Some Christian Convictions | Page 4

when they
thought of "nature" as something fixed, so that it is possible to state
what is natural and what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all
the while to new stimuli, and the title of a recent book, Creative
Evolution, indicates a changed scientific and philosophical attitude
towards the world.
From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian
convictions, with much else, these items:
(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of
insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of the
complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the
mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole
creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they
made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate
districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural.
Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to truth, to love, to

companionship, to justice, hold good of his response to God. There is a
"law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it must be ascertained and
worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our labels for the
discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of working, and they
do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal fellowship with
Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding His new and
completer entrances into the world's life.
(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which
religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and
grow in a changing world.
(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and
attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find
in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it
now is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian,
God.
And not from nature up to nature's God, But down from nature's God
look nature through.
(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes
that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various writers
lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.
(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more
complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to
light.
A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this scientific
quarry, is the historical and literary investigation of the Bible. This has
not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed, but has been
worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church, and notably at
the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined the books of
the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of indifference to him
whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, pronounced the Books
of the Chronicles less accurate historically than the Books of the Kings,
considered the present form of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and

Hosea probably due to later hands, and distinguished in the New
Testament "chief books" from those of less moment. Calvin, too,
discussed the authorship of some of the books, and suggested Barnabas
as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But the Nineteenth Century
witnessed a very thorough application to the Scriptures of the same
methods of historical and literary criticism to which all ancient
documents were subjected. The result was the discovery of the
composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the Biblical
literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of the
documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they
profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.
We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian
thought to these scholarly investigations:
(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that
falls in with the idea of development or evolution.
(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,
science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of
which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.
(3) An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin
(however we may end) with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of
God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him
reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from
Humanitarianism. Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antæus, has
always drawn fresh strength for its battles from touching its feet to the
ground in the Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi
recovered His figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther
rediscovered Him in the Sixteenth. There