the requirement of the god has somehow not been
met, that this arbitrary and capricious deity has in
some way been offended. In an ethical religion it is
the sense of positive wrongdoing, or, more signifi
cantly still, the appreciation of some good that has
not been performed. "We have left undone those
things which we ought to have done; and we have
done those things which we ought not to have done. "
With this is sorrow. Again in the less ethical religions
fear of punishment, in the more ethical religions pain
for the failure of the best.

Conviction of sin and contrition for sin are not
as common as they used to be. There are many
causes for this: the decline in the belief in future
punishment, the general belief in the benevolence of
God, change in the ethical estimate of much conduct
that was formerly regarded as sinful, perhaps a
certain laxity of moral standards.

We must have a more intelligent view of sin.
The slums, the sweat shops, the dying children,
the wasted youth, all proclaim us a selfish, sinful
people. We need a conviction of sin before there is
any hope of social salvation. If we would use
Rauschenbusch's Prayers of the Social Awakening
in our worship, we might get it. Jesus and the
Prophets read to us thoughtfully might bring us to
a godly sorrow. We must revive the symbolism
of the cross. We may give the penitential Psalms
their true social meaning and cry indeed, "God
have mercy upon us. "

i66 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

The introduction into our worship of a definite
element calculated to help us to feel our social sins
and to repent of them is an important need in our
present-day religious education.

The object of all religion is atonement, if we may
read it at-one-ment. Whether it be primitively con
ceived as satisfying God and thus averting danger
and securing benefits, whether it be conceived in the
modern evangelistic sense as getting right with God,
that is, meeting the Divine conditions of pardon and
spiritual blessings, whether it be conceived as recog
nition of human failure and limitation with an expecta
tion of Divine help for nobler living and a better
society, religion looks to a surcease of the inward
conflict and a resultant peace.

The great religious souls have been conscious of
what psychology recognizes as a release of tension,
relaxation. The " fears within and fightings without "
are over. The soul is satisfied.

Religious literature is full of the expression of this
peace of the spirit. Jesus promised this experience
to his disciples, "Ye shall find rest unto your souls."

Worship properly develops the feeling of peace.
We confess our sins and receive the assurance that He
is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. We seek
help and receive the assurance, "My grace is suf
ficient for thee. " We are at peace. How fitting that
worship should close with a benediction.

Proceeding in the analysis of religious feeling to a
fifth element, I would mention confidence. I choose

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 167

this word rather than faith because the latter has
been almost captured by intellectualism. When we
say faith we think of opinion, but when we say con
fidence we think of personal relationship. That has
ever been the characteristic of the highest religion.
The Bible is the great literature of confidence. It
has just enough of skepticism to throw into bold relief
its triumphant trust. Job may rebel, Jeremiah may
despair, the psalmist may sing de profundis, but
they all come out into the sunlight. Only Ecclesi-
astes has no faith, and the editors have even given
some to him. The martyrs may cry, "How long,
0 Lord, how long, " but the vision shows them with
palms of victory in their hands.

Van Dyke wrote a gospel for an age of doubt.
You cannot argue men into faith. Let a beautiful
voice sing to me, "I know that my Redeemer liveth,"
and it is easier for me to believe in the life beyond
than when I read any treatise on immortality. Let
me sing with a hundred comrades "How firm a
foundation, ye saints of the Lord," and I find myself
believing that God is here, while the lurking skepti
cism that all life is chance is driven away.

The contagion of faith is wonderfully manifest in
worship. Of course the psychology of such attitudes
of confidence is very simple and that is a stumbling-
block to some people. They object that they do not
wish to put themselves into the way of being influ
enced by mere feeling. During the great days that
have just passed we were not ashamed deliberately to

1 68 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

organize the technique by which we could stimulate
patriotic feeling. We said, Bring the flags, sing the
songs, let the bands play, show us the boys in khaki,
we want to be stirred, we want to be impelled to give
our money for Liberty bonds, to spend our time in
Red Cross service, to do all that our government
calls upon us to do.

It is hard to believe in God. His voice is drowned
in the market-place and in the halls of pleasure. We
need another hour and another place where the men
who have believed him can tell us their faith, where
the poetic souls who have seen him may sing to us
their faith, where the symbols that revealed him may
touch our imagination, where we may give our souls
a chance to believe the best that it is in us to be
lieve.

With the highest psychological skill at our disposal
we must plan the worship of the children, youth, and
adults that there may be a social attainment of con
fidence in the good God and the good world and the
better tomorrow.

A notable religious feeling is joy. In primitive
religion where divinity was near to men and the
immediate cause of all happenings, every common
joy had its religious quality. The gladness of awaken
ing life in the spring time, the exuberant happi
ness of the harvest, the joy of marriage, and the
pleasure of a thousand lesser occasions were all
expressed with religious ceremony, for the gods were
doing well to men.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 169

Two conditions have robbed modern religion of
its joy. Our sense of the order of nature has made the
succession of the seasons commonplace. We know
the conditions of good crops, the character of the
blights, the scales, the insects that spoil our efforts.
We garner our harvests with huge machinery instead
of with the uniting enterprises of long ago. More
over most of us live in the cities, where the change
of seasons means principally a change of clothing.
So God is gone out of nature.

We get much of our joy from our pleasures.
Unhappily religion has often separated itself from
pleasure, for pleasure is dangerous. Primitive reli
gion was not afraid of the allurements of the flesh,
but frankly accepted the allurement and after its
fashion sanctified it. Ethical religion has been more
concerned with inhibitions, so that men have often
found their joy not only apart from religion but in
spite of it. We do not know much about Jesus'
pleasures, but we know very much about his joy.
The word "happy " was ever on his lips. Everything
spoke to him of God — the birds, flowers, children,
loaves and fishes, marriage, parenthood, and life itself.

It is a good world, a glorious world, God's world.
Of course it is a terrible world of pain and sorrow
and calamity. We do not forget that. But it is a
world of richness of life, of abounding health, of
beauty, intelligence, truth, goodness, love.

Let us not teach mournful songs and prayers to
children. Let them sing "Bless the Lord, 0 my

170 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

soul. " Let youth be happy. That is what Browning
means in "Pippa Passes. " He is not giving his total
philosophy of life in Pippa's song. He knows — and
no one has told us better — how serious life is. But it
is good for youth to drink the cup of wholesome joy.
On a spring morning, on a holiday, all is right with
the world. It is a mood. Our worship needs that
note. People should often go from church aglow
with the sense of God. It is a great opportunity of
worship. We cannot argue people into joy. They
shall not feel the thrill of life in God's wonderful world
at the end of a syllogism. But they may find it in a
solemn service of praise, in the prayers, Scriptures,
and messages, that sound forth the ever-present God.

If we could help our frivolous pleasure-loving
people to appreciate the joy of religious exercises we
should do them great service. It is because we are
weary, nervous, overburdened, that we turn to the
easy amusement of the picture film and of the vaude
ville. Paul already suggested to the Christians who
wanted the delights of intoxication that they could
get ecstatic happiness in what we should call a
" Community sing." The "Y" in the army camps
at home and abroad found that Paul's substitute for
debauchery was very often effective.

