The New Evangelism: and its Relation to Cardinal Doctrines
Paper read to Free Church Theological
Society, Glasgow.
IT is no small heroism in these times to deal
with anything new. But this is a theological society; and I do not need to ask
the protection of that name while I move for a little among lines of thought
which may seem to verge on danger. One does not need to apologize for any
inquiry made in a formative school of theology such as this; for in this
atmosphere a seeker after truth is compelled to take up another than that
provincial standpoint which elsewhere he is committed to.
The question you will naturally ask at the outset
is, What is the new Evangelism? Now that is a question that I cannot answer. I
do not know what the new Evangelism is, and it is because I do not know that I
write this paper. I write because I ought to know, and am trying to know. Many
here, and all the most earnest minds of our Church, are anxiously asking this
question, and each who has once asked it feels it to be one of the chief
objects of his life to answer it.
Preachers, finding that the things which stirred
men's minds two centuries ago fail to do so now are compelled to ask themselves
what this means. Do we need a new Evangelism, and if so, what? By the word
Evangelism I do not mean to include merely, or even particularly, evangelistic
work, evangelistic meetings, or what is comprehended under the general head of
revivalism. I mean the methods of presenting Christian truth to men's minds in
any form. By the new Evangelism, so far as mere definition is concerned, is
meant the particular substance and form of evangel which is adapted to the
present state of men's minds. The new Evangelism, in a word, is the Gospel for
the Age. To notice the outcry against the mere mention of a Gospel for the Age
is unnecessary here. What do we want with a new Gospel? Can the Gospel ever be
old? might be asked elsewhere, for this is always cast in one's teeth when he
raises those questions, as if by speaking of a new Evangelism he was
depreciating the old Gospel. Of course we do not want a new evangel, we state
that out at once; but an Evangelism is a different thing, and we do want that;
we want that at the present hour, almost above any reform of our time.
I. The need of a new Evangelism.
There are two general considerations which seem
to me to prove the need of a new Evangelism.
The first is the threatened decline of vital
religion under present methods of preaching. If the Gospel be the power of God
unto salvation, we are entitled to believe that wherever it is presented to
men's minds it will influence and impress them. If men are not influenced or
impressed under preaching, the only alternatives are, either that the Gospel in
substance is not the power of God unto salvation, or that the Gospel in form is
not presented to them so as to reach them. Either the Gospel cannot save them,
or the Gospel does not reach them. We, as Christians, are shut up to the
latter. The Gospel is not reaching men. There are hundreds of churches where
the Gospel is not reaching men. Every third minister one meets confesses that.
The Church, as a whole, admits, for instance, that she is rapidly losing hold
of young men as a class. What does that mean? It really means that the Gospel,
as presented to them, has ceased to be a gospel; it is neither good nor new. It
means that the active thinkers of a congregation, the most hopeful and eager,
are failing to find anything there to meet their case. It is not simply that
many of them object to religion naturally, which will always be the case, but
that those who are looking for a religion do not find it. Many of ourselves
know this by our own experience. How long did we not search; on what diverse
ministries did we not wait; to what endless volumes did we not turn; before
finding a message which our faith could grasp or conscience rest on, and at the
same time our intelligence respect? "I like Christianity," said Hallam, the
subject of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," "because it fits into all the folds of
one's nature." How long was it before we found a form of Christianity which
fitted into any of the folds of our nature? From the time they were
Sabbath-school scholars onwards, it is the experience of thousands of young men
that they find only misfit after misfit in the theological clothes in which
they were asked to disguise themselves. If this has been the experience of men
who were not simply passive (men who were not simply waiting until religion
would, some day or somehow, seize hold of them), but who were searching for
religion, what substance is there in the present form of it to captivate the
ordinary run of men? Our present Evangelism, as mere matter of fact, is not
meeting the wants of the age.
In 1847 Dr. Chalmers found--and the statistics
almost paralyzed him--that there were 30,000 people in Glasgow who did not go
to church. Since then the Free Church has risen; Baptists, Independents,
Morisonians, and Wesleyans, have poured their new life into the city. The most
complete evangelistic organization in the kingdom, the Christian Union, has
been at work. Have Chalmers' 30,000 been sensibly reduced? They have been
increased exactly fivefold--out of-all proportion to the increase of the
population. Excluding 100,000 Roman Catholics, there are at present 150,000
non-church-goers in the city. The aspect of affairs in the English towns is
notoriously worse. To take a single case. The population of Sheffield is
240,000. It has 60 churches. Allowing 1,000 sitters to each church there would
only be accommodation for 60,000 people; not only, therefore, do 180,000 not go
to church, but there is no accommodation for them if they were willing. What is
the cause of this decline in vital religion? Why is the Gospel not reaching the
Age? Because it is not the Gospel for the Age. It is the Gospel for a former
Age. Because, in the form of it as used, the Gospel is neither good nor new. It
does not fit into all the folds of men's being. It is not in itself bad--but it
is a bad fit.
The second general consideration is based, not on
the effects of Evangelism, but on its nature. The very nature of truth demands
from time to time a new Evangelism. At the opening of this college, we heard
(Prof. Bruce's introductory lecture) that a Scotch divine at the Presbyterian
Council in Philadelphia found himself rebuked for using the phrase, "Progress
in Theology." Theology, he was eloquently reminded, was behind us. He was
pointed to the Standards of his Church. There is no more unfortunate word in
our Church's vocabulary than "Standard." A standard is a thing that stands.
