The Church and Modern Life by Washington Gladden
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Washington Gladden >> The Church and Modern Life
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This, then, is the first great reason why our religion has gradually
become more rational. The rationality of the universe constantly
presented to our thought has developed a rationality in our thoughts
about the universe. The mind, like the dyer's hand, is subdued to what
it works in. The response of primitive man to the pressure of Nature
upon him was a response of wonder and awe and fear; his religion was
instructive, emotional; but through the long tuition of the ages, the
old nurse has taught him how to use his reason; and he now finds unity
where he once found strife, and order and law where once confusion and
chaos reigned. His religion has become rational.
But what do we mean when we say that man's great teacher has been
Nature? Nature, as we have seen, is instinct with Reason, and the Reason
which is revealed in Nature is only another name for God. It is the
immanent God, the Eternal Reason, who has been patiently disclosing
himself to us in the world round about us, and thus cleansing our minds
from the crude and superstitious conceptions with which in our ignorance
and fear we had invested him.
The second of the sources from which the influences have come for the
purification of religion is humanity itself.
We are told, in the Book of Genesis, that man is made in the image of
God; and the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, on which the entire
teaching of Jesus rests, is but a stronger statement of the same truth.
It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in
very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It
does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our
evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the
earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected
type before we can make up our minds about it. The eaglet just hatched
does not give us the right idea of the eagle, nor does the infant in his
swaddling clothes reveal to us the man. So it is with species and races;
if they are undergoing a process of development, we must wait for the
later stages of the process before we judge. The apple is not the crab,
but the Northern Spy; the horse is not the mustang, but the Percheron or
the German roadster. In estimating any living thing, you take into
consideration its possibilities of development; the ideal to which it
may attain must always be in sight.
In the same way when we think of man, we do not take the Patagonian as
the type, but the best specimens of European or American manhood.
If, then, we are taught to believe that man is a child of God, we should
be compelled to believe that it is the most perfectly developed man who
most resembles God. We have some conception of the ideal man. Our
conceptions are not always correct, but they are constantly improved, as
we strive to realize them. And in the ideal man we see reflected the
character of God. We are sure that a perfect humanity would give us the
best revelation we could have of divinity. If we could see a perfect
man, we could learn from him more about God than from any other source.
Most of us believe that a perfect Man appeared in this world nineteen
hundred years ago; and the best that we know about God we have learned
from him. More has been done by his life and teachings to purify
religion of its crudities and superstitions than by all other agencies.
The worst of the crudities and superstitions that still linger in our
own religion are due to the fact that the people who bear his name only
in part accept his teachings and very imperfectly follow his example. If
we could all believe what he has told us and do what he has bidden us,
our religion would soon be cleansed from its worst defilements.
The manifestation of the life of God in Jesus Christ we call The
Incarnation; and it was a manifestation so much more perfect than any
other that the world has seen, that we do well to put the definite
article before the word. Yet it is a mistake to overlook the fact that
God dwells in every good man, and manifests himself through him. And
whenever, in any character, the great qualities of truth and justice and
purity and courage and honor and kindness are exhibited, we see some
reflection of the character of God.
In many a home the father and the mother, by their faithfulness and
kindness and self-sacrifice, make it easy for the children to believe in
a good God; and in every community brave and true and saintly men and
women are revealing to us high qualities which we cannot help
interpreting as divine. We cannot imagine that God is less just or fair
or kind than these men and women are; they lift up our ideals of
goodness, and they compel us to think better thoughts of him in whom all
our ideals are united.
Thus it is that our humanity, as glorified by the Word made flesh, and
as lifted up and sanctified by the lives of good men and women, has been
a great teacher of pure religion. We have learned what to think about
God and how to worship him aright by what he has shown us in the living
epistles of his goodness and grace which he has sent into the world,
and, above all, in that "strong Son of God" whom we call our Master.
The other source from which the influences have come by which religion
has been purified, is that divine Spirit who is always in the world, and
always waiting upon the threshold of every man's thought, and in the
sub-conscious depths of every man's feeling, to enlighten our
understanding and purify our desires. To every man he gives all that he
can receive of light and power. To many his gifts are but meagre,
because their capacities are small and their receptivity is limited; but
there are always in the world open minds and docile tempers, to whom he
imparts his larger gifts. Thus we have the order of prophets and
inspired men, whose words are full of light and leading. In the Bible we
have a record of the messages given by such men to the world. In that
teaching, rightly interpreted, there is great power to correct the
errors and cleanse away the delusions and superstitions which are apt to
gather about our religion. We cannot estimate too highly the work that
has been done by these sacred writings in purifying our conception of
God.
