The Method of the New Theology, and some of its Applications
Address delivered to Theological Society of
F. C. College, Glasgow, Jan., 1892.
I SHALL begin by congratulating you, and myself,
on the free theological atmosphere in which it is the lot of this society to do
its work. Never has there been fresher air in that dusty realm than there is
to-day; and if we pay the price for our freedom in bewilderment or doubt, in
the suspicion of our enemies, in the helplessness of our wisest friends to give
us certainty, we have at least the sympathy of the best around us, and the
stimulus of working in an age when theology is no longer stagnant, but the most
living of all the sciences. Of what we seem to be leaving behind us we can
speak without panic or regret. Much of what has been in faith or practice is
visibly passing away. But there is little trace in this process of deliberate
destruction; it resembles rather a natural decay. And it is the beauty of this
change, and the guarantee of its wholesomeness, that it has worked without
serious violence, that it has come, as all great kingdoms do, almost without
observation.
Though this may appear to us a crisis, it is well
to remind ourselves that to true thought crisis is chronic. There is nothing
superior about ourselves that we shall have the privilege of thinking in a new
way about theology. It is the world that progresses. Modern thought is not a
new thing in history, nor is it an unrelated thing. It is simply the growing
fringe of the coral reef, the bit of land far out, in contact on the one hand
with the unexplored sea--the bit of land far out in the ocean of unexplored
truth--on the other with the territory just taken in, and the place, in short,
where busy minds are making the additions to what other busy minds have built
through the ages into the growing continent of knowledge. After all, it is only
the old reef that we extend; it is on the past we build; and the man who
ignores the continuity of the past, and attempts to raise an island of his own,
may be sure that the world's lease of it will be very short. New ideas are, in
the main, a new light on old ideas, and nothing is gained by a ruthless
handling of the older gospel which our fathers held and taught, and which for
the most part made them better men than their sons.
But what is this newer theology, and what is the
direction of the movement where changes and perturbations come home to us in
such a society as this with so great an interest?
To some the new theology is a re-arrangement of
doctrines in a new order, a bringing of those into prominence which suit the
need and temper of the age, and an allowing of others to sink into shadow
because they are either distasteful to this generation or rest on a basis which
it will not honour. We are told, for example, that the accent in the modern
gospel is placed no longer upon faith, but rather upon love. We are told by
others that what they see is the intricate theology of Paul beginning to give
place to the simpler theology of John, or both being for the time forgotten in
the still simpler Christianity of Christ. To others the change is from the
great Latin conception of the Divine Sovereignty of Augustine and Calvin to the
earlier Greek theology, with its emphasis on the immanence of Christ, or to its
renaissance in the nineteenth century presentation of the incarnation, and the
Fatherhood of God.
But, important as these characterizations are, to
contrast the subject-matter of the new and the old Evangelism is not enough. In
a theological society we must get down to principles, and I wish in a word to
state what seems to me the essential nature of this change, and to illustrate
its practical value by plain examples.
The real contrast between the new and the old
theology is one of method. The way to make a sermon on the old lines, for
example, was to take down Hodge, or by an earlier generation Owen, and see what
the truth was, then to work from that--to proclaim what Hodge said, to expound,
assert, reiterate, appeal in the name of Hodge and anathematise and
excommunicate everybody who did not agree with Hodge. The new method declines
to begin with Hodge, or Owen, or even Calvin. It does not work from
truth, but towards truth. It aims not at asserting a dogma, but at
unearthing a principle. With all respect to authors, it yet declines authority.
These are two at least of its more obvious marks-- it does not only allow, but
insists on the right of private judgment, and it declines authority. These
propositions mean practically the same thing, and so far from being novelties
are of the first essence of Protestantism.
It is only to re-assert these propositions in a
different form to say that another characteristic of the new theology is its
essential spirituality. We are accustomed to hear it opposed on spiritual
grounds, but its spirituality is really its most outstanding feature, and as
contrasted with some at least of the old theology it has the exclusive right to
the name. The mark of the old theology was that it was made up of forms and
propositions. Filled no doubt with spirit once, that spirit had in many
instances wholly evaporated, and left men nothing to rest their souls on but a
set of phrases.