Have we too much rationalized our religion?
Shall we leave to the periods of an often vulgar
evangelism the religious festivals of joy? No. We
should deliberately educate our people in the abound
ing expression of the feeling of gladness.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 171

If joy is a satisfaction in that which is good, then
hope and aspiration may express the feeling that we
have as we look forward to that which is to be better.
As an expectancy of material betterment this feeling
is probably universal in the earlier forms of religion.
With the exception of sheer devil worshipers men
have always thought that their gods would do some
thing for them. "Hope springs eternal in the human
breast." It has generally been connected with
religion.

This is entirely true of the wonderful hope that
stretches beyond death to the life hereafter. How
deeply men have been moved by that anticipation is
written in the exultant chapters of the New Testament
and in the major part of our Christian hymnody.

Religious hope becomes ethical in a longing for
personal character and for social amelioration.
Worship has been remarkably successful in stimulat
ing aspiration after goodness. How men have longed
in the sacred hours and in the sacred places to be
holy. The sermon as a part of worship has been
more successful in this direction than perhaps in
any other. To use the old word, worship has made for
sanctification. Great souls have never been satisfied
with their little goodness. They have felt that human
life was not long enough for the perfecting of the
saint. "Oh, but a man's reach must exceed his
grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

In any reinterpretation of character-making we
shall need to keep worship as our great ally. There

172 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

are many other sources of motivation, but prayer,
Scripture, sermon, are of incomparable value. There
is need of a careful educational process to enable
people to secure the best values.

But the noblest aspiration is for social good.
There is of course a danger of a refined selfishness in
the desire that one may be personally sanctified, but
the longing for a better world of men is wholly pure.

Undoubtedly in this matter knowledge plays a
very large part. If we learn the facts concerning
our neighbors, especially the harsh facts of the
unhappiness of children, the exploitation of youth,
of womanhood, of manhood, shameful conditions of
housing and of labor, these facts are likely to stir
us to hope and determination for something better.
But prayer can do it wonderfully. And song. It
has long been noted that our hymnody is weak at
this point. Nor have the attempts to write social
hymns been very successful. Most people who try
it succeed only in writing sociological hymns, which
is a very different thing. But there are some hymns
that stir the soul to longing after a better world.
We must practice our people in them.

And here is the noblest place of the sermon. I am
thinking of the sermon as a part of worship. Not as
an argument but as prophecy — picture and appeal.
Who can read Jesus' parable of the Judgment without
longing to serve the Master in serving his brethren ?

Allied to this feeling of social aspiration is the
very significant religious feeling of mission. This

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 173

is probably not a universal religious emotion. It is
doubtful if Chemosh sent his worshipers on life-
giving errands. But the higher religions have a
God who sends men to do good to their fellows.
The feeling may express itself in a range of activity
from the most partisan propagandism to the most
unselfish service. But its motivating energy is of
the greatest. The apostles, prophets, missionaries,
reformers, ministers, teachers, social-service workers
and the finer type of statesmen, a Lincoln, a John
Bright, a Gladstone, a Wilson, have this sense of
mission. And common folk with simple tasks often
have it — Sunday-school teachers, fathers and mothers,
older brothers and sisters.

The sense of mission is often born in the hour of
worship. When one sees the vision and hears the
Sanctus one also hears the voice, "Whom shall we
send?" and answers, "Here am I, send me."

Would God that all the Lord's people were proph
ets of the new social order. There is not a more
glorious opportunity in our modern life than in the
service of worship if we can vitalize it and educate
our people to its appreciation.

The greatest religious feeling is love. When
they asked Jesus to sum up the Commandments he
stated them as love. How can an emotion be com
manded? Can it be our duty to have a certain
feeling? It is the common thought that feelings
come and go and are inevitable. Affection is one
of the most fundamental impulses, but it is very

174 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

capricious. Parental affection is the only one that
can be at all depended upon. But even in the primi
tive religions affection has a place. Men generally
have some affection for their deity. And the develop
ment of that affection in depth and in ethical quality
is a sure test of religious development. As religion
becomes more ethical the love of God extends to
love of men. It is the peculiar characteristic of the
Bible that it so universally insists that there can
be no religion without unselfish human love. The
great saints have ever been great lovers.

Our world needs love. We have plenty of hate,
suspicion, shrewdness, diplomacy. We need love, love
between peoples, love between classes of people,
love among neighbors, love in schools and families,
love in Christian communities, in churches. How
shall we be inspired with love ? Worship is a tech
nique for arousing love. The imagery, the symbols,
the poetry which may stimulate the emotion are all
there. "How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of
Hosts." "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in
Christian love. " From earliest kindergarten through
all our youth and adult worship the glorious note of
love should be sounded.

I have tried to analyze the religious feeling. There
may be more elements than these nine that I have
mentioned, but I think these are the important
elements. They are not altogether separate. Reli
gious feeling has a certain community. The syn
thesis of these different feelings is a kind of absorption

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 175

into God, "I and my Father are one," "I delight
to do thy will, 0 my Father." This feeling is not
only individual; it is socialized and includes men as at
least potentially a part of the unity; "All shall know
Him from the least even unto the greatest." This
feeling of unity with all that seems to be worthy,
with the supreme worthiness, with all possible human
worthiness, with all the worth of nature, this is
religion. To engender this feeling is the purpose of
worship.

Returning to our definition of worship as any
technique that stimulates religious feeling, we are
ready to inquire what this technique may be. It
cannot be arbitrarily prescribed. As a matter of
fact techniques as varied as the Quaker meeting and
pontifical mass produce the same results in different
persons, sometimes in the same person.

It is commonly asserted that there are funda
mental differences of temperament which must
determine practices of worship. There is supposed
to be a ritualistic temperament which inevitably
requires a person to be an Episcopalian, a certain
buoyancy that can be satisfied with nothing less
than Methodism and finds itself very unhappy when
Methodism is toned down, a certain soberness of
temperament that can only find fitting expression
in the Presbyterian order, and a critical chilliness
that demands the Congregational forms and, at
lower degrees of temperature, seeks the liberal
churches.

176 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

Of course this is nonsense. Inasmuch as most
people find themselves perfectly satisfied with the
church of their parents there would be, if this theory
were correct, a hereditary transmission of tempera
ment. Moreover, one finds people who are happy
in a free and easy religious service, deriving also the
greatest satisfaction from the extreme formalism of
the Masonic ritual. The supposedly staid Presby
terians have been the leaders in the tabernacle
evangelism of recent times which, whatever else it
may be, can scarcely be designated as staid. And
congregations which have been somewhat super
ficially reproached for coldness have not seldom
been stirred by emotions too profound for noise.

There are doubtless temperamental differences.
But these do not breed to type on denominational
lines. The matter is largely determined by custom
and education. The problem of worship is thus an
educational one. There is neither divine nor histori
cal prescription to determine it. It is wholly a
question of ascertaining what techniques will be
effective and how the people may be trained to
employ them.

May I state the problem in a series of proposi
tions ?

i. The technique of worship for any particular
congregation must be congruous with the religious
tradition of the worshipers. The stations of the
cross are quite natural in the Roman Catholic church,
but they would be utterly artificial to ourselves.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 177

The Quaker silences have the most effective psycho
logical appropriateness, but they would be hopelessly
negative to most of our congregations. The cere
monial of immersion, which is a highly impressive
symbolism to those who are accustomed to it, is
often positively repulsive to those to whom it seems a
meticulous literalism.