Theology is a thing that moves. There must be progress in everything, and more
in theology than in anything, for the content of theology is larger and more
expansive than the content of anything else. I do not say we are to give up the
idea involved in the word Standard. We certainly never can. But standards must
move. The sole condition of having them with us at any particular place or time
is that they should move with us according to place or time. The word Standard,
as applied to theology, is in some respects an unfortunate term. Buffon's
Natural History was a standard. Linnaeus' Vegetable System was a standard. But
they are not standards now. They were places for the mind of Science to rest on
in its onward sweep through the centuries; but the perches are not needed there
now, and they are vacant. These books stand like deserted inns on the roadside
which gave hearty meals and shelter in their day, but which the race (with no
disrespect to Linnaeus and Buffon) has long since passed. When the English
fought Waterloo, they did not leave their standard at Bannockburn--they brought
it up to Quatre Bras; and if our standard was made for Holland, or Rome, or
Geneva, we must bring it up to Germany, and Paris, and the Highlands. But there
is something deeper than progress in theology; there is progress in truth
itself. "Truth is the daughter of Time." It is surely unnecessary to insist on
this, for it is true of all kinds of truth, in the natural as well as the
spiritual sphere. Nature is all before our eyes, as truth in the Bible is all
before our eyes. But we do not see it all; every day we are seeing more. The
firmament was not all mapped by astronomers at once. Since Calvin's time many a
new star has been discovered. The stars were there before. Space was there
before, but a new order is seen in it, new material for thought, new systems,
especially a new perspective. To take another illustration: when we were
children we could not understand how, if God made the world, He had made it so
ugly; why everything in nature was brown, or dun, or green, and grey. Why was
the sky not scarlet like the inside of our trumpet, or a good hearty blue, with
unicorns on it like our drum? We thought, as we looked at the lichens and
washed-out azure, that, by some oversight, God had forgotten to put the colour
in. We know now why God did not put the colour in. We know that Nature wears
the colour of the future. It is painted for the highest art. Vermilion is for
the savage, blue with unicorns for the child, the neutral tints for the world's
maturity--the developed taste. The colour was in Nature all along, but the
world's eye was not full grown. The Greeks had almost no colour-sense at all;
and if Mr. Ruskin sees what Homer did not see, it is not because it was not to
be seen, but that the faculty was not developed.
The higher art has grown; it sees in the
colouring of Nature a beauty which must increase till the evolution of mind and
eye pronounces and sees all perfect. It is so with Truth; the truth-sense, like
the colour-sense, grows. Truth has her vermilion, and her high art olives and
sage-greens. "When Solon was asked," says Plutarch, "if he had given the
Athenians the best possible laws, he answered that they were as good as the
people could then receive." When we were given our system of truth, it was as
good as the people could receive--perhaps as good as their teachers could give.
But we can receive more now; our taste demands sage-green, and we cannot live
on vermilion. If it be objected that this argument renders the Bible itself
effete, the answer is that the Bible is not a system. It is the firmament; its
truth is without form, therefore without limit. It is a book of such boundless
elasticity that the furthest growth of the truth-sense can never find its
response outgrown. And it is in this elasticity that one finds a sanction for a
new theology to be the basis of a new Evangelism. It encourages a new theology;
the prospect and possibility of that is written in every epigram and paradox,
in the absence of anything propositional or bound. The view we are to take,
therefore, of the old theologies is not that they are false, but simply that
they are old. Those who framed them did in their time just what we want to do
in ours. The Reformation did not profess to create new truth; it was not a
re-formation, but simply a restoration--a restoration of the first theology of
the New Testament, as much of it as could then be seen. At the time, probably,
it was a restoration, and had all the strength and grandeur of the first
theology, with all its vividness and life. Probably it was suited to the wants
of the time, and moved the hearts of preacher and people.
We, too, can still preach it, but to some of us
it has a hollow sound. If we would confess the honest truth, our words for it
are rather those of respect than enthusiasm; we read it, hear it, study it, and
preach it, but cannot honestly say that it kindles or moves us. When we wish to
be kindled or moved, driven perhaps to prove whether we are capable of being
kindled or moved, we leave the restoration and go back to that which was
restored.
Restoration can only retain its hold vitally and
powerfully for a limited time. It is essentially an accommodation for a certain
age. If that age has changed, it no longer accommodates me, it incommodes me.
What was the new theology of the seventeenth century is the theology of the
nineteenth century only on one condition--that the age has not grown. If it
has, in the nature of things it no longer accommodates me. It is not bad,
simply a bad fit. The then new theology, the very adaptation possibly that was
needed, becomes now old doctrine, a mere old skull, an old skull with the
juices dry. This is the source of what is called dry preaching. It is a once
glorious truth disenchanted by time into a faded, juiceless form.
Such then is the general effect of Time on Truth.
As the serpent periodically casts its skin, so Truth. The number of times it
has cast its skin marks the number of stages in its forward growth. Many of the
shelves of our theological libraries are simply museums of the cast skin of
Truth. The living organism has glided out of them to seek a roomier vestment.
This is no disrespect, I repeat again, to the old theology. For the present
vestiture in turn must take its place on the shelf. Nor does it imply that no
beauty exists there, nor that to many some of the old doctrines may not prove
even to-day a fountain of life. They do do so. Many volumes of theology have
never been outgrown; many of the Puritans, for instance, have not only never
been outgrown, but it is difficult to conceive how they can be. To take again
the analogy from colour. The sage-green does not necessarily destroy the
vermilion, though it renders many of its combinations old-fashioned. Some forms
of truth in like manner may have reached their ultimate expression,
certainly they may, though this is not so clear as that some have not. To sum
up, the demand for a new theology, therefore, as the basis of a new Evangelism
is founded upon the nature of Truth. It is not caprice, nor love of what is
new. It is the necessity for what is new. It is in the nature of things.
I have next to bring some more specific charges
against the old theology--the old theology, that is to say, as represented in
the ordinary preaching of the day. And lest I should be accused of caricaturing
the doctrines in question, let me say that the rendering which follows
represents the impression made as matter of fact by these doctrines upon
myself. I do not implicate the whole Evangelism, nor do I speak directly for
any one else; but I cannot more honestly illustrate the teaching of what was to
me the current Evangelism--the pabulum, namely, supplied by the ordinary
country pulpit, by the evangelist's address, by the Sabbath-school teacher, and
in a limited sense by religious books and tracts--than by stating the sort of
religious ideas which these fostered in myself. For convenience I select three
as samples, taking them in theological order. I limit myself likewise to a very
few sentences with regard to each, more particularly (1) as to the theological
conception and (2) as to the ethical effect.
