Some Christian Convictions | Page 3

confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which religious
experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose, rhetoric into
logic, and have lost much of its content in the process. Jesus is to the
mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or sacrament of the
Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula of logic, and
attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in geometry, is to
lose that which divinity is to those who have experienced contact with
the living God through Jesus.
A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from
which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is
Humanitarianism. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its
struggle for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own
day, setting free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against
war and cruelty, protecting women and children from economic
exploitation, and devoting itself to all that renders human beings
healthier and happier.
It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of
points. Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of

man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and
bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ. They were
teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with
its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human
justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God. They
proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ's death the
expiation of man's sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in
McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England,
the Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men's
consciences, as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience
which creates a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering
heart of God, who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's
transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was
throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter
Israel's enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance
uttered by vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and
Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less
good than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of
sensitive conscience did for our generation what the Greek
philosophers of the Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the
thought of God moral: "God is never in any way unrighteous--He is
perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most
like Him" (Plato, _Theæt_. 176c).
From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:
(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.
(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and
duty to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in
imaginatively reconstructing history, many Lives of Christ have been
written; and it is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known
and understood at present than He has been since the days of the
evangelists.
A third quarry is the Physical Sciences. As its blocks were taken out

most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for
the temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of
materialism, not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the
beginnings of things; its greatest book during the century bore the title,
_The Origin of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and
human life itself appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law
was found dominant everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the
possibility of prayer and miracle, even of a personal God. Its
investigations into nature exposed a world of plunder and prey, where,
as Mill put it, all the things for which men are hanged or imprisoned
are everyday performances. The scientific view of the world differed
totally from that which was in the minds of devout people, and with
that which was in the minds of the writers of the Bible. A large part of
the last century witnessed a constant warfare between theologians and
naturalists, with many attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people
see that the battle was due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a
scientific and a religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only
when either attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely
said, "I do not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of
himself." Both physicists and theologians were wrong