I was recently in a Memorial Day parade in a
small town in Illinois. An occasional citizen sheep
ishly took off his hat as the flag was carried past.
But most of them could not manage it. Doffing the
hat is not part of their social heritage.

We cannot then arbitrarily create a worship tech
nique. It must be congruous with the religious tra
dition of the people.

2. The technique must have the prestige of
religious tradition. Symbolisms cannot be created
by fiat. If a religious convention should ordain
that an airplaine should be introduced into ecclesi
astical architecture as a symbol of man's reaching
unto heaven, no one would take the regulation
seriously. But an angel, a fair youth with arms and
legs and wings — an impossible human hexapod — is a
most fitting symbol. Angels belong to our religious
tradition. We shall teach our children that they
belong in the realm of fancy, but they none the less
express our religious feelings.

It is easier to destroy than to create. We can
impoverish our worship by neglect of the religious
elements that the past has preserved for us or by

178 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

rationalistic antagonism to them, but it will be very
hard to find anything to take their place. The
utter bareness, unpoetic, unimaginative unloveliness
of our Sunday-school opening and closing exercises,
which very properly are not even called worship, is
evidence of the iconoclasm with which we have
destroyed that which had the prestige of religious
tradition without rinding anything significant to
supply its place.

3. We must develop our technique freely with the
use of all available elements. All things are ours.
We may search all the liturgies for prayers and
practices that may be helpful. American congre
gations know only one prayer, only one psalm,
and they can sing only the Doxology without the
book. We come to church to listen to a speech and
to a concert, and we have forgotten to be worshipers.

It will take the greatest skill and long educational
practice to discover from many sources the elements
of prayer, song, response, posture, ritual which will
evoke for us the feelings that are the deepest meaning
of religion.

Let me here state an objection even at the risk of
digression. It is sometimes said that our fathers who
knew the old rituals and rejected them found their
fellowship with God immediately. Why should we
need what they discarded? There is a psychology
of negative suggestion. To a vigorous soul who had
seen an unethical and unspiritual religion connected
with the elaborate ritual there was evidence of the

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 179

immediate presence of God in the very ugliness and
bareness of his meetinghouse. He needed nothing
but a long prayer, a long sermon, and an unharmoni-
ous psalm to stir his soul to the depths with the
sense of the presence of God — a sense which he had
already brought with him to the meetinghouse.

But negative suggestion only operates when
there is consciousness of opposition. Benjamin
Franklin's homespun was suggestive of republican
simplicity amid the fopperies of the French court.
But it would be ridiculous to wear homespun today
when any gentleman may have an evening coat.

4. The criterion of a technique must be the pos
sibility of expressing adequately the religious feel
ings of the particular congregation.

I say the possibility. The congregation will not
know its own possibilities in advance. Let me refer
more sympathetically to the Memorial Day parade
which I have already mentioned. A class of fifty
boys in one of the elementary schools was selected
as a guard of honor for the veterans of the G.A.R.
The little chaps were dressed in white suits. They
had their own marshal mounted on a pony. They
lined up and saluted as we drove through with the
dignity of young Americans who understood the
meaning of that great day. It was a ritual well
worth the plan and practice.

My friend H. Augustine Smith, of Boston Uni
versity, goes into the highways and hedges and
brings in the gamins and makes a boys' choir, vested,

i8o THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

effective, reverential, and teaches them to sing the
Elijah choruses. Under his guidance the Congre
gational churches find new possibilities of worship
of which they never dreamed.

5. The minister must be a master of worship-
technique.

There's the rub. Our ministers do not know
how to preach very well, but they scarcely know
how to lead worship at all. It is an art, worthy of
the most careful study and of the most painstaking
preparation.

Shall we say that any man led by the Spirit of
God can lead a congregation in worship? Let me
suggest a parallel. I am myself greatly stirred by
the song "If with all your hearts ye truly seek me."
Sometimes it is just the song which I need in my
service. I feel its beauty, I appreciate its meaning.
1 think I have a right to say that the Spirit of God
inspires me with that song. Then why should not
I sing the song for the congregation ? Simply because
I cannot sing. I have every qualification of a great
singer except vocal ability. One must be a master
of song to help a congregation in song; one must be a
master of worship to lead a congregation in worship.
I assume the spiritual preparation. I am speaking
of the technical preparation. The art of public
prayer, of the arrangement of a service, of the stimulus
of song, of the creation of a mood, of the molding of a
congregation into a unity is a consummate art. If
some men have possessed it without study that is

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 181

only another example of genius. There is no law for
genius. But most of us have to work for our skill.

6. Worship calls for a carefully planned and
graded process of education by which, beginning with
young childhood, people may be trained to those
practices which may be useful as the stimulus and
expression of religious emotion.

It cannot be done hi a day. Children are little
ritualists. As they learn the right decorums and
politenesses of life in home and school (if happily
they do learn them), so may they learn simple prac
tices of worship that may be carried on into mature
years with growing appreciation.

We must distinguish between instruction in the
elements of worship and the actual use of those
elements in the worship itself. Everything should
be studied and understood — hymns, prayers, postures,
the ritual of the offering. Much may be committed
to memory.

The problem of grading in worship is not so
difficult as in biblical and other study. Many ele
ments of worship are universal. Even little chil
dren will have points of contact with them and
gain enrichment of experience by sharing them with
the general congregation. So we may bring the
children back into the church, not for the long prayer
(if that is still to be retained), not for the elaborate
anthem (if indeed that is still essential), not for the
hymns expressive of more mature feeling, and cer
tainly not for the sermon, but for half an hour of

182 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

worship with processional, recessional, the Doxology,
the Lord's prayer, the General Confession, the
General Thanksgiving, the recited Psalm, simple
Scripture, offering received with dignified ritual,
hymns carefully learned and understood and sung
with the fresh enthusiasm of young voices. We can
develop a genuine congregational worship. I like
to call it in a large sense family worship. The
children may retire for educational activities with
the sense of faithful and solemn worship in their
hearts, and the congregation may remain for the
sermon, ready for the ethical impulse which the
sense of the presence of God has prepared them to
receive.

THEODORE GERALD SOARES

SOCIAL ETHICS

THE EQUIPMENT OF THE MINISTER AS
A SOCIAL REFORMER

No man with any moral passion in his nature can
be indifferent to the problems that now confront
society. His special avocation may be what you
please — literature, art, education, law, the ministry,
business, politics — but if his sympathies and thoughts
carry him beyond self-interest at all, if he shares in
any vital and imaginative way in the life of his country
and the great world, he is sure to be caught up by the
spirit of the time and forced to reflect, if not to speak
or write or act, on the problems of human betterment.
Carlyle, for example, began his literary life as a
translator and interpreter of German literature to
the English-speaking people, but the condition of
England in the thirties and forties of last century so
stirred his heart and imagination that he soon ceased
to be a translator and interpreter of other men's
works and poured forth his own passionate con
victions in his Sartor Resartus and Past and Present.
Tolstoi began his life as a soldier and a novelist, but
for long years before his death he spent himself in a
most solemn quest for the secret of spiritual and
social regeneration. John Ruskin was at first an
art critic, but when he discovered that art had a

183

184 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

deep root in the moral nature of man, and that no
country could produce a noble art whose ideals were
basely and selfishly materialistic, he became a per-
fervid and uncompromising preacher of national
righteousness and a more ethical political economy.
William Morris in his earlier life was a poet, "the
idle singer of an empty day," as he called himself;
but he ended it as a socialist, and a writer of pamphlets
and campaign songs for the Socialist party in England.
H. Rider Haggard spent many years of his life in
writing sensational romances, but the Zeitgeist found
him also, and for several years back he has been
engaged in the social work of the Salvation Army.