(1) THE CONCEPTION OF GOD as fostered by the old
Evangelism.
The chief characteristic of the conception of God
to me was its want of characteristic. The figure was too vague for any
practical purpose. It was not a character. One could form no intelligent figure
of God, for so far as it could be formed it was the God of the Old Testament.
The Incarnation, i.e., contributed nothing. The Old Testament believer,
I need not remind you, was very helpless as to a personal God. Each man,
practically, had to make an image of God for himself. He was given a name, and
a set of qualities--Holiness, Justice, Wisdom, and others, and out of this he
had to make God. The consequence was that the great majority made it wrong, and
worshipped they knew not what. One great purpose of the Incarnation was to
change all this. It is to give us a new, defined, intelligible Figure of God.
"The Son of God is come." said John, who saw most fully the meaning of the Word
made Flesh--"The Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that
we may know him."
The old Evangelism had little benefit here from
the incarnation in this respect. It never got this understanding. God remained
unchristianized in it. The Figure came no nearer. God remained Jehovah, the I
AM that I AM. He was not God in Christ, God made intelligible by Christ, God
made lovable by Christ, but God Eternal, Unchangeable, Invisible, therefore
Unknowable; and in the nature of this cloud-God, the outstanding element was
Vengeance --Anger, the ethical effect of which is obvious. A man's whole
religion depends on his conception of God, so much so that to give a man
religion in many cases is simply to correct his conception of God. But if man's
natural conception of God, which is of a Being or of a Force opposed to him, a
Being to be appeased, be not corrected, his religion will be a religion of
Fear. God therefore was a God to be feared, an uncomfortable presence about
one's life. He was always in court, either actually sitting in judgment or
collecting material for the next case. He was the haunting presence of a great
Recorder,
"Who was writing
now the story
Of what little children do."
The
reiteration that God was Love did nothing to dispel this terrible illusion. We
cannot love God because we are told, for Love is not made to order. We can
believe God's love, but believing love is like looking at heat.
We cannot respond to it. To excite love, we need a person, not a doctrine--a
Father, not a deity. To be changed into the same image we must look at the
glory of God, not in se, but in the face of Jesus. The old Evangelism
was defective in not exhibiting God in the face of Jesus. It exhibited God in
the nailed hands of Jesus; this is an aspect of God, an essential aspect, but
not God. Next--
(2) THE CONCEPTION OF CHRIST.
If the conception of God was vague, the
conception of Christ was worse. He was a theological person. His function was
to adjust matters between the hostile kingdoms of heaven and earth.
I do not acquit myself of blame here, and I hope
no one else has an experience so shocking, but until well on in my college
course, and after hearing hundreds of sermons and addresses on the Person and
Work of Christ, the ruling idea left in my mind was that Christ was a mere
convenience. He was the second person in the Trinity, existing for the sake of
some logical or theological necessity, a doctrinal convenience. He was the
creation of theology, and His function was purely utilitarian. This might have
been theological, but it was not religious. Religion said, "Christ our
Life." Theology said, "Christ our Logic."
This is a painful confession, but it is far more
painful to think of its basis. It is impossible to believe that in these
sermons I was not presented with the true aspects of Christ's life and
character. But it is also almost impossible to believe that these were insisted
on with anything like the same frequency or reality as the aspect I have named.
What moves an attentive mind in a sermon is its residual truth, not the
complementary passages, not the squarings with other doctrines, but that truth
on which the whole theme is strung, the vertebral column which, though hid, is
the true pillar of the rest. Now the residuum to me--and it is surprising how
unerringly this betrays itself and stands nakedly out from all mere words--was
always this. Whatever other points were thrown in, whatever devout expressions
were mixed with it, whatever appeals to the affections, this was the prominent
half-truth, and therefore whole error.
This is the explanation, I think, of the fact,
now pretty well acknowledged, that the old theology made almost nothing of the
humanity of Christ. In such a body of divinity clearly there was little room
for so mundane a thing as humanity. The arrangements in which Christ played a
part were looked at almost exclusively from the Divine and cosmical standpoint.
The question was, how God could forgive sin, and yet justify the sinner; how
God could do this and that, as if we had anything to do with it. Such a
divinity necessarily wanted humanity, the humanity of man as well as the
humanity of Christ. Man was a cypher, the mere theological unit, the x
of doctrine (his character, his aims, his achievements, his influence, were
neither here nor there) and an unknown quantity, one of the parties in the
proposition. And it was not necessary for this theological unit to have a
humanitarian Christ, except as to the mere identity of flesh, and this was
requisite only to complete the theological proposition.
The emphasis on the humanity of Christ, which,
happily, has now crept into our best teaching, marks more distinctly perhaps
than anything else the dawn of the new Evangelism. Still, it must be confessed
that in influential quarters the revival of this doctrine is viewed even yet
with no inconsiderable alarm The newer Lives of Christ, for instance, in which
the humanity is conspicuously developed, are constantly assailed as Unitarian,
and within the last fortnight a Life of Christ has been given to the world,
from the preface to which one can almost gather that the author's object is to
provide an antidote to the erroneous tendencies of these works.
Men fail to see that it was God Himself who
conceived this wonderful idea of a humanitarian Christ. When God does anything,
He never does it by halves. When He made the Word flesh, when He made Jesus a
Man, He made a Man, and it is just because He carried out His idea so
perfectly that Unitarianism is possible. When we say Man, then let us mean Man.
It is a mistaken scruple even to minimize His Humanity. In our zeal for the
doctrines of the Atonement we are really robbing God of His doctrine of the
Incarnation.