The task of the newer theology has been to pierce
below these phrases and seek out the ethical truth which underlay them: and
having found that, to set up the words and phrases round it once more if
possible; and where not possible, to set up new phrases and a more modern
expression. It is of course because men have been accustomed to these old forms
that they fail to recognise the truth when clothed in other expression, and
therefore raise the cry of heresy against all who take the more inward or
spiritual view.
Two classes in the community must of necessity,
and always, oppose the new foundation--the Pharisee who is not able to see
spirit for forms, and the lazy man who will not take the trouble to see spirit
in form. It is always easier to assert truth than to examine it, to accept it
ready made than to verify it for oneself, and we must always have a class who
are guilty of these intellectual sins, who mistake credulity for faith and
superstition for knowledge. The calm way in which these men assume that they
are right and put all the rest of us on our defence is a miracle of effrontery,
a miracle only exceeded in wonder by the tolerant way it is submitted to. I am
not sure but that if Christ were among us He would not denounce the Pharisee as
He did of old.
But it is not enough to say that the new
theological quest is a movement in the direction of spirituality. What is that
spirituality? Is it a mere vagueness, a substitution of the shifting sand of
the mysterious, and the undefined for the buttressed logic of the older
doctrines? On the contrary, it is the most definite thing in the world. Instead
of relaxing the hold on truth, the new method makes the grasp of the mind upon
it a thousand times more certain. Instead of blurring the vision of unseen
things, it renders them self-transparent; instead of making acceptance a matter
of mere opinion, or of upbringing, or of tradition, it forces truth on the mind
with a new authority--an authority never before to the same extent introduced
into theological teaching. That authority is the authority of law. The
basis--like the basis of all modern knowledge--of the coming theology is a
scientific basis. It is a basis on great ethical principles. It is not a series
of conceptions deduced from another central conception or grouped round a
favoured doctrine of a favourite Divine--a Calvinism, a
Lutheranism, an Arminianism, or any conceivable ism. It is
a grouping round law, spiritual, moral, natural law, a structure reared on the
eternal order of the world, and therefore natural, self-evident,
self-sustaining and invulnerable.
This method, dealing as it does with law and
spirit, ignores nothing, denies nothing, and formally supplants nothing in the
older subject-matter; but it tries to get deeper into the heart of it, and
seeks a new life even in doctrines which seem to have long since petrified into
stone. This was largely Christ's own method. He dealt with principles--His
teaching was mainly excavation--the disinterring of hidden things, the bringing
to light of the profound ethical principles hidden beneath Rabbinic subtleties
and Pharisaic forms.
The Reformation--Protestantism--these were large
attempts in the same direction, and modern thought is the heir to this spirit.
Being a process of growth, and not a series of operations upon specific
theological positions, this method is in the best sense constructive. It can
never destroy except empty forms. To be negative, to oppose or denounce
time-honoured doctrines is poor work--poor work which unfortunately many minds
and pens and pulpits are continually trying to do. The only legitimate way to
destroy an old doctrine is Christ's way to fulfil it. Instead of busying
themselves about its death and calling their congregations ostentatiously to
attend the funeral, the new theology will invite them rather to witness anew
the resurrection of the undying spirit still hidden beneath the worn-out body
of its older form.
As an illustration of what I mean, I propose to
select one or two Christian doctrines which in their current forms have lost
their power for thinking men, and try to show how these may live once more and
play a powerful part in current teaching. One or two of the greatest Christian
truths have already been so abundantly re-illuminated and re-spiritualised by
modern literature and preaching that one need only name them. An admirable case
is the doctrine of inspiration. It is idle to deny that the authority of the
Bible was all but gone within this generation. The old view had become
absolutely untenable, misleading and mischievous. But from the hands of
reverent men who have studied the inward characters of these books, we
have again got our Bible. The theory of development, the study of the Bible as
a library of religious writings rather than as a book; the treatment of the
writers as authors and not as pens; the mere discovery that religion has not
come out of the Bible, but that the Bible has come out of religion: these
announcements have not only destroyed with a breath a hundred infidel
objections to Scripture, but opened up a world of new life and interest to
Christian people.