It is possible, however, to treat this book in a manner so hard and
literalistic that it shall become a hindrance rather than a help to the
better knowledge of God. The one fact that it brings vividly before us
is that fact of progress in religious knowledge which we are now
considering. It shows us how men have gone steadily forward, under the
leadership of the divine Spirit, leaving old conceptions behind them,
and rising to larger and larger understanding of divine things. Any
treatment of the Book which fails to recognize this fact--which puts all
parts of the Bible on the same level of spiritual value and
authority--simply ignores the central truth of the Bible and perverts
its whole meaning.
The truth which we need to emphasize in our use of the Bible is the
truth that the same Spirit who gave the men of the olden time their
message is with us, to help us to the right understanding of it, and to
give us the message for our time. Nor is his illumination confined to
any guild or rank of believers; the day foretold by the prophet has
surely come, when the Spirit is poured upon all flesh, and the prophetic
gift may be received by all the pure in heart.
The one glorious fact of our religion--a fact but dimly realized as yet
by the church--is the constant presence in the world of the Spirit of
Truth. If there is anything at all in religion, this divine Spirit is
ready to be the Counselor, Comforter, and Guide of every human soul. And
we cannot doubt that the steadily enlarging conception of the character
of God is due to his gracious ministry.
* * * * *
Such, then, are the sources from which have come that better knowledge
of God which makes the religion of our time to differ from the religion
of past generations. And it will be seen that these three sources are
but one. It is the divine Reason and Love himself who has been revealing
himself to us in the unity and order of nature, in the enlarging life of
humanity, in the inspired insights and convictions of devout believers.
What we are looking upon is that continuing revelation of God to the
world which has been in progress from the beginning, and which will
never cease until the world is full of the knowledge of God as the sea
is full of water.
With this great and growing revelation the church is intrusted. Its
business in the world is to take this truth about God, this new truth,
this larger and fairer truth, which God himself, in the creation and
through the incarnation and by the Indwelling Spirit, has been clearing
up and lifting into the light, and fill modern life full of it. This is
the truth which modern life needs. Religion is a permanent fact, but its
forms change with advancing knowledge. There are forms of truth which
are suited to the needs of modern life. God himself is always at work
preparing the truth for present needs. It is the function of the church
to understand this truth, and make it known in every generation.
II
Our Religion and Other Religions
Our religion is the Christian religion. This is the form of faith which
the church in our country is organized to promote. Ours is a Christian
country.
This is not by virtue of any legal establishment of Christianity, for
one of the glories of our civilization is that first amendment to our
national constitution, which declares that "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof." Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jews, are just as
free to exercise their respective forms of religion in this country as
are the Christians. The government neither forbids nor fosters any kind
of faith.
Ours is a Christian country because nearly all the people of the country
are, by birth and by choice, identified with the Christian faith.
Still it is true that the freedom extended by our constitution to other
forms of faith has been claimed by some of their adherents, and we have
in the United States a goodly number of groups representing
non-Christian creeds. Of these the Jews constitute much the largest
number, there being, perhaps, six or seven hundred Jewish congregations
in all parts of the country. There are also sixty or seventy Chinese
temples, a few groups of Parsees and Mohammedans, a few hundred
companies of Spiritualists, and a few scores of societies of Ethical
Culture and Free Religion. All told there are not, probably, among the
eighty millions of our people, more than a million and a half who are
not either traditionally or nominally Christians.
Our contact with the Orient, on our western frontier, is likely,
however, to bring us into close relations, in the near future, with
other ancient forms of faith. The Christian church in modern life will
be compelled to meet questions raised by the presence of Buddhists and
Confucians and Mohammedans, and to prove its superiority to these
religions. The study of comparative religion has had hitherto purely an
academic interest for most of us; in the present century it is likely to
become for millions a practical question. Many a young man and young
woman will be forced to ask: "Why is the religion of my fathers a better
religion than that of my Hindu associate or my Japanese classmate?" The
answer, if wisely given, may be entirely satisfactory, but the question
must not be treated as absurd or irrelevant. In the face of the great
competitions into which it must enter, our religion must be ready to
give an intelligent account of itself.
One of the first questions to be asked when we take up this inquiry is,
What is the attitude of our religion toward the other religions? Perhaps
it is better to put the question in a concrete form and ask, What is the
attitude of the Christian people toward the people of other religions?