(3) A third point to notice is, The old
Evangelism in its CONCEPTION OF SALVATION, and of religion generally. The
characteristic to notice here is that religion was not so much a question of
character as of status. Man's standing in the sight of God was
the great thing. Was he sheltered judicially behind Christ, or was he standing
on his own merits? This is a vital question to ask, certainly, but the way in
which legal status was put sanctioned the most erroneous notions as to religion
and life. Salvation was a thing that came into force at death. It was not a
thing for life. Good works, of course, were permitted, and even demanded, but
they were never very clearly reconcilable with grace. The prime end of religion
was to get off; the plan of salvation was an elaborate scheme for getting off;
and after a man had faced that scheme, understood it, acquiesced in it, the one
thing needful was secured. Life after that was simply a waiting until the plan
should be executed by his death. What use life was, this one thing being
adjusted, it were hard to say. It was not in the religious sphere at all. The
world was to pass away, and the lust thereof, and all time given to it, all
effort spent on it, was so much loss, like putting embroidery upon a shroud.
When a preacher did speak of character, of the
imitation of Christ, of self-denial, of righteousness, of truth and humility,
the references theologically were not only not clear, but were generally
introduced with an apology for enforcing them at all. Nine times out of ten,
too, the preacher took them all back under the last head, where he spoke of
man's inability and the necessity of the Holy Spirit. The ethical effect of
even weakening the absolute connection between religion and morality is too
obvious to be referred to, so I shall pass on.
Having now given samples of the teaching of the
old Evangelism, I need not take up the time to complete its circle of theology,
for the doctrines indicated rule and colour all the rest. No doubt what has
been said up till now is more or less commonplace to most of you, and (with
regard to the more) I now proceed to attempt something more constructive, for
which, however, all that has gone before has been a somewhat necessary
preparation. In what follows I can only hope to indicate what dimly seem to me
to be the lines upon which a new, intelligent, and living Evangelism must be
built up.
II. What I am most anxious to do here is to
arrive at principles. I make no attempt to sketch portions of a detailed
theology, such as one might wish to see taking the place of some of the old
doctrines. That will all come in time; i.e., if it ought to come. It is
the principles which are to guide us in constructing the new Evangelism that
are the true difficulty. We have all our own opinion as to special points of
contrast, and, as we think, of improvement; but what outstanding general truths
are to regulate the movement as a whole? I fear I shall only have time to refer
to two.
(1) Perhaps the most important principle, in the
first place, is that the new Evangelism must not be doctrinal. By this
is not meant that it is to be independent of doctrine, but simply that its
truths as conveyed to the people are not to be in the propositional form. With
regard to doctrine, to avoid misconception, let me say at once we must
recognise it as one of the three absolutely essential possessions of a
Christian Church.
The three outstanding departments of the Church's
work are criticism, dogmatism, and Evangelism. Without the first there is no
guarantee of truth, without the second there is no defence of truth, and
without the third there is no propagation of truth. Criticism then, in a word,
secures truth, dogmatism conserves it, and evangelism spreads it. Now, when it
is said that preaching is not to be doctrinal, what is meant is this. When
Evangelism wishes to receive truth, so as to expound it, it is to refer to
criticism for information rather than to dogmatism. And when it gives out what
it has received, it is neither to be critical in form, nor doctrinal.
To deal with this in detail. When Evangelism
wishes to receive truth in order to expound it, it is to refer to criticism for
that truth rather than to dogmatism. This simply means that a man is to go to a
reliable edition of the Bible for his truth, and not to theology.
Why should he take this trouble? Does not
theology give him Bible truth in accurate, convenient, and, moreover, in
logical propositions? There it lies ready made to his hand, all cut and dry;
why should he not use it? Just because it is all cut and dry. Just because it
lies there ready made in accurate, convenient, and logical propositions. You
cannot cut and dry truth. You cannot accept truth ready made without its
ceasing to live as truth. And that is one of the reasons why the current
Evangelism is dead.
There is in reality no worse enemy under certain
circumstances to a true Evangelism than a propositional theology, with the
latter controlling the former by the authority of the Church. For one does not
then receive the truth for himself; he accepts it bodily. He begins, set up by
his Church with a stock in trade which has cost him nothing, and which, though
it may serve him all his life, is just as much worth exactly as his belief in
his Church. One effect of this is to relieve him of all personal
responsibility. This possession of truth, moreover, thus lightly won, is given
to him as infallible. There is nothing to add to it. It is a system. And to
start a man in life with such a principle is a degradation. All through life,
instead of working towards truth, he is working from it, or what he is told is
it.
An infallible standard is a temptation to a
mechanical faith. Infallibility always paralyzes. It gives rest, but it is the
rest of stagnation. Men make one great act of faith at the beginning of their
lives--then have done with it for ever. All moral, intellectual, and spiritual
effort is over; and a cheap theology ends in a cheap life. It is the same thing
that makes men take refuge in the Church of Rome and in a set of dogmas.
Infallibility meets the deepest desire of man, but meets it in the most fatal
form. All desire is given to stimulate to action; much more this, the
deepest,--the hunger after truth. Men deal with this desire in two ways. First,
by Unbelief,--that crushes it by blind force; second, by Infallibility,--that
lulls it to sleep by blind faith. The effect of a doctrinal theology is the
effect of infallibility. The wholesale belief in a system, however grand it may
be, grant even that it were infallible--the wholesale belief in this system as
the starting point for a working Evangelism is not Faith, though it always gets
that name. It is mere credulity. There is a vital difference between
Faith and credulity. Realize what it fully amounts to, and you will see how
much, besides this, there is in the religion of this country which falls before
the distinction. There is no real religious value in this belief; for it is
more belief in a Church than in truth. It is a comfortable, credulous rest upon
authority, not a hard-earned, self-obtained personal possession Truth never
becomes truth until it is earned. The moral responsibility here, besides, is
nothing. The Westminster Divines are responsible, not I. And anything which
destroys responsibility, or transfers it, cannot but be injurious in its moral
tendency, and useless in itself.
