Some Christian Convictions | Page 3

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, _The?t_. 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 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)