[ p. 90 ]
WE HAVE SEEN how natural, and almost universal, was the development of the belief in anthropomorphic deities. Equally natural and widespread was the expectation that such deities would occasionally communicate with human beings. This is such a reasonable assumption that atheists have often urged the absence of any universal and absolutely certain revelation as a reason for not believing in God. On the other hand, supporters of the traditional belief in revelation used the argument against the deists of the eighteenth century, who proclaimed a belief in God on rational grounds but rejected the dogmas of “revealed religion.” It is not therefore surprising that from prehistoric times man has looked for communications from his deities and has lent a ready ear to anyone who could plausibly support a claim to have received them. In these circumstances, too, it is natural that many people should have come forward with such claims. The wish is father to the thought, and a lively expectation, amidst intense emotional excitement such as religious exercises often induce, is a fertile source of self-deception. In addition, the prestige and power and even economic advantage obtained by those able to convince their fellows that they possess such revelations, become a further inducement both to self-deception and to deliberate fraud. Divine revelations have been sought and seen in every unusual phenomenon of nature, in the effect of drugs, in psychological abnormalities, in incidents and experiences of religious ceremonial, in solemn vigil and [ p. 91 ] quiet meditation. Priests, soothsayers and prophets have acquired reputations for a capacity to receive and interpret these communications. And records of special revelations in varied forms have been preserved and elaborated in oral tradition and sacred scriptures.
The record of what men have believed to be revelations from God is a strange mixture of sordid deception, fantastic nonsense, tragic error, well intentioned fraud, pleasant illusion, wholesome legend, enslaving tradition, stimulating faith, lofty idealism and penetrating moral insight. Among the human intermediaries of these alleged revelations, however, it is important to distinguish two types: First, the priests, who carry on a tradition, teaching an accepted form of revelation or practicing a traditional method of receiving and interpreting divine communications. They perform their functions voluntarily and are intermediaries by profession, often inheriting their traditional office and usually being specially inducted into it by their predecessors. Second, the prophets, who receive their alleged revelations involuntarily and frequently introduce innovations upon the tradition. One and the same person may sometimes perform both functions, but the prophet is usually outside the ranks of the professional intermediaries and, for this reason and because of his innovations, often finds himself in conflict with the established priesthood. The motives and the emotional grounds of belief in the two classes are often mixed, including fear, wishful thinking and moral conviction. But this distinction of motives is important, especially in the case of the prophets. Progress in religion is made through the work of the prophet who is moved by moral conviction. We need not make any assumptions regarding the source of his revelations to recognize in him the genuine prophet, compared to whom the other is a mere pseudo prophet or soothsayer. The genuine prophet has a message that is new to him and his hearers, a message [ p. 92 ] that impresses him with its distinctive moral importance; and he labors under the conviction that it is given to him of God to preach it.
The moral genuineness of the great prophets is beyond question. Mohammed preached with high courage against the idolatry and low moral standards of his pagan compatriots, working under a conviction of his mission that had come upon him after many years of “seeking” in which scraps of Christian and Jewish teaching had convinced him of the inferiority of the paganism of the Arab tribes. For long he feared that he and all his people must be consigned to hell by the one true God for their sins and idolatry. The hardness and bitterness of traditional racial and religious lines long inhibited any other solution, for it was very little indeed that Mohammed knew of the higher religions. It was a revolutionary thought, and a genuine moral insight, that came to him in his vigil, with a vision of the angel bidding him to recite:
Thy Lord is most gracious,
Who taught by means of the pen.
Taught man what he knew not.[1]
To the earnest but ignorant caravan leader it was a wonderful illumination — that the great God of the sacred writings would be gracious even to the sinful pagan.
To Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, the problem of salvation presented itself in a different light. The doctrine of transmigration, with its endless chain of lives in each of which the individual atoned by his suffering for the sins of the previous existence, presented itself to the Indian mind, then as now, as a threat rather than a hope. It was something [ p. 93 ] from which one must try to escape. The Brahmanism of the day sought this release in mystic contemplation, the cultivation of trance states and the practice of severe asceticism. Gautama tried these without success, subjecting himself to terrible privations, before there came to him the enlightenment that revealed a better way. The great need, as the Upanishads [2] taught, was to overcome the desires that maintained the chain of being. But the true way to do this, Gautama now became convinced, was by the life of simple faith, purity, righteousness and kindliness, comprised in what he defined as the “eightfold path.” It was this insight into a better way that gave to him his sense of a prophetic destiny. It obtained for him, among his followers, the title of “the Enlightened One” and eventual deification. The “ path” is not beyond criticism from the standpoint of the developed social consciousness of the twentieth century, but it was a wonderful advance on the traditions of the day, and Gautama’s faithful teaching and practice of it have earned for him a place among the very greatest of the moral and religious leaders of mankind.