It may be objected, perhaps, that this statement
of the paralysis, spiritual and mental, induced by infallibility applies also
to the Bible. The answer is that though the Bible is infallible, the
infallibility is not in such a form as to become a temptation. And that leads
to a remark as to the contrast between the form of truth in the Bible and the
form in theology. In theology, as we have seen, truth is propositional, tied up
in neat parcels, systematized and arranged in logical order. In the Bible,
truth is a fountain. There is an atmosphere here, an expansiveness, an
infinity. Theology is essentially finite, and it only contains as much infinite
truth as can be chained down by its finite words. The very point of it is, that
it is defined, otherwise it is no use.
To the practical question. There are few minds
which can really take truth in this theological form. Truth is a thing to be
slowly absorbed, not to be bolted whole. In this country we have been so
accustomed to get and give our truth in the propositional form, that many
congregations do not recognise it if stated in the ordinary language of life.
But this is the only living language. And the failure to catch sight of the
truth when clothed in this language means that it has not been comprehended
before as a substance, but as a form.
"Two or three days ago, I dined," says Lynch in
"Letters to the Scattered," "with a little child whose mamma had prepared for
him a very wholesome and delightful pudding. `what is in it?' said the child.
`There's an egg in it,' said the mother. `Where's the egg?' asked the child,
after close and incredulous inspection. `It is mixed with it,' she
explained."
"There are many grown men and women," adds Lynch,
"that unless they see the very form of a doctrine will not believe they can
have the nutriment of it. They ask, `Where's the egg?' and if you say it is
mixed with it--the doctrine of Atonement, or of Justification, or
Sanctification--and was diffused through the whole of what was said, they shake
their heads suspiciously. They will have nothing to do with such preaching, or
such books, or such people."
There is nothing truer, certainly, than that in
this country people at once suspect adulteration if you do not present them
with the actual egg, shell and all. But what I am trying to show is that this
demand is a mistake, and defeats its own end. The truth is Nature never
provides for man's wants in any direction, bodily, mental, or spiritual, in
such a form as that he can simply accept her gifts automatically. She puts all
the mechanical powers at his disposal, but he must make his lever. She gives
him corn, but he must grind it. She prepares coal, but he must dig it; and even
when she grows him apples and plums, ready-made fruits, he has at least to
digest them, and in most cases he had better cook them. A law of nature like
this, we are justified in carrying by analogy into the region of the spiritual.
A man can no more assimilate truth in infallible lumps than he can corn. Though
it be perfect, infallible, yet he has to do everything to it before he can use
it. Corn is perfect, all the products of Nature are perfect, and perfection in
Nature corresponds to infallibility in truth. But perfect though they are, few
of the products of Nature are available as they stand. So with Truth. Man must
separate, think, prepare, dissolve, digest, work, and most of these he must do
for himself and within himself. If it be replied that this is exactly what
theology does, I answer, it is exactly what it does not. It simply does what
the greengrocer does when he arranges his apples and plums in the shop-windows.
He may tell me a Magnum Bonum from a Victoria, or a Baldwin from a Newtown
Pippin; but he does not help me to eat it. His information is useful, and for
scientific horticulture absolutely essential. Should a sceptical pomologist
deny that there was such a thing as a Baldwin or mistake it for a Newtown
Pippin, we should be glad to refer the said pomologist to him. But if we were
hungry, and an orchard were handy, we should not trouble him. This brings us
back to the original proposition then, that the new Evangelism as a provision
for the hunger of men's souls is not to be doctrinal. Their truth is to be
given them, not in infallible lumps, but as a diffused nutriment. Truth is an
orchard rather than a museum. Dogmatism will be very useful to us when
scientific necessity makes us go to the museum. Criticism will be very useful
in seeing that only fruit-bearers grow in the orchard and neither weeds nor
poisonous sports. But truth in infallible propositional lumps is not natural,
proper, assimilable food for the soul of man; and therefore a propositional
theology is not the subject-matter of Evangelism.
(2) So much for exposition of the nature of the
truth with which Evangelism is concerned. The second principle to which we now
turn refers to a matter of equal moment--the faculty which deals with truth.
And I might sum up what is to be said under this head in this
proposition--The leading Faculty of the new theology is not to be the
Reason. The previous proposition deals with the form of truth. This is
meant to elucidate the principle of arriving at truth. It is a deeper question,
and strikes at a fundamental difference between the old and the new
theology.
The old theology was largely a product of reason.
It was an elaborate, logical construction. The complaint against it is that, as
a logical construction, it was arrived at by a faculty of the mind, and not by
a faculty of the soul. On close scrutiny it turns out to be really nothing more
nor less than rationalism.
The doctrine of the Atonement, for instance, and
the whole federal theology is an elaborate rationalism. The common way of
presenting salvation is the most naked syllogism: "I believe. He that believeth
hath everlasting life, therefore I have everlasting life." I do not pause to
point out that a theology of this sort may be received by any one without any
spiritual effect whatsoever being produced. It does not take a religious man to
be a theologian; it simply takes a man with fair reasoning powers. This man
happens to apply these powers to doctrinal subjects, but in no other sense than
he might apply them to astronomy or physics. I knew a man, the author of a
well-known orthodox theological work which has passed through a dozen editions,
and lies on the shelves of all our libraries. I never knew that man to go to
church, nor to give a farthing in charity, though he was a rich man, nor to
give any sensible sign whatever that he had ever heard of Christianity. It is
equally unnecessary to point out that if reason is the exclusive or primary
faculty in theology, theology itself breaks down under rigid tests at almost
every point. Its first principle, for example, that God is, contains a
distinct contradiction, as has been repeatedly pointed out. Many philosophers,
therefore, in being presented with theology as the expression of the Christian
religion, have had no alternative but to become atheists. The reasoning faculty
then cannot be the organ of the new Evangelism, for its conclusions are
philosophically assailable. But I am not dealing here with philosophy, and it
is not to be understood that I am using terms--Reason, for instance--in any
particular philosophical sense. I am looking at the question exclusively from
its practical side. And the question I ask myself is, "When I apprehend
spiritual truth, what faculty do I employ?" When I say it is not the reason, I
do not purposely make the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason,
which Kant and his followers, for example, do in philosophy, and Coleridge in
religion, making the Understanding the logical faculty and the Reason the
intuitive faculty. I use the word in its ordinary working sense, meaning by it,
if you like, the logical understanding of the writer's mind.