And if literature has led earnest, sympathetic,
imaginative men and women more and more into
the field of "the social problem," the work of the
ministry is doing so even to a greater degree. The
minister is no longer only a pastor and an inter
preter of Scripture. A man cannot minister to
the needs of the age, in the big industrial centers
at least, unless he can interpret, not merely the
books of the great dead, but also the movements
of the life of his time. It is well, when possible,
that each individual should' repeat the experience
of the ages in his own development, should come
to a knowledge of himself and his times through
a knowledge of all the great master minds from
Homer to Hegel. But he must not take up his
permanent abode anywhere on the way, but push
on to the end of the journey. It is well to be able

SOCIAL ETHICS 185

to interpret a prophecy of Isaiah, or a dialogue of
Plato, or a letter of Saint Paul, or a canto of Dante,
or a critique of Kant, but if we are to meet the needs
of our time, we must also be able to interpret the
meaning of a great miners' strike, the human signifi
cance of the world-wide movement called Socialism
and the social implications of big industry and large
cities and the intermingling of races and ideals.
A knowledge of the past is essential to an understand
ing of the present and the future, but we must use the
past, not as a home to live in, but as the foundation
of the home that we are in the process of building.
We live in an age when the world is thinking seriously
and passionately, if confusedly and hurriedly, on the
problems of human betterment, and we cannot
minister to that age unless we feel its spirit and are
working at its problems. We must equip ourselves
so as to be able to understand and guide and encourage
the great work of reform which has become so urgent
in all industrial countries.

In discussing my subject, namely, "The equipment
of the minister as a social reformer," there is no
need to labor the statement that the moral enthusi
asm which springs from sympathy, pity, the senti
ment of justice, and the social instincts and sentiments
generally is not the only equipment the social reformer
needs. That is indispensable as a main part of his
motive power, but it is no guarantee that he will not
repeat experiments that have been tried and found
wanting, that he will not try impossible things, or

i86 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

that he will not antagonize other forces which, while
not exactly working with him, are moving in his
direction. As there is a technique at the basis of
every art, as there are mathematical and mechanical
principles at the basis of all practical engineering
skill, as there is a detailed knowledge of anatomy and
physiology at the basis of scientific medicine, so there
must be some adequate foundation for the work of
the social engineer. It is perfectly true that our
so-called social sciences have not as yet developed
any body of principles that can be compared for
accuracy and efficiency with the technique of the arts,
or with mechanics, or with anatomy and physiology,
but such knowledge as we have should be in the
possession of the social reformer, if not in detail, at
least in broad, clear outline. Our universal democ
racy, of course, tends to obscure this fact. We
graduate every young man of twenty-one years of
age as a social engineer, but we have known democracy
long enough to be aware that its success depends on
sane, well-informed, progressive leaders. It ought
to be a commonplace in an age which lays such
stress on the specialist that zeal alone is not an
adequate equipment for the social reformer.

What, then, constitutes an adequate equipment?
I would lay down as the first requisite a genuinely
systematic knowledge of human nature. I do not
mean the kind of knowledge which a shrewd business
man acquires by watching men and women closely
in the world of trade, politics, and society, although

SOCIAL ETHICS 187

such knowledge is not to be despised altogether.
I mean rather the knowledge which sociology is
gradually gathering from biology, psychology, anthro
pology, and history, and correlating into its doctrine
of the social forces. We must know human nature
if we are to better human association, and we cannot
know human nature unless we know it in its physical
origins, in its mental and social processes, in its
racial divisions, and in its most characteristic histori
cal manifestations. Again and again in the history
of the world, movements for human betterment have
signally failed because they were based on inadequate
knowledge or complete ignorance of human nature.
Puritanism tried to crush the dramatic instinct in
Cromwell's time, but only brought about a crude
recrudescence of it when the strong arm of Cromwell
was removed by death. Communism always goes
to pieces on the rock of man's desire for private
property, domestic privacy, and personal indepen
dence. Monasticism finds its way barred by the
sex instinct. Idealism will have it that all peoples
are fit for self-government simply because they are
human beings, but experiments fail to justify that
affirmation. History is strewn with the wrecks of
social movements that came to disaster simply
because they did not take into account the funda
mental facts of human nature.

Our first obligation, therefore, as reformers, is
to study as profoundly as we can the human nature
that we desire to remake, on its subnormal, normal,

i88 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

and supernormal levels. We should keep in touch
with what the biologists are saying about man's
physical antecedents. Man, although on the way to
become a spiritual being, has all the fundamental
animal instincts, and we must realize how powerful
those instincts are and how necessary it is to make
provision for their legitimate expression. Hunger,
thirst, the sex appetite, the parental instinct, the
gregarious instinct, the instinct of self-assertion, the
play impulse, the demand for liberty — these are older
than the individual, older, indeed, than the human
race, and wherever society is so organized that they
cannot find normal expression, they break forth in
disorder and destruction. Animal instinct does not
play the star role in human life that it plays in the
animal world, but it is still operative, and the social
reformer should have the clearest possible idea of its
working. The more idealistic we are, the more must
we be on our guard against overlooking the great
instinctive desires that impel man in his every-day
activities. We never can explain man by his animal
ancestry, but in trying to improve him we must at
least take account of what his physical past has been.
We must frankly recognize that many human beings
are subnormal, feeble-minded, defective, criminal,
and not go on appealing to a conscience which they
have not got when we ought to be using our influence
to secure institutional care for them and to segregate
them so that they shall not be able to reproduce
their kind. We must learn from the biologist that

SOCIAL ETHICS 189

sex-immorality not only endangers the soul's salvation,
in the language of the older evangelicalism, but also
threatens the future of the whole human race. We
must keep the significance of the bodily side of life so
constantly in mind that we shall never forget that
bad food, unhygienic tenements, and exhausting toil
blunt the sensibilities and ultimately encourage
thoughts, sentiments, and deeds that brutalize the
soul. The main weapon of the minister as social
reformer must always be his appeal to the conscience
and intelligence of the people, but, instructed by the
biologist, he will always bear in mind that a human
being whose instincts are starved or driven under
ground or inadequately satisfied is not very likely to be
in a mental condition to respond to appeals to his
higher nature. Biology can never say the last word
about man, but it always says the first word, and the
social reformer must know what that first word is.
If it is possible to doubt the reformer's need of
some knowledge of biology, his need of psychology
cannot be questioned. And when I say psychology,
I do not mean merely the general analysis of mental
processes which we find in an ordinary college text
book or even the experimental laboratory psychology
which has become so popular in recent years. I mean
rather that practical knowledge of the total working
of the mind which we find in recent books on social
psychology and the psychology of religion and sug
gestion, etc. Such books as James's Varieties of
Religious Experience, Ribot's Creative Imagination,

THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

Sidis' The Psychology of Suggestion, Hall's Adolescence,
or the works of McDougall, Tarde, Ross, Ellwood,
etc., on social psychology are not mere academic text
books. They furnish knowledge about and insight
into human nature, especially in its social phases,
which every public leader of men and women ought
to possess. We cannot understand the past and we
cannot shape or guide the future unless we know
something about the role that imagination, imitation,
suggestion, the mob-consciousness, and belief have
played and are playing in human life.

