Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 8

when we turn back again to the great Greek symbols with that
conception of the immanence of God which the truer insights of our
own time have done so much to supply, we find these old forms and
phrases unexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the
Western Church had been more strongly influenced by the
philosophical insight of the early Eastern Church, Western
Christendom might have been saved from a good deal of that
theological hardness from which great numbers are just now reacting.
But Western Christendom took the Cross for the central symbol of its
faith. What would have happened to Western Christendom without
Augustine we do not know, and it is idle to try to guess, but Europe in
its religious thinking followed for a thousand years the direction he
gave it. His theology is only the travail of his soul, glowing and molten.
His Confessions reveal to us more clearly than any other record we
have Paganism becoming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we see
something vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of
new spiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, the
growth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us the
passages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirth
meant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing
recasting of both the inner and outer life. He shows us what it meant to
put aside the inheritances and relationships of an immemorial order and
to stand as a little child untaught, undisciplined and unperfect in the
presence of the new. The spiritual attitude which Augustine attained
was to be for long the dominant spiritual attitude of Europe, was to
govern medieval conceptions, inspire medieval actions, colour with its
flame the mystic brooding of the medieval mind.
In the end the sovereignty of God became for Augustine supreme and
over against this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state.
He was doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions

but they took new character as they passed through the alembic of his
own experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers
concerning the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby
brought into unity with God. They do not hesitate to designate this
unity to be as a deification ... they dwell on the idea that we become
partakers of the Divine nature."[3] The emphasis here is not so much
upon sin to be atoned for or punishment to be avoided, as reconciliation
to be achieved.
[Footnote 3: Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine," p. 162.]
After Augustine the interpretations of the Cross take a new direction.
Now men are thereby not so much to be made partakers of the divine
nature as to be saved from hell. The explanations of the way in which
this salvation is really achieved change with the changing centuries but
through shifting theologies there is one constant. All men are lost and
foredoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only
in that Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith and
obedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varying
theological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as if here
were something whose meanings no single explanation could exalt,
something to be felt rather than understood. The Cross so seen is the
symbol at once of love and need, of moral defeat and moral discipline,
of suffering helplessness and overcoming goodness. We cannot
overstate the influence of this faith upon the better part of Western
civilization.
It has kept us greatly humble, purged us of our pride and thrown us
back in a helplessness which is, after all, the true secret of our strength,
upon the saving mercy of God. The story of it, simply told, has moved
the hard or bitter or the careless as nothing else can do. Its assurances
of deliverance have given new hope to the hopeless and a power not
their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very message of God
the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us how there
is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and the strong put
their strength at the service of the weak; it has taught us that the
greatest sin is the sin against love and the really enduring victories for

any better cause are won only as through the appeal of a much enduring
unselfishness new tempers are created and new forces are released. Nor
is there any sign yet that its empire has begun to come to an end.
The Catholic Church Offered Deliverance in Obedience to the
Authority of an Inerrant Church
Nevertheless the preaching of the Cross has not commonly taken such
forms as these;