What faculty do I employ, then, in apprehending
spiritual truth? What is the primary faculty of the new Evangelism if it is not
the Reason? Leaving philosophical distinctions aside again, I think it is the
IMAGINATION. Overlook the awkwardness of this mere word, and ask yourself if
this is not the organ of your mind which gives you a vision of truth. The
subject-matter of the new Evangelism must be largely the words of Christ, the
circle of ideas of Christ in their harmony, and especially in their
perspective. Sit down for a moment and hear Him speak. Take almost any of His
words. To what faculty do they appeal? Almost without exception to the
Imagination. And this is the main thing I wish to say to-night. I do not merely
refer to His parables, to His allusions to nature, to the miracles, to His
endless symbolism--the comparisons between Himself and bread, water, vine,
wine, shepherd, doctor, light, life, and a score of others. But all His most
important sayings are put up in such form as to make it perfectly clear that
they were deliberately designed for the Imagination.
You cannot indeed really put up religious truth
in any other form. You can put up facts, information, but God's truth will not
go into a word. You must put it in an image. God Himself could not put truth in
a word, therefore He made the Word flesh. There are few things less
comprehended than this relation of truth to language.
"Was stets und
aller Orten
Sich ewig jung erweist
Ist in gebundnen Worten
Ein ungebundner Geist."
The purpose of
revelation is to exhibit the mind of God--the ungebundner Geist. The
vehicle is words, gebundnen Worten. What words? Words which are windows
and not prisons. Words of the intellect cannot hold God--the finite cannot hold
the infinite. But an image can. So God has made it possible for us by giving us
an external world to make image-words. The external world is not a place
to work in, or to feed in, but to see in. It is a world of images, the external
everywhere revealing the eternal. The key to the external world is to look not
at the things which are seen but in looking at the things which are seen to see
through them to the things that are unseen. Look at the ocean. It is mere
water--a thing which is seen; but look again, look through that which is seen,
and you see the limitlessness of Eternity. Look at a river, another of God's
images of the unseen. It is also water, but God has given it another form to
image a different truth. There is Time, swift and silent. There is Life,
irrevocable, passing. But the most singular truth of this, as suggested a
moment ago, is the Incarnation. There was no word in the world's vocabulary for
Himself. In Nature we had images of Time and Eternity. The seasons spoke of
Change, the mountains of Stability. The home-life imaged Love. Law and Justice
were in the civil system. The snow was Purity, the rain, Fertility. By using
these metaphors we could realize feebly Time and Eternity, Stability and
Change. But there was no image of Himself. So God made one. He gave a word in
Flesh--a word in the Image-form. He gave the Man Christ Jesus the express
image of His person This was the one image that was wanting in the
image-vocabulary of truth, and the Incarnation supplied it.
God had really supplied this image before, but
man had spoilt it, disfigured it to such an extent that it was unrecognisable.
God made man in His own image; that was a word made flesh. From its ruins man
might have reconstructed an image of God, but the audacity of the attempt
repelled him, and for centuries men had forgotten that the image of God was in
themselves.
How, then, do you characterize that irreverent
elaboration of theology which attempts to show you in words what God has had to
do in the slow unfolding of Himself in history, and by that final resort, when
words were useless, of incarnating the Word, giving us the manifestation of a
living God in a living Word. These doctrines stand apart. They are above words.
It is a mockery for the Reason to define and formulate here, as if by heaping
up words she could drive the truth into a corner and dispense it in phrases as
required. It is just as clear as a simple question of rhetoric, that Christ's
words were positively protected against the mere touch of reason. They were put
up in such form in many cases as to challenge reason to make beginning, middle,
or end of them. Try to reason out a parable. Try to read into it theology, as
our forefathers often did; or dispensational truth, as certain erratic
theologians do to-day, and it becomes either utterly contemptible or utterly
unintelligible.
You see a parable, you discern it;
it enters your mind as an image, you image it, imagine it. I am the Bread of
Life. With what faculty do we apprehend that? We look at it long and earnestly,
and at first are utterly baffled by it. But as we look it grows more and more
transparent, and we see through it. We do not understand it; if we were asked
what we saw, we should be surprised at the difficulty we had in defining it.
Some image rose out of the word Bread, became slowly living, sank into our
soul, and vanished. The peculiarity of this expression is that it is not a
simile. "I am like bread." Christ does not say that. I am bread--the
thing itself. And that faculty, standing face to face with truth, draws aside
the veil, or pierces it, seizes the living substance, absorbs it; and the soul
is nourished.
Besides the parable, the metaphor, and the
metaphor which is no metaphor, Christ has two other favourite modes of
expression. These are the axiom and the paradox. The axiom is the basis of
certainty; the reason is inoperative without it, but it is not apprehended by
reason. It is seen, not proved. Again, therefore, we are dealing with the
Imagination. The paradox is the darkest of all figures. "He that loveth his
life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life shall find it." What can reason
make of that? It is an utter blank; it absolutely repels reason. But for that
very cause it is the richest mine for the imagination. It is not the darkest
figure, but the lightest, because the rays come from exactly opposite sides,
and meet as truth in the middle. The shell of words, once burst, reveals a
whole world, in which the illuminated mind runs riot, and revels in the
boundlessness of truth.