For example, every spiritual leader stands appalled
now and then as he sees the lure that money-making
has for the youth of North America. He sees them
wild with speculation, turning sharp corners for the
sake of gain, working almost with the fury of demons
to beat their rivals or to destroy their competition
altogether. He sees the wealth of the continent
growing at a rate absolutely unprecedented in the
history of man. And as he watches the headlong
scramble, he is apt at first to say to himself: "What
a sordid people we Americans are ! How materialistic
and vulgar we seem in comparison (let me say) with
the Hindus of India! What culture can ever be
developed in a people who can give themselves with
such energy to the amassing of mere external wealth! ".

But here his psychological insight into human
nature comes to his assistance. He asks himself:
"Is sordidness, after all, the complete explanation
of our economic energy? Is it the mere blind greed

SOCIAL ETHICS 191

for things that is our motive power ?" And the
answer comes: It is not. The love of activity, the
love of self-expression, the love of power, the joy that
the imagination has in conceiving great schemes, the
challenge to man's will that great opportunities
afford, the stimulus of great horizons and wide spaces,
the passion for manipulating large masses of people —
these, as well as the desire of things for the sake of
enjoyment, constitute the driving force of our money
civilization. A few great men among us have achieved
colossal power by means of wealth; their mere word
has such an influence in the economic world, either to
bless or to curse, that they seem like Providence giving
or withholding the rains and the seasons; they have
struck the imagination of youth almost like demigods;
the newspapers have told the stories of their lives over
and over again; imitation and suggestion have been
busy among our young people from ocean to ocean —
and now we have an army of people engaged in the
scramble to be millionaires. But it is not all irredeem
ably sordid. Once our economic life settles down to a
more static condition, once we have cut off some of
the sources of ill-gotten wealth, other types will
spring up among us, will dominate the imagination of
youth, and by imitation and suggestion sway our life
toward more ideal ends. Misdirected energy is
always more hopeful than a sensuous, luxurious,
languorous ease.

In some such way as this will psychology help
us to understand our common human nature. It

192 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

will teach us by what forces the popular imagination
is dominated; it will enable us to understand the
role of the hero, the picturesque personality, the
revivalist, the crowd, the fad, the craze, the psychical
epidemic; and it will teach us by what educational
means the mass can be individualized and made to
respond to reason and to exercise judgment. Such
a psychology cannot be learned by the mere mastery
of a textbook or two in college. Its greatest text
books are the histories and biographies in which
the total working of human nature is revealed on the
largest scale. The knowledge of it is the achievement
of a lifetime, but the young reformer has at hand
today a body of sound psychological knowledge of
which the seminary of my day was quite ignorant.
When I was a theological student twenty-five
years ago, anyone proposing to study economics
as a preparation for the ministry would have been
frankly regarded as an unspiritual person. It did
not occur to us then that many ethical problems
would sooner or later inevitably lead us into the
economic field. But many things before the war,
and especially the war and all its consequences, have
made it clear that the minister can no longer afford
to be ignorant of the major facts and theories of the
economic life. As the prophet of the brotherhood of
man and the herald of good-will, he cannot be deaf
to the controversy which already has gone far to
divide humanity into two warring classes. We are in
the midst of a struggle between property and labor

SOCIAL ETHICS 193

which may be prolonged far into the future and
which concerns itself at almost every point with
questions of right and wrong. To such a struggle the
minister simply cannot remain indifferent, and unless
he is capable of forming independent judgments,
he is likely to be betrayed by his prejudice or his sym
pathies into positions which may make his service
to the whole community impossible. His main task
is to hold the community together, to interpret people
to each other, and to create that atmosphere of
good-will without which scarcely any worthy and
permanent reform can be effected.

Now, if he is to perform this task adequately,
he must master the leading principles of the science
of economics. Each party to the struggle has its
own kind of economic theory, but, in the very nature
of the case, neither party is likely to see things in a
large, liberal way. The thinking of men who act in
the spirit of class is mob-thinking. Men believe
what their class interest dictates. As in the time of
war, they believe what helps the cause. Disbelievers,
whatever reasons they may give for their disbelief,
are branded as heretics. The upholders of the
existing order stress the need of capital and ever more
capital, the value of the service of the organizer,
the justice of paying a man what his services are
worth, the social demand for large production, but
pass lightly over the iniquity of stock-watering,
stock-gambling, monopoly, inadequately taxed inheri
tance, and all the other devices by which wealth

194 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

accumulates in the hands of those who do not pro
duce it. On the other hand, the labor organization
develops an economics that suits its purpose. It
makes a gospel of the economics of Marx and estab
lishes colleges to teach this dogma as churches teach
theirs. It is all alive to the contribution of labor,
but undervalues or overlooks entirely the contribu
tion of the organizer and the capitalist. Labor has
through past ages been an oppressed class and is now
seeking deliverance, and its theoretical thinking is
inevitably hurried, partisan, uncritical, and passionate.
Now, even though the minister should never
touch on an economic subject in the pulpit, he ought
to know economics profoundly enough to be able to
use his influence toward a fair and impartial discussion
of economics in his community. His policy must be
one of mastering his prejudices so as to be able to
listen to both sides. He must listen to the masses,
for they know best, through the constant pressure of
fact on their lives, where our present system of pro
duction and distribution is weak and unfair. He
must listen to the masters of industry, for they know
best how vast our present economic system is, how
intricate are its mechanisms, how dependent society
is on its harmonious working, and how well considered
must be the reforms which shall rid us of its evils
without involving all society in chaos and disaster.
When men think as a class, they never think straight,
whether they are rich or poor; and the minister who
belongs to no class but to all classes ought to be

SOCIAL ETHICS 195

trained so that he shall be able to keep a clear head
in the turmoil of his generation and use his influence
with his friends and acquaintances— I do not say in
the interests of mere moderation and toleration, but
in the interests of fair, just, impartial consideration of
the economic problems in which so many of our
modern questions of right and wrong arise. The
preacher who knows nothing of Marshall or Gide
or Taussig or Ely or Hobson or Seager, in other
words, who has not yet discovered how many of our
moral problems have an economic root, may minister
in many personal ways to his congregation, but can
have very little part in the public discussion of the
most agitating and peace-destroying problems of his
community. He cannot clarify or stabilize the think
ing of those about him, for he does not think
for himself, but picks up his opinions, if he has any,
from the class toward which his sympathies are
naturally drawn. On the other hand, if he forms his
own judgments and tries to be the friend of all
classes, rather than the advocate of one, he is apt to
draw upon himself the fire of both warring parties on
those occasions when passions are violently aroused
and so he must be firmly grounded in the reasons for
his judgments if he is to stand for the larger view and
maintain the idea of justice and liberality against the
tyranny of mob -opinion.

