Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 7

Him and feelings about Him which have been lost
out in the development of Christianity.
Historically Christian theology, particularly in the West, has centered
around the conception of a Transcendent God. As far as doctrine goes
Christianity took over a great inheritance from the Jew, for arrestingly
enough the Jew, though he belongs to the East, had never anything in
common with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets
and lawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects of
Pantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament is
always immeasurably above those who worshipped Him in
righteousness and power; He is their God and they are His chosen
people, but there is never any identification of their will with His
except in the rare moments of their perfect obedience.
True enough, through the insight of the prophets and particularly the
experience of psalmists, this conception of the Apart-God became
increasingly rich in the persuasion of His unfailing care for His children.
None the less, the Hebrew God is a Transcendent God and Christianity
inherits from that. Christianity took over what Judaism refused--Jesus
Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealth of His
teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made most of
what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of their
race. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and
the greatest of the group--St. Paul--was a Jewish Rabbi before he
became a Christian teacher. He had been nurtured and matured in the
schools of his people and though he was reborn, in renunciations and
obediences distinctly Christian, there were in his very soul inherited
rigidities of form in conformity to which he recast his faith.
More distinctly than he himself could ever have known, he
particularized the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doubtless his own experience
was the deeper directing force in all this. Theologies always, to begin
with, are the molten outpouring of some transforming experience and
they are always, to begin with, fluid and glowing.
Such glowing experiences as these are hard to communicate; they, too,
soon harden down and we inherit, as cold and rigid form, what was to

begin with the flaming outcome of experience. St. Paul's own struggle
and the bitterness of a divided self which issued in his conversion
naturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out his
system strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he had
probably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ's
lips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inheritance and
widened that system of sacrifices and atonements until he found therein
not only a place for the Cross but the necessity for it. He made much,
therefore, of the sense of alienation from God, of sin and human
helplessness, of the need and possibility of redemption.
The Incarnation as the Bridge Between God and Man; the Cross as the
Instrument of Man's Redemption. The Cross the Supreme Symbol of
Western Theology
Here, then, are the two speculative backgrounds of historic
Christianity,--God's apartness from man in an inconceivable immensity
of lonely goodness, man's alienation from God in a helpless fallen
estate. For the bridging of the gulf between God and His world
Christianity offers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost
estate Christianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the reëntry of
God into a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way of
thinking, He has never been entirely separate, but from which He has,
none the less, been so remote that if ever it were to be rescued from its
ruined condition there was needed a new revelation of God in humanity;
and the Atonement is just the saving operation of God thus incarnated.
Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greek
theologies were built around that. They exhausted the resources of a
language particularly fitted for subtle definition in their endeavour to
explain the mystery of it, and, after more than a century of bitter debate
about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves with
affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature, neither
confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making
clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to
define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their
keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon it, they did,

nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as one come into
human life and sharing it and using it, without which there would have
been in all the faith and thinking of the West for more than a thousand
years an unbridged and unbridgeable gulf between God and man.
Indeed,