Had the reason been able to sink its shaft, it
might have brought up a nugget. Theology would have gained another proposition,
another neat parcel, and there would have been the end of it. As it is, it is
without end, limitless, infinite truth, incapable in that form of becoming
uninteresting, unreal, included in a human phrase. It is this sense of depth
about Christ's words which is the sure test of their truth. They shade off,
every one, into the unknown, and the roots of the known are always in the
unknown. Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Dogma is simply an attempt to undo
this. It takes up the sublimest truth in its fingers with no more awe than an
anatomist lifts a muscle with his forceps, turns it about, dissects it,
determines the genus and species of the organism to which it belongs, and marks
it down "described" for all future time. We know all about it--all about it. We
see the whole thing quite clearly; it is as simple as the frog's muscle. The
new Evangelism can never deal with truth in this way. It will never say that it
sees quite clearly. It may remain ignorant, but it will never presume to say
there is no darkness, no mystery, no unknown. It will sound truth, it will go
fathoms further perhaps than the reason can go, but it will come back saying we
have found no bottom. It is not all as clear as the old theology; it has that
dimness of an older theology which sees through a glass darkly, which knows in
part, and which, because it knows in part, knows the more certainly that it
shall know hereafter.
The want of apprehension of the quality of truth
by-much of the propositional theology is in nothing better evidenced than by
this mistake as to its quantity. It robbed it at once of the infinite and the
supernatural. The soul-food was taken out of the truth, and the husks thrown to
the intellect. As a faculty, then, the reason is not large enough to be the
organ of Christianity. It has a very high and prominent place to play in
Christianity, but prima facie it lacks the first and the second
qualities of a religious faculty. The first of these qualities is that just
mentioned, largeness and penetration. The second is universality. All men
cannot reason, but all men can see. In the rudest savage and in the
youngest child, the imagination is strong. And Christ addressed His religion to
the most unlettered, to the youngest child. He boldly asserted that His
religion was for the youngest child. He directly appealed again and again to
the child-spirit. "Except ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise
enter into the kingdom of heaven." To object to this that Christ was speaking
to the Oriental mind is of course beside the mark. Christ was not an Oriental
speaking to the Oriental, He was the Son of Man speaking to man in the
universal language of truth. I have already apologised for using this word
Imagination, but I think I have made clear the idea. I am not concerned longer,
therefore, about retaining it. I am not sure that it is the right word. You
might perhaps prefer to call it faith or intuition, or the spirit of
discernment, or a subjective idealism, but the name is of no moment. The idea I
have tried to make clear is that this is the faculty which works with the eyes,
as contrasted with reason, which works with the hands. The old theology
manipulates truth, the new is to discern it. As preachers our aim must be, not
to prove things, but to make men see things.
This conclusion with regard to the faculty of the
new Evangelism is derived simply from observation. It contains the crucial
point of the whole question, and I have little more to say except in support of
it. But I need scarcely remind those of you who are in any way conversant with
German philosophy that distinctions closely corresponding to this have been
drawn in philosophy, and long indeed before the German philosophers arose. The
later form of this philosophy filtered into English literature early in this
century, and at once awakened profound interest, and, it is fair to say, alarm.
Through such men as Coleridge and the Hares it was easily traced to its source
in Schelling and Kant. But that Schelling and Kant, Fichte and Hegel had
differentiated this faculty, or something like this faculty, in the
philosophical sphere, was against it. The new influence for the time was
quenched. The unfortunate thing with the English neo-Platonists was that they
paid too little attention to the practical aspects of truth. Had Coleridge done
this, had Maurice and Hare done this more, we should have been farther on
to-day with the new Evangelism. These men, and especially Coleridge, were far
too transcendental in their metaphysics to be the prophets of the new
Evangelism, but with many other errors they held the germ of a very great
truth. With Coleridge the imagination was a synthesis of the reasoning power
and the sensing power. His definition is "that reconciling and mediatory power,
which, incorporating the reason in images of sense, and organizing (as it were)
the flux of the senses, by the permanent and self-circling energies of
the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols harmonious in themselves, and
consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." [1] Again he says[2]
"the grounds of the real truth, the life, the substance, the hope, the love, in
one word the faith, these are derivatives from the practical, moral, and
spiritual nature and being of man."
I do not stop to inquire here as to where
Coleridge's version of "the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the
world" leads. The new Evangelism doubtless will have its apologetics when it
exists. Nor do I enter upon the question as to how far this light exists in
every man, or how far it is true that those only who are born again can see the
kingdom of God. These are particular applications which may just now be passed
over. But I should like to go on with the general subject by adding another
quotation, this time from science, bearing upon the general subject.
In I870 Professor Tyndall wrote an address
entitled, "On the Scientific Use of the Imagination." The motto or text of this
address is taken from a paper read before the Royal Society some years ago by
its then president, Sir Benjamin Brodie. It says: "Physical investigation, more
than anything besides, helps to teach us the actual value and right use of the
imagination--that wondrous faculty which properly controlled by experience and
reflection becomes the noblest attribute of man; the source of poetic genius,
the instrument of discovery to science, without the aid of which Newton would
never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the earths and alkalies,
nor would Columbus have found another continent." Then Tyndall goes on to say:
"We find ourselves gifted with the power of forming mental images of the
ultra-sensible; and by this power, when duly chastened and controlled, we can
lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. There are Tories
even in Science who regard Imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided
rather than employed." But "Imagination becomes the prime mover of the physical
discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the
outset a leap of the Imagination. In Faraday the exercise of this faculty
preceded all his experiments . . . . In fact, without this power our
knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of co-existences and sequences."
If Tyndall claims so much for the scientific use of the Imagination,
what may we not claim for the religious use of it? What is not possible to an
Imagination guided by reason and illuminated, as we hold it may be, and is, by
the Spirit of God? "Without this power," we might almost paraphrase from
Tyndall, "our knowledge of religion must be, or is, a mere tabulation of
co-existences and sequences." There is one preacher to whom, from his printed
sermons, I have many times been much beholden and from whom I also quote a
sentence. I do not stay to characterize the sermons of Horace Bushnell, but he
has long been to me a representative man of the new Evangelism, although I knew
nothing of him, of his life, of his methods of thought or work. But the other
day he died, and his life was written. There I have found, to my great
amazement, that Bushnell's method of looking at truth is defined by himself as
an exercise of the Imagination. He has actually published an article, which
appears in America bearing this title, "The Gospel a Gift to the Imagination."