The most essential part of the equipment of the
minister as social reformer is still to be mentioned.
His special contribution must always be his clear,

1 96 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

forcible, and persuasive presentation of the Christian
world- view. A religious reverence for human nature
is the great driving power of the only betterment of
the human lot that has ultimate moral significance —
I mean the betterment that makes not merely for
more food, clothing, shelter, and amusements, but
rather for more opportunity for the higher life of the
mind and spirit. In all the institutions where the
poor, the helpless, the deficient, and the wicked are
cared for — the hospitals, asylums, reformatories —
it has been found that the officials who have no
religious reverence for human nature, or nothing
corresponding to it, are apt to do their work in a
purely mechanical way, and often descend to down
right cruelty and brutality. Look upon man as a
mere animal who by some happy accident has learned
to talk and invent tools and machines, and so has
gained the mastery over all other animals and physical
nature; look upon his lust, drunkenness, laziness,
and wickedness as natural instincts of which he has
no reason to feel ashamed; look upon human life as a
mere continuance of the animal struggle for existence
and as getting all its significance from its present
instinctive satisfactions ; take the purely naturalistic,
hedonistic, non-religious view of human nature — and
you cut the most vital nerve of all the most genuine
social reform. All you have left is the class struggle
and the fury of the have-nots to get possession of the
property of those who have. On the other hand, if
you see in man a spirit in the making; if you construe

SOCIAL ETHICS 197

his lust, drunkenness and wickedness as perversions
of natural instincts by means of that very imaginative
reason which might have raised him into a splendid
manhood; if, in spite of his history with its wars,
murders, and carnivals of corruption, you see through
all his long evolution the struggling into life of a
divine spirit; if you see in his art and religion and
science and philosophy and literature and in his
self-sentiment and his self-sacrifice the evidences of a
divine descent and the promise of an immortal
destiny — then you will feel a certain sacredness,
even in the lowest men and women; at the sight of
perverted instincts you will be filled not so much with
loathing and hatred (as the person of merely aesthetic
culture is), but rather with a sorrowful pity; and
you will hope for man's future even when the present
is dark and threatening, so sure will you be that no
evil, physical or moral, can absolutely prevent the
onward march of the moral order. If religious
reverence for man's nature dies out, how can we
generate the energy by which reforms can be initiated
and carried into execution? The transformation of
society is an arduous, up-hill process; and no energy
is dynamic enough to carry it on decade after decade,
in the face of so many tragic failures, except some
such reverence for human nature as I have suggested
or as Carlyle expresses in that wonderful old book
Sartor Resartus. Carlyle cries:

To the eye of vulgar logic, what is man ? An omnivorous
biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure reason, what is

198 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

he? A soul, a spirit, and a divine apparition. Round his
mysterious Me, there lies under all these wool-rags a garment
of flesh (or of senses) contextured in the loom of Heaven;
whereby he is revealed to his like and dwells with them in
union and division; and sees and fashions for himself a universe,
with azure, starry spaces and long thousands of years. Deep
hidden is he under that strange garment; amid sounds and
colors and forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably
over-shrouded; yet it is sky- woven and worthy of a God.
Stands he not thereby in the center of immensities, in the con
flux of eternities? He feels; power has been given him to
know, to believe; nay, does not the spirit of love, free in its
celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for mo
ments, look through ? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his
lips of gold, "The true Shekinah is man": where else is the
God's presence manifested not to our eyes only, but to our
hearts, as in our fellow-men ?

My friends, is it not our chief task as ministers
and reformers to preserve or rather to awaken again
into vivid life some such religious reverence for
human nature as finds utterance in these famous
words? The world is just beginning to recover
from a war in which human nature has revealed
itself, no doubt, now and then, in acts of the sub-
limest heroism, but more obviously in acts of passion,
hatred, cruelty, and greed which have shaken to its
very foundation our old moral and religious idealism.
Nothing is more needed now among millions of suffer
ing people whose lot it has been to see human nature
at its worst than faith in the power of the human
spirit to shake itself free from its horrible memories
and live again in the light of its visions and ideals.

SOCIAL ETHICS 199

And so I end by saying again that the chief task of
the minister as a social reformer is to awaken in the
minds of the people a religious reverence for human
nature, and the chief task of the theological school
as the institution which trains men and women for
the ministry is, through its biblical criticism and its
church history and its theology and its sociology and
its philosophy and all its systematic studies, to
awaken in the minds of its students a vivid, imagina
tive, soul-quickening realization of the Christian
world-view and a vision of the righteous social order
which such a world- view naturally engenders.

ROBERT JAMES HUTCHEON

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

THE MODERN MINISTER: HIS TRAINING
AND HIS TASK

We have been listening during the last three
days to a series of papers on some of the elements
which enter into the training of the modern minister.
We have now come to the closing session of our formal
celebration; and before we separate I wish, in the
presence of a more considerable company of the
alumni of this School than has gathered in Meadville
for many years, to take a final bird's-eye glance at the
various disciplines concerning which representative
scholars have been speaking, and to ask the bearing
of these disciplines upon the purpose for which the
School was founded and the task that is still before it.

The object for which the School was founded was
the training of ministers for the Unitarian churches
of the West. It is for the graduates of the School
in the pews before me, and for the churches which
they have served, rather than for us who are teaching
here, to testify whether that task has been performed
well or ill. For the test of the vocational school is
not the learning of its professors but the achievements
of its alumni. At our Fiftieth Anniversary a promi
nent part in the celebration was taken by men who
had known the School from the beginning. There

200

PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 201

are, unhappily, not with us at this time those who
can tell us from personal knowledge about the
earliest beginnings of the School. If one who had
been present when the institution was founded had
slumbered like Rip Van Winkle for the intervening
seventy-five years and were to inspect its curriculum
today, he would, notwithstanding the lapse of time,
find himself on familiar ground. We are still engaged
in interpreting the Old Testament and the New,
and in teaching the Greek and the Hebrew languages
in which those testaments were written. We are
still teaching church history, systematic theology,
the construction of sermons, and the duties of the
pastorate; and a casual inspection of our curriculum
would indicate that these subjects constitute the
major portion of our present task. We still sing
some, at least, of the same hymns which were sung
in 1844, we meet daily for common prayer to the
same God who was worshiped then, and we still use
in our classrooms the same Bible that was used by
the young Frederick Huidekoper and the young
Rufus Stebbins when they began together, in the
year 1844, to expound the contents of this book.
Though those of us who are now teaching are con
siderably older, on the whole, than the teachers of
that early date, we still retain something of the
enthusiasm of youth and still believe in the capacity
of religion to remake the world.