The answer to this question may not be as prompt and confident as we
could wish. Many, people who profess and call themselves Christians are
not so broad-minded or so generous hearted as they ought to be, and they
are inclined to be partisans in religion as well as in art or politics;
they think that all the truth and all the goodness are in the
institutions with which they are allied, and that all the rest are of
the evil one. But such people are not good representatives of
Christianity. They never learned any such judgment from him whom they
call their Master. And we may safely claim that those who have the mind
of Christ are tolerant and generous toward those whose opinions or whose
religious practices differ from their own. They do not forget that their
Master treated with the greatest sympathy men and women whose faiths
greatly differed from his own; that some of those who received his
strongest testimonies to the greatness of their faith, like the Roman
centurion and the Canaanitish woman, were pagans; that one of his most
intimate and gracious conversations on the deep things of the Spirit was
with a Samaritan woman, and that his representative hero of practical
religion was a Samaritan man whose genuine goodness he placed in sharp
contrast with the heathen selfishness of the priest and the Levite of
his own faith. No Christian ever learned to be a bigot by sitting at the
feet of Jesus Christ. And I think we may justly claim that those who
have entered into the spirit of the Christian religion are always
generous in their attitude toward those who worship by other forms of
faith.
They cannot forget that all these people whose creeds and rites differ
so greatly from their own are children of our Father, and that they can
be no less dear to him than we are; and it is therefore hardly possible
for them to imagine that he can have left them without some revelation
of saving truth. They approach, therefore, the religious beliefs of
other peoples with open minds, expecting to find in them elements of
truth, and desiring to put themselves into sympathetic and cordial
relations with those whose opinions differ from their own.
As has been said, not all those who are known as Christians have this
tolerant temper, because there are many who are known as Christians who
have but dim notions of what it means to be a Christian. It was once the
prevailing assumption that all religions were divided into two classes,
the true and the false; that ours was the true religion and all the
others were false religions. That the heathen were the enemies of God
was the common belief, and it was a grave heresy to insinuate that any
of them could be saved without renouncing their false religions and
accepting the true religion. This was the basis upon which the work of
foreign missions was long conducted, and there are still many who bear
the Christian name who have not yet reached any other conception.
But the church in modern life is learning to see this whole matter in a
different light. Our best modern missionaries decline to take this
attitude in dealing with men of other religions. They do not regard the
heathen as outside the pale of the divine compassion; they seek for
points of sympathy between their own beliefs and those of the people to
whom they are sent. From no other sources have come stronger testimonies
to the sympathy of religions. We must not, these veteran missionaries
insist, assume that our religion is the only true religion, while all
the others are false religions. We may well assume that all human forms
of faith are more or less imperfect--our own as well as theirs, and
invite them to a candid comparison of the differing systems. If our own
is really superior, if it meets universal human needs more perfectly, we
ought not to fear such a candid comparison. But we must be ready to see
and approve the good that is theirs, if we wish them to accept the good
that is ours.
This is not admitting that there is no difference--that one religion is
as good as another; we should stultify ourselves by making any such
admission. But it is a willingness to recognize truth and goodness
everywhere, and to rejoice in them. And we must show that we are not
afraid to take from the many truth which has been revealed to them more
clearly than to us. If we believe in the universal fatherhood and the
omnipresence of the Holy Spirit, we must expect to find, in every form
of faith, some elements that our Christianity needs. In fact
Christianity, through all its history, has been appropriating truth
which it has found in the systems with which it has come in contact, and
it is one of the glories of Christianity that it has the power to do
this.
A great Christian scholar has just published a book entitled "The Growth
of Christianity," in which he shows how this has been done. He finds
that "just as Jewish morality was ennobled and beautified by the
teaching of Christ and yet made an essential element of that teaching,
so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic
virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while
remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process
cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and
development as is the privilege of every truly living institution."[8]
It is true, as one critic suggests, that in taking in these foreign
elements Christianity not only made some important gains, but also
suffered some serious losses. Greek philosophy and Asian mysticism and
Roman legalism are responsible for certain perversions of Christianity,
as well as for enlargement of its content. We have great need to be
careful in these assimilations; some kinds of food are rich but not
easily digested. But it is, as I have said, a chief glory of
Christianity that it possesses this assimilative power. It is the
natural fruit of faith in the divine fatherhood. We ought to be able to
believe that God has some revelations to make to us through our brethren
in other lands, as well as to them through us. It is the possession of
this power which fits Christianity to be the universal religion.
It has already given some striking proofs of the possession of this
power. We have had, once, upon this planet, a great Parliament of
Religions, in which the representatives of all the great faiths now
existing in the world were gathered together for comparison of beliefs
and experiences. It was, perhaps, the most important religious gathering
which has ever assembled. The presiding officer, in his opening address,
thus described its import:--
"If this congress shall faithfully execute the duties with which it has
been charged, it will become a joy of the whole earth and stand in human
history like a new Mount Zion crowned with glory and making the actual
beginning of a new epoch of brotherhood and peace.