So thoroughly has the spiritual as opposed to the
mechanical theory of inspiration imbued all recent teaching that the battle for
Scotland at least may be said to be now won. If there is anything further to be
said on the subject, indeed, it is to caution ourselves against going too far
or being very positive.
Modern criticism in this country, especially of
the Old Testament, is not in a good way. The permission to embark upon it at
all is sudden, and very few men are sufficiently equipped for a responsible
reconstruction. Probably in Old Testament criticism there are not ten competent
experts in the country, and these are all more or less disagreed, and what is
more, afraid to announce their disagreements lest the others should turn and
rend them. One of the greatest of these ten has just written an important book.
I happen to know that it is being handed about among the nine for a review in a
certain high-class theological monthly, and not a man of them will touch it.
Hasty conclusions as to authorship or canonicity
are as foreign to the scientific spirit as the old dogmatism. Guinness Rogers
has well pointed out that in the far future, when English has become a dead
language, almost no internal evidence would allow the literary critic to
allocate the authorship of John Gilpin, e.g., to the melancholy recluse
who wrote the Olney hymns; and in dealing with questions of Biblical authorship
the minute scholarship of this day, based on favourite words and particular
styles of thought, is often in danger of ignoring such broader facts as the
versatility of human nature, the changing moods of thinkers, the contradictions
which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exhibit within the same man's soul at the same
period, or at contrasted periods of his life of which history can keep no
cognisance.
This remark applies with even greater force to
the subject-matter of the Books. We have treatises written, for instance, on
the theology of Peter. Men talk of the Petrine conception of this and the
Petrine presentation of that; they contrast the Petrine standpoint with the
Pauline and the Johannine, and even go the length of fixing the proportion in
which the various theological truths were held in the Petrine system. The
absurdity of all this may be seen from a single fact. The entire Petrine
remains that have come down to us and upon which all these elaborate structures
are reared amount to a page or two, all that the apostle ever wrote or all that
is left to us. They could be read to a congregation in exactly half the time
that it would take a minister to deliver a half-hour's sermon. Think of the
absurdity of judging a man's theology, or the proportion in which he held its
various parts, by half a sermon, and you will never again hear the word Petrine
without a smile. The men, and especially the Germans, who allow internal
evidence--not seeing its excessive limitations--to be abused in this way are
the true literalists, and their provincial analysis can only hinder the victory
of a spiritual cause. If the new theology is the scientific spirit, that class
of work is its stultification.
But to pass on to another instance. The
unearthing of the tremendous ethical principle underlying the atonement is now
restoring that central doctrine to theology just when in its mechanical forms
it was on the point of being discredited by every thinking mind. The Salvation
Army preacher, it is true, still preaches it as a syllogism, and pays the
penalty in the utter apathy or mystification of his hearers at least on that
point. But no man who preaches the spirit of it, instead of the phrases of it,
will lose his audience. The man who makes words, even Bible words, the
substitute for thought, can never be understood of the common people at the
present day. There is nothing the street preacher needs to be warned against
with more earnestness than the mechanical preaching of the syllogisms of the
atonement. One listens often and with admiration and respect to the powerful
way the street preacher brings home the great facts of personal sin to the
crowd around him, to his almost melting appeal for instant decision to this
offer of salvation--nearly always in my experience glowing with real enthusiasm
and backed with an almost contagious faith and hope. But when he tries at that
point to answer the simple inquiry, How? when he stands face to face with the
question of the drunkard leaning against the lamp-post, "What must I, the
drunkard, standing here to-night in Argyle Street, do to be saved?" he takes
refuge in some text or metaphor, a proposition, and passes on. What I complain
of in Gospel addresses is that many have no Gospel in them, no tangible thing
for a drowning man to really see and clutch. They break down at the very point
where they ought to be most strong and luminous. To tell the average
wife-beater to take shelter behind the blood or to hide himself in the cleft is
to put him off with a phrase. I do not object to these metaphors, I believe in
metaphors. I go the length of holding that you never get nearer to truth than
in a metaphor; but you have not told this man the whole truth about your
metaphor, nor have you touched his soul or his affections with what lies
beneath that metaphor; and it falls upon his ear as a tale he has heard a
thousand times before. It is not obstinacy that keeps this poor man from
religion--it is pure bewilderment as to what in the world we are driving at.