And yet we are living in a different world today
from the world of 1844, and the changes which have

202 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

been going on outside have had their counterpart in
the curriculum of the School. For three things have
happened, since the School was founded, of such
significance that they have changed for all time the
thought, the life, and the spiritual outlook of the
world. The thought of the world was transformed
by Darwin's Origin of Species. The life of the
world has been profoundly affected by the vast
social and industrial upheaval resulting from the
application of newly invented machinery to industry
and transportation; and the end of this upheaval is
not yet. And finally, the spiritual outlook of the
world has been changed by the world- war. An
institution like our own which could pass through
these epoch-making changes in mental and moral
outlook and not be affected by them would show itself
singularly insensitive to the times in which it lives.
It was inevitable, of course, that the Darwinian
theory, even if it did not abolish any of the theologi
cal disciplines, should have a profound effect upon
theological teaching. It created an atmosphere favor
able to the acceptance of the conclusions of the
higher critics of the Old Testament, even though
the beginnings of the higher criticism antedated
Darwin. Indirectly, if not directly, Darwinism
has revolutionized the teaching of history; and
there are few theological schools in which it has not
profoundly affected the teaching of doctrinal theology.
It is difficult for us of the present generation to realize
the violence and bitterness of the controversy of

PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 203

which the work of Darwin was the cause. It was
impossible that the accepted account of the origin of
the race and the beginnings of religion should be
overthrown without something in the nature of a
panic in the religious institutions which had adjusted
their teaching to this accepted account. But the
panic subsided, and for more than half a century the
necessary adjustments to the new situation have been
under way. One of the necessary adjustments is
the introduction into the theological curriculum of
such subjects as the history of religion and religious
education — subjects which seventy-five years ago
had no part in ministerial training.

The social changes of the last seventy-five years
following upon the industrial revolution have been
in some ways more significant than the acceptance of
the Darwinian theory, for they have affected primarily
the world's life rather than the world's thought. Our
present industrial system had reached its climax
during the years immediately preceding the founding
of this School. That system was based upon the
assumption that the highest welfare of the community
was attainable by the unrestricted pursuit of economic
self-interest; or, in other words, of material posses
sions. The result of the unrestricted pursuit of
self-interest has become increasingly familiar to all.
It has concentrated the wealth of the world in the
hands of a few, helped to keep a considerable portion
of the population of industrial centers below the
poverty line, created a sense of antagonism between

204 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

capital and labor, and aggravated a class consciousness
which has already assumed ominous proportions.
It has reached its highest point in Bolshevist Russia
and is ominous of danger in the most highly civilized
countries of the world. The proposition that the
highest happiness of all can be attained through the
pursuit of economic self-interest was challenged in
ringing words within the first decade after the found
ing of this School by England's greatest preacher of the
nineteenth century, Frederick Robertson. He said,

Brethren, that which is built upon economic self-interest
cannot stand. The system of personal self-interest must
be shattered to atoms. Therefore we who have observed
the ways of God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful
expectation until he shall confound this system as he has
confounded those which have gone before. And it may be
effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody than the
world has yet seen. While we are talking of peace and of
the progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the
noise of armies gathering rank on rank; east and west, north
and south, are rolling toward us the crashing thunders of
universal war.

The challenge of Frederick Robertson has been
repeated with increasing frequency by other Christian
preachers who have realized that the unrestricted
pursuit of materialistic self-interest strikes at the
very root of the gospel of Christ. Very slowly, but
yet surely, has the church been coming to realize the
futility of the effort to Christianize a few souls here
and there unless society can be Christianized at the
same time. It has come to see that the life of the

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS 205

family must be Christianized as well as the life of
the individual, and that the life of the family cannot
be Christianized until economic conditions can be
created which make decent family life possible. We
may hardly expect, however eloquent may be the
sermons which we preach, to create the Kingdom of
God out of men and women whose childhood has
been stunted by child labor. It is, of course, as true
today as it was true seventy-five years ago, that
society cannot be saved en masse and that a Christian
society presupposes individual Christians. But it
has become increasingly clear at the same time that
the church has a mission to society as well as to the
individual, and that in so far as the church is failing
to recognize that mission it is losing its hold upon that
portion of the community which it can least afford
to do without. We live in the age of the social
problem. Its watchword is social solidarity. The
church that has no social gospel has no message to
this time. The seminary which has failed to adjust
its curriculum to this outstanding fact is not living
in the present century. I take satisfaction in calling
to mind the fact that the Meadville Theological
School was one of the first of the seminaries to intro
duce the study of social ethics.

We are as yet too near the events of the world- war
to give a final estimate of its influence upon religion
and the institutions of religion. But this much, at
least, is sure, that men who thought before the war in
national terms are now thinking and speaking in

206 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

international terms. It is true that the United
States has not yet joined the League of Nations.
But it is also true that the recognition of world-
solidarity which the deliberations of Paris involved,
went beyond the fondest dreams of any group of
practical statesmen before the war. The ends of
the world have been brought together as they were
never brought together before. The movement for
Christianizing the world that had been going on in
previous years, has received such an impetus that
millions of dollars are being offered for the purpose
where thousands were offered before, and the cry of
need in the farthest part of the world has met with
such a response as at no other time in history. World-
projects are in the air today as community projects
were in the air yesterday. It seems almost a foregone
conclusion that denominational competition on the
mission field will come speedily to an end. The
World Church Movement has been planned on a
scale previously unheard of. So disillusioned have
the nations of the world become as to the possibility
of a satisfactory settlement of national disputes by
war that it seems unthinkable that humanity shall
witness again such an unspeakable calamity as the
one through which we have lately passed.

It is scarcely to be expected, perhaps not even to
be desired, that national differences shall be eradi
cated as a result of the new international outlook;
or that religious differences which have in the past
kept the nations apart shall be forthwith removed.

PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 207

It is reasonable, however, to expect that men will
learn in religion as well as in business that co-operation
is better than competition and that love is better than
hate. As the apocalyptic hope of a redeemed Israel
burst forth most radiantly when Israel sat by the
waters of Babylon amid the ashes of her former
hopes, so at the present day in the midst of the
hideous aftermath of war are the nations of the earth
struggling to the acceptance of the declaration of the
apostle, that God hath made of one blood all nations
of men to dwell on the face of the earth.

If this declaration of the apostle represents a fact
and not a fancy it may prove to be the one fact for
which the world has been groaning and travailing
in pain together until now. It may even prove to be
a fact of such transcendent importance that the
blood and treasure which have been poured out like
water in the last six years have not been utterly
wasted. For it seems to point to the time, if that
time is not already here, when the church as well as
the state will embody in its organized life the prin
ciple of human kinship, when the discordant notes of
our competing sects shall blend in a great harmony,
and when men of divers races and creeds who love
righteousness and are seeking to promote the Kingdom
of God shall again become members of one holy
Catholic church, visible and invisible, the supreme
object of which is the incarnation of the will of God
in human institutions and human lives. It is, of
course, inconceivable that institutions which have

208 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

as their aim the training of ministers should be
unaffected by the emergence of a new world-attitude
such as this. It goes without saying that it should
give a new impulse in every theological school to the
study of missions and should compel the creating of
departments of missions in schools where they do not
now exist. It has stimulated the exchange of theo
logical professors between institutions separated by
3,000 miles of ocean. It has shown the triviality of
sectarian distinctions in the face of the work of
world-reconstruction which is waiting to be done.
Before the world- war the ministerial training schools
of the different denominations were much nearer
together than the denominations themselves; for
scholarship knows no sectarian limitations. And
these schools are immeasurably nearer together than
they were before the war.