These and many other figures from non-Christian religious literature can be set beside the great prophetic figures of the Hebrew-Christian tradition. Even from as early as 3500 b.c., in ancient Egypt, we have records preserved of prophetic utterances earnestly expounding ethical teaching in the name of religion.[3] In Pythagoras and others, including Socrates with his daemon, Greece had prophets as well as philosophers. That these great prophetic leaders are genuine, in the sense that they earnestly believed in their own prophetic mission and made important contributions to the moral and religious life and thought of their times, there can be no doubt. [ p. 94 ] Whether their spiritual insight was in any sense a revelation to them from some form of spiritual reality independent of their own and other human minds, is quite another question. They certainly were often mistaken as to the kind of spiritual being from whom they believed their revelations to come. The conflicting views they express indicate that the so-called process of revelation, though it has led the way in the unfolding of higher and higher ideals, is far from being a source of pure and absolute truth. The orthodox theologies have usually struggled to explain away the contradictions within their own tradition, and have maintained that the revelations of their own prophets are true and that the others are not genuine revelations at all. But the ethical teaching of East and West, of Greek, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese sages, rises at its best to a height so nearly the same that such insular arrogance is precluded. If the ethico-religious development of any one people has been achieved by the human mind, unaided by any superhuman power, then the same must be true of all. And if any superhuman power has been at work, aiding in this moral and religious development of mankind, then it certainly succeeds in no more than instilling a very gradual enlightenment amid much illusion and error.
Yet the claim of the genuine prophet that his teaching is not merely his own, but is given him by a Source beyond himself, is too persistent to be dismissed without explanation. However, in our recognition of the division within the self that lies at the root of religious experience, and of the effect of the persistent presence of the altruistic will, we have at hand an adequate explanation of the prophetic phenomenon. The genuine prophet works under the compelling influence of a moral conviction. And it arises not merely from the social tradition around him nor from his own ego. Rather it is thrust upon him, more or less against his egoistic will and traditional social influences, by the disinterested will to the [ p. 95 ] good that is deeply rooted in his own personality. He is a man who has concerned himself with the moral issues of his day more deeply than the rest of his contemporaries. He is an earnest and sensitive soul. In wrestling with his problem he passes through a period of spiritual culture and psychological preparation that quickens his responsiveness to the subtle influence within of that will to the good which reaches beyond the habitual impulses of the ego. Gradually that growing influence gives new meaning to his problems until, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly, he sees them in a new light. A glorious new truth has dawned upon his mind. It is more than the teaching of his fathers; more, he feels sure, than his own sinful heart could devise. It is God who has revealed it to him. Such is his natural conviction. And such, if we agree to give the divine name to the altruistic will within us, we may recognize it to be. It is then God, as immanent in the prophet’s soul, that has given him his insight and his commission. Whether God, thus immanent, is but one organic, active part of a spiritual being far transcending his manifestation here is a question into which we have still to inquire.
Upon one feature of the prophet’s experience perhaps a further word should be said: the matter of visions, voices and other strange experiences that often accompany his receipt of the revelation. These psychological phenomena are, of course, no proof of any superhuman influence, though they often do much to convince the prophet himself of the superhuman source of his insight. But neither do they suggest that the explanation we have given in terms of normal moral development is unsound. The great prophets have attained their “revelations” out of the travail of their souls. They have been seekers of truth with an intensity that has often put great strain upon them. Or they have struggled with a moral problem that could find a solution only in a revolu [ p. 96 ] tionary change of personal attitude and customary thought, against which the ego has naturally fought hard and long. It has been no easy matter to break the moral (or immoral) bonds in which a people has been bound for generations, and the psychological strain has often been enormous. At such times the new insight, quite naturally, comes with a great wave of feeling, creating vivid visual or auditory imagery or other unusual psychological phenomena. Sometimes the prophet may be of a mental type especially susceptible to such experiences, but the fact that he had such experiences does not necessarily indicate that he must have been so. Even a very well balanced, normal personality, undergoing a great revulsion of feeling following a tremendously important discovery (especially after a long period of severe mental strain, and under conditions of strong suggestion due to antecedent beliefs in the supernatural) , is likely to experience such abnormal psychological phenomena. Such experiences therefore, when recorded by the prophet, are evidences neither of the reliability nor of the unreliability of his message, but rather of the deep travail of soul through which he has passed to attain it.