The new theology when it preaches the atonement will not be less loyal to that
doctrine, but more. It will not take refuge in the poor excuse for slipshod
preaching and unthought-out doctrines that we must wait for God's light to
break. God's light breaks through some men's preaching, through some clear,
honest, convincing statement of truth, and not occultly. Faith cometh by
hearing, and if our plan of salvation is not telling upon our audience it is
blasphemy to blame God's spirit. The blame lies in our own spirit and in our
offering words instead of spirit, and in our neglect to spend time and thought,
in trying to get down to the professed meaning and omnipotent dynamic of the
law of Sacrifice.
If a man has not something more to say about the
atonement than the conventional phrases, let him be silent. By introducing
from time to time he may earn the cheap reputation of being orthodox; but
it is for him to consider whether that is an object for which his conscience
will let him work. There are thousands of tender and conscientious souls now in
our midst who cannot find that foothold on the conventional doctrine which they
are led to believe their teachers have, and without which they feel themselves
excommunicate from the work of the Church and the fold of Christ. If we see no
further behind these words, let us say so, and not keep up this fraud, or
preach these words, until we have sunk our spirits in them and can teach them
with vital force and truth.
* * * * *
Gentlemen, I do not for a moment mean that we are
to treat our congregations to dissertations on biology. Nature--human
nature--are to be to us but discoveries of things as they are, the expression
of principle, the theatre, on whose stupendous stage each can see with his own
eyes the great laws act.
And this leads me to a final statement. We have
seen that the method of the new Evangelism is to deal with principles. The
mental act by which we are to search for truth, truth being in this spiritual
form, is not therefore to be so much the reason, but the imagination. We are to
put up truth when we deliver truth to others, not in the propositional form,
but in some visual form--some form in which it will be seen without any attempt
to prove. Truth never really requires to be proved. The best you can do for a
law is to exhibit it.
Gentlemen, as a preparation for the work of the
new Evangelism in which you are to spend your lives, I commend you to the study
of the principles of the laws of God in nature, and in human nature: the
development of that seeing power, as opposed to mere logic, which discerns the
unseen through the seen. About the greatest thing a man can do, Ruskin tells
us, is to see something, and tell others what he sees.
The Gospel as Christ gave it was a gift to the
seeing power in man. His speech was almost wholly addressed to the imagination,
to the imagination in its true sense, and this, which is the highest language
of science, is also the language of poetry and of the poetry of the soul, which
is religion. Unless we can fill the new theology with what the soul sees and
feels, and sees to be true and feels to be living, it will be as juiceless and
inert as the old dogmatic.
For it is only a living spirit of truth that can
touch dead spirit, and the test of any theology is not that it is logically
clear or even intellectually solid, but that it carries with it some
sanctifying power.
These examples of the rejuvenescence of old
truths under the more spiritual treatment of an ethical theology are more or
less obvious. I wish in the time that remains to apply the method a little more
in detail to one particular department of theology, which is perhaps less
intruded upon by modern teachers. The revolt of the moral sense of this country
against the doctrine of a physical hell, and the appeal to a Judgment Day, has
lately led to almost complete silence on the whole subject of eschatology. Is
this great theme or any part of it --say the conception of a Day of
Judgment--not capable of a deeper ethical treatment? If the Divine judgment
upon sin lies in the natural law of heredity, may we not find among the laws of
the moral world some larger and more universal principle of judgment which
shall restore the appeal of these forgotten dogmas to their place in religious
teaching? It is quite clear we must discuss this or remain silent. No man can
now say such words to his people as these--I quote from no less an authority
than Jonathan Edwards,--"The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as
one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you. It is
nothing but His Hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it
is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to Hell last night; and
there is no other reason why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in
the morning. . . . There is nothing else to be given as a reason why
you do not this very moment drop down into Hell."[3]
That kind of thing is not over, though we
may hear little of it.
Many of you have seen some, at least, of the
great classical pictures of the Last Judgment. Here [in the next chapter] is
Ruskin's account of the greatest of them all, the Last Judgment of Tintoretto,
which hangs on a well-known church wall in Venice, in full view of the
congregation.
[3] Guinness Rogers` "Present-Day Religion and
Theology," p. 150.