Lest I be accused, however, of special pleading
and of idealizing the kind of institution in whose name
we have been meeting, let me say that I am painfully
aware that theological schools have their defects
as well as their virtues. I have stated that a super
ficial examination of the curriculum of this School
would disclose an amazing resemblance to the curricu
lum of seventy-five years ago. And the teaching of
the seminary of seventy-five years ago was based
upon a conception of divine revelation so much
narrower than the conception which obtains today
that it may fairly be said to have been outgrown.
The curriculum, therefore, of many a seminary of

PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 209

our time is a survival from the past rather than a
response to the needs of the present. For what is
the material studied in the average seminary, even
in our own time? Is it not in the first place the
Greek and the Hebrew text of the Bible, presuppos
ing years of wrestling with grammars and lexicons ?
And is it not in the second place the story of the lives
of the popes and the reformers and the history of the
historic controversies over issues which were once
debated with passion and even with violence, but
which have a very far-away sound at the present time ?
And is there not in the third place a vast variety of
subsidiary material growing out of these three
departments, in Semitic languages and exegesis
and the curious bypaths of religious history and
doctrine, of interest to the intellectually curious but
without much relation to the great purpose which
impels men to become ministers of religion? For
it often proves more diverting to a certain type of
theologian to investigate religion as a phenomenon
than to help to set it to work to move the hearts,
to quicken the consciences, and to redeem the souls
of men.

Suppose, however, a student is not diverted by
such mistreatment from his chosen calling but steps
from the seminary into the church. And suppose
he tries to avail himself in his preaching or in his
pastoral work of the kind of knowledge which has
been poured in upon him. Is he not bound to make
the tragic discovery that a very large portion of this

210 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

knowledge is absolutely devoid of interest to the
people among whom he has come? As a matter of
fact, that is exactly the kind of discovery that has
been made by hundreds of ministers of our time.
At the end of three or four years of faithful study at a
seminary, they discover that the people are not
interested -in the things which they have brought
with them from the seminary. And to their intense
chagrin they often find that men who have had no
theological education at all are preferred before them.
It is not without significance that such men as Joseph
Parker, Robert Collyer, Edward Everett Hale, and
Thomas R. Slicer received their ministerial training,
not in the seminary but in the school of practical
experience. And the list of similarly successful
self-made ministers might be indefinitely pro
longed.

The reason for the partial failure of the seminary
is the vagueness and indefiniteness of the thing it
has been trying to do. Once there was a fixed and
definite line which separated the secular from the
sacred, and it was held that ministerial training was
concerned with the latter but not with the former.
That line at the present time simply does not exist.
There is no longer any sacred history, or sacred
literature, or sacred philosophy, or sacred rhetoric.
The modern minister needs to know human hearts and
interpret human needs. His field is not primarily
the Bible or church history, but the human soul.
As the physician needs to know the body, so does the

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS 2 1 1

minister need to know the mind of man. No minis
ter in our time is equipped for his work without
a knowledge of religious psychology and religious
education.

The training of the physician has been much more
definite, concrete, and effective than the training
of the minister. The medical school has not been
guilty of anything like the waste of time of which the
divinity school has been guilty. From start to finish
the medical teacher has been seeking to make physi
cians out of his pupils. Many a theological professor,
even in our own time, has not the slightest concern
as to whether he shall produce a preacher and a
pastor. His concern, on the contrary, is his particular
specialty; and the colossal tragedy of theological
teaching is that if a man is willing to do so he may
teach so absorbingly interesting a subject as the Old
or the New Testament or the history of the Christian
church as if it had nothing whatever to do with the
preaching of the gospel or the salvation of a human
soul. Three years ago there came a call from France
to America for two different kinds of men — products
of these two different kinds of schools — and in
response to that call the divinity school sent forth
chaplains and the medical school sent forth surgeons.
Which of these two types of men had been best
equipped by the institution which sent them out for
their peculiar task? Or, to put the question in
another way, which of these two types of men could
most easily have dispensed with his vocational

212 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

training? I am led to believe that the American
chaplains as well as the American surgeons did a
work in France of which America may well be proud.
But I am compelled to harbor the suspicion that
less credit belongs for this work to the school of
theology than to the school of medicine. It is much
for the seminary to learn that its primary task is
not the promotion of theological knowledge or the
correction of theological error or the perpetuation of
ecclesiastical forms, however desirable these may be,
but the training of students so to preach, so to pray,
so to bring comfort to souls in distress and hope to
souls in despair, so to inspire society with the religious
ideal, so to make clear the religious import of con
temporary movements, and so to make men conscious
of a great religious inheritance, that the institutions
they serve shall become an integral part of the
Kingdom of God and the people to whom they
minister shall become more fully conscious that they
are children of God. I have spoken of new theo
logical disciplines which have made their appearance
since this School was founded. They have all been
ably defended and need no further defense from me.
But I would not seem to speak lightly of those other
disciplines which have held their place in this School
from its founding, and which will hold an honored
place in the future. Biblical and historical study
will continue to hold their own, not because the
world any longer believes in an infallible book or an
infallible church, but because the Bible was written

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS 213

from the point of view of men who believed from the
bottom of their hearts in the overbrooding love of
God, and the history of the church is the history of
an institution composed of men and women who
were conscious of this love and were seeking to make
it a power in human life. The individual as well as
the church is rooted in the past. The minister who
would rally his fellow-men to the service of God will
speak with tenfold power if he is able to show them
the mighty things which God has done in days gone
by. The one thing that matters very much to an
institution like this is the human soul. But all
subjects will be of primary interest to it which
depict the possibilities of the human soul when it is
set on fire with the consciousness of God.

I have been freer to speak of the defects of theo
logical training because I believe that they are
temporary and that they are destined to disappear
in the face of a fuller acceptance of the Darwinian
hypothesis, the new sense of human solidarity, and
the broader world-outlook of our time. These
causes have all contributed to a greater defmiteness,
a firmer sense of reality, and a broader catholicity in
the work of ministerial training. The seminaries of
America have in recent years gained in large measure
this definiteness and concreteness by drafting into
their service those sister-institutions of learning in
which science, literature, philosophy, economics, art,
music, and other subjects of study which tend to
broaden and deepen human life, have found their

214 THEOLOGICAL STUDY TODAY

natural home. About the great universities of our
country are grouped in increasing measure vocational
schools of every kind. It is as futile to seek to
divorce theological study from the university as to
seek to divorce the study of chemistry from the
laboratory. It has been of inestimable advantage
to those seminaries which have been compelled to
do their work in isolation from university centers, to
be granted, as this School has been granted, the
privileges of the university for at least a portion of
the year. For five years this institution has reaped
the advantage of affiliation for a quarter of the
school year with the University of Chicago. That
privilege is now to be extended to four quarters for
those of our students whose collegiate training has
been lacking or incomplete. And it means that the
possibility of raising the standard of the School for
which its friends have been hoping for lo! these many
years, has finally come. Of all the gifts which might
have been desired with which to help the rounding
out of our seventy-five years, this is the best.

I have spoken of the minister's training and the
minister's task. I should have liked to speak, had
time permitted, of the ministers opportunity; for
I believe in that opportunity, in the face of the work
of reconciliation that awaits the Christian church,
as I have never believed before. The demonstration
of the greatness of that opportunity, however, has
been and will continue to be an affair, not of words,
but of deeds. It has been given for many years by

PRESIDENTS ADDRESS 215

those who have received their training here and have
carried the results of that training to the world
outside. It is the proud privilege of the School
today to set the seal of its approval upon the work of
some of these.

FRANKLIN CHESTER SOUTHWORTH

78980