Permit me to quote a sentence or two from the biography. Bushnell is speaking
in propria persona. "The Christian Gospel is pictorial. Its every line
or lineament is traced in some image or metaphor, and no ingenuity can get it
away from metaphor. No animal ever understood a metaphor. That belongs to man.
. . . All the truths of religion are given by images, all God's
revelation is made to the imagination, and all the rites, and services, and
ceremonies of the olden times were only a preparation of draperies and figures
for what was to come, the basis of words sometime to be used as metaphors of
the Christian grace. `Christ is God's last metaphor!` the express image of
God's person! and when we have gotten all the metaphoric meanings of His life
and death, all that is expressed and bodied in His person of God's saving help,
and new-creating, sin-forgiving, reconciling love, the sooner we dismiss all
speculations on the literalities of His incarnate miracles, His derivation, the
composition of His person, His suffering, plainly transcendent as regards our
possible understanding --the wiser we shall be in our discipleship. . . .
If we try to make a science out of the altar metaphors, it will be no gospel
that we make, but a poor dry jargon--(rather) a righteousness that makes nobody
righteous, a justice satisfied by injustice, a mercy on the basis of pay, a
penal deliverance that keeps on foot all the penal liabilities." One passage
more. "There is no book in the world that contains so many repugnances or
antagonistic forms of assertion as the Bible. Therefore, if any man please to
play off his constructive logic upon it, he can easily show it up as the
absurdest book in the world. But whosoever wants, on the other hand, really to
behold, and receive all truth, and would have the truth-world overhang him as
an empyrean of stars, complex, multitudinous, striving antagonistically, yet
comprehended, height above height, and deep under deep in a boundless score of
harmony--what man soever content with no small rote of logic and catechism,
reaches with true hunger after this, and will offer himself to the
many-sided forms of the Scripture with a perfectly ingenuous and
receptive spirit, he shall find his nature flooded with senses, vastnesses and
powers of truth such as it is even greatness to feel."
Gentlemen, after the old Evangelism, this is a
new world to live in. There is air here. Take the Gospel as a gift to the
Imagination, and you are entered into a large place. It is like a conversion.
We read the Bible before with a key. A lamp was put in our hands with which to
search for truth-- rather to search for Scripture proofs of a truth thrust down
our throats. We were not told the Bible was the lamp. I once saw an
hotel-keeper on a starlit night in autumn erect an electric light to show his
guests Niagara. It never occurred to the creature that God's dim, mystic
starlight was ten million times more brilliant to man's soul than ten million
carbons. When will it occur to us that God's truth is Light--self-luminous; to
be seen because self-luminous? When shall we understand that it has no speech
nor language, that men are to come to the naked truth with their naked eyes,
bringing no candle? The old theology was luminous once. But it is not now.
"Election," says Froude in "Bunyan," "Election, conversion, day of grace,
coming to Christ, have been pawed and fingered by unctuous hands for near two
hundred years. The bloom is gone from the flower. The plumage, once shining
with hues direct from Heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The most solemn of all
realities have been degraded into the passwords of technical theology." It is
from this that we are to emancipate ourselves, and, God helping us, others. We
have a Gospel in the new Evangelism which for a hundred years the world has
been waiting for. We have a Gospel which those who even faintly see it thank
God that they live, and live to preach it. But I am not quite done yet. What
will be, what are, the main hindrances to the acceptance of the new Evangelism?
They are mainly two.
(1) Unspirituality and (2) Laziness.
(1) All formal religions are efforts to escape
spirituality. It matters not what the form is--ritual, idols or doctrine, the
essence of all is the same--they are devices to escape spiritual worship. The
carnal mind is enmity against God--hates any spiritual exercise or effort. This
is at the bottom of the perpetuation of the old theology. There is nothing a
man will not do to evade spirituality. Do we not all know moods in which we
would rather walk twenty miles than take family worship? And there are moods in
which men find it of all efforts least easy to come into contact with living
truth. This is always difficult: to know His doctrine, a man must do the will
of God. The supreme factor in arriving at spiritual knowledge is not theology,
it is consecration. But for years and years--and it is one of the saddest
truths in this world--a preacher may go on manipulating his theological forms
without the slightest exercise of religion, unknown to himself, and unnoticed
by his people.
(2) The second obstacle is laziness. To make
doctrinal sermons requires no effort. A man has simply to take down his Hodge,
and there it is. Every Sabbath, though not formally expressed, he has the same
heads. And the people understand it, or at least they understood it twenty
years ago when he preached, and preached well and with real heart, in the bloom
of his early ministry. But for years now he has been a mere mechanic, a
repeater of phrases, a reproducer of Hodge. And the people--they too are spared
all effort. They are delighted with their minister. He in these days
preaches the Gospel.
A caution may be necessary. In His exhaustless
wisdom, in speaking on these subjects the Lord Jesus said: "No man having
tasted the old wine straightway desireth new." We can speak of these things
broadly to one another here, but we cannot with too much delicacy insinuate the
new Evangelism upon the Church. The old is better, men say; and if any man
really feels that it is better, I do not know that we should urge it upon him
at all. There are many saints in our Churches, and if the old wine is really
their life-blood, we can but wish them Godspeed with all humility. Younger men
will come to us, too, when our wine is old and the sun has set upon our new
theology; but to the many who are waiting for the dawn, and these are many, our
evangel may perhaps bring some light and fulfil gladness and liberty.
Least of all have we anything to do with wilfully
destroying the old. Christ was never destructive in His methods. It was very
exquisite tact, a true understanding of men and a delicate respect for them,
that made Him say, "I came not to destroy but to fulfil."
[1] "Statesman's Manual," p. 229;
vide Rigg, "Modern Anglican Theology," p. 15.
[2] áids,'p. 141.