"In this congress the word 'religion' means the love and worship of God
and the love and service of man. We believe the Scripture 'Of a truth
God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth God
and worketh righteousness is accepted of him.' We come together in
mutual confidence and respect, without the least surrender or compromise
of anything which we respectively believe to be truth or duty, with the
hope that mutual acquaintance and a free and sincere interchange of
views on the great questions of eternal life and human conduct will be
mutually beneficial.
"The religious faiths of the world have most seriously misunderstood
and misjudged each other, from the use of words in meanings radically
different from those which they were intended to bear, and from a
disregard of the distinctions between appearances and facts, between
signs and symbols and the things signified and represented. Such errors
it is hoped that this congress will do much to correct and to render
hereafter impossible."
Such was the purpose of this parliament, such the spirit which prompted
the calling of it, and found utterance in its conferences. It was surely
a notable and beautiful thing for, the adherents of these dissimilar
faiths, whose ordinary attitude toward one another has always been
suspicious and oppugnant, to come together in this friendly way, seeking
a better understanding, and emphasizing the things that make for unity.
And whose was this parliament? Which religion was it that conceived of
it, and made provision for it, and set in motion the influences that
drew these hostile bands into harmony? It was the Christian religion
which gave us this great endeavor after unity. And it is highly
improbable that such a movement would have originated in any other than
a Christian country, or among the followers of any other Leader than the
Man of Nazareth. It was the natural thing for the disciples of Jesus to
do; and while many men of the other faiths yielded to this gracious
influence, and were thus brought under the power of the bond that unites
our common humanity, it is not likely that any of them would have taken
the initiative in such an undertaking.
We may hope that this is not the last parliament of religions; that in
the days before us such manifestations of the unity of the race will not
be uncommon. And we are sure that the leaders of all such endeavors will
be found among the followers of the Prince of Peace.
Here, then, we find one clear answer to the question with which we
started. The Christian confessor who is confronted with the question
"What reason have you for thinking that the religion of your fathers is
better than any other form of faith?" may answer, first, "It is better
because it cares more for the unity of the race than any other religion
cares; because it believes more strongly in the essential brotherhood of
all worshipers; because it teaches a larger charity for men of
differing beliefs, and more perfectly realizes the sympathy of
religions. It is far from being all that it ought to be, on this side of
its development; many of its adherents are still full of bigotry and
intolerance and Pharisaic conceit; but these are contrary to its
plainest teachings, and all its progress is in the direction of larger
charity for men of all religions. Already, in spite of its failures, it
has shown far more of this temper than any other religion has exhibited;
and when it gets rid of its own sects and schisms, and comes closer to
the heart of its own Master, it will have a power of drawing the peoples
together which no other religion has ever thought of exercising."
I have spoken of the fact that Christianity claims to be a universal
religion. That was the expectation with which its first messengers were
sent forth. They were bidden to go into all the world and preach the
gospel to every creature. There has never been any other thought among
the loyal followers of Jesus than that the day is coming when every knee
shall bow to him and every tongue confess him.
This expectation of universality is not shared by all the religions of
the earth. Many of them are purely ethnic faiths; they grow out of the
lives of the peoples who adhere to them; it does not seem to be supposed
that any other peoples would care for them or know what to do with them.
The old Romans had a saying, "_Cujus regio, ejus religio_"--which means,
Every country has its own religion. The earlier Hebrews had the same
idea; they thought that every people had a god of its own. Jehovah was
their God; Baal was the god of the Phoenicians, and Chemosh was the god
of Moab. They believed that Jehovah was a stronger God than any of these
other deities, but they did not seem to doubt their existence or their
potency. Even the prophet Micah says: "For all the peoples will walk
every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of
Jehovah our God for ever and ever."[9] The later prophets gained the
larger conception of universality; they believed that there was but one
supreme God, and therefore but one religion, to the acceptance of which
all mankind would at last be brought. The narrower conception of
religion as a national or racial interest has, however, prevailed and
still prevails among many peoples. The Hindu religion, which numbers
many millions of votaries, has no expectation of becoming a world
religion. Indeed, it could not well entertain any such expectation; the
system of caste, on which it rests, makes it necessarily exclusive. It
has no missionary impulse; its adherents are content with a good which
they do not seek to share with other peoples. The same thing is true of
many of the minor faiths.
Now it is manifest that religions which do not expect to be universal
are not likely to exceed their own expectations. "According to your
faith be it unto you" is as true of systems as of men. And none of us is
likely to be strongly drawn to a faith which has really no invitation
for us, no matter how stoutly it may maintain its own superiority. No
religion which has only a tribal or racial significance can make any
effective appeal to our credence. The note of universality must be
struck by any religion which claims our suffrages.
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