(a) The Sacrifice of Communion. — There is a form of social experience that we call fellowship or communion. It does not require overt communication. All that is necessary is to be in the presence of some other person or persons, to feel that there is good will between them and you, and to believe that they share your major interests and purposes and that you share theirs. Such fellowship or communion is a subtle source of spiritual strength and comfort among human beings. It is not surprising therefore that when men attained a personalized conception of their gods they should have sought such communion with them. Much of the public [ p. 97 ] ceremonial of religion is designed to cultivate this sense of communion. In any public ceremony there is, of course, a tendency to realize a sense of communion with the other participants. But a religious occasion differentiates itself from one that is merely social and secular by the deeper sense of communion that it generates, an experience that the believer naturally tends to interpret as fellowship with the divine, and one that the unbeliever also may feel and cherish however he explains it.
Among the most dramatic and striking of religious cere monials are those of sacrifice. In these practices we find chiefly expressed the two ideas of atonement and communion, the one being sometimes much more prominent than the other. For the present let us pay attention to the aspect of communion, usually symbolized by the participants’ eating some portion of the sacrifice. From the beginning of human experience the sharing of food has been a real expression of genuine community of life. From time immemorial such sharing has been a recognized symbol of fellowship, and man has found no more eloquent way of expressing his faith in communion with his god, and with his fellow servants of the same god, than in the symbolism of the common meal. Even though the idea of God has been so exalted and spiritualized that he can no longer be thought in any sense to partake of food himself, the Christian religion retains such a ceremony as its most solemn act of worship. The Christian, who sees his ideal of the divine take living shape in the person of Jesus Christ, joins in memorial celebration of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and finds in its eloquent symbolism, replete with stirring memories and lofty ideals, a means of cultivation of a deep and rich sense of communion with God.
In explanation of the sense of value found in such occasions of communion, both social and religious, it has been customary to postulate the satisfaction of a primitive herd [ p. 98 ] instinct or to point to the fact that human beings have been so conditioned as to feel security in union with their fellows. This, however, scarce suffices to explain religious communion, which is independent of numbers and can attain its full richness and reality in solitude as well as in company. Our analysis of religious experience, however, suggests another explanation. The God with whom the religious man communes is within him as the most fundamental feature of his own personality — the disinterested will to the good. With that disinterested will his ego is, at ordinary times, in frequent conflict. But in the period of communion the ego loses its prominence. It surrenders its central place to the thought of a good that is not a good-for-me. The tension between the ego and the disinterested will relaxes, and the mind enjoys a sweet sense of harmony and peace within through union of the familiar egoistic self with something infinitely more worth while. But the value is more than merely that of the solace or bliss of the moment. For the self, always more or less divided, has gained in integration and power. In the moments of communion it has achieved an inner adjustment the influence of which will remain, making it easier thereafter to live in harmony with God and man,
(b) The Prayer of Communion. — In public ceremonial, the cultivation of a sense of communion is undoubtedly aided by the presence of others co-operating in the act of worship. There may be a very deep and real fellowship of kindred minds among those participating, and powerful forces of psychological suggestion may be brought to bear upon the worshipers. But these extraneous influences are not essential to the generation of the experience of communion. It arises also in private prayer and meditation. When prayer consists merely of petitions this subtler subjective effect is probably very little felt. But prayer on that level has little in it that is genuinely religious. It is just one of many ways in which [ p. 99 ] the individual tries to get what he wants. However, a very slight acquaintance with the literature of prayer reveals that the prayer of communion is a thing of far deeper significance. Far more than any acts of public worship, it has been the medium of insight and the source of power to the great religious personalities of history. One cannot study the literature of devotion without realizing that those who practice prayer in this spirit find in it a very precious and sustaining experience. But it is something that is not easily attained, something in which the richer rewards come only to the persistent and zealous practitioner. In the words of Thomas à Kempis, “it is a great art to commune with God.”
Why is it that people who believe in a personal God find it difficult to attain a sense of communion with him? This is an interesting and important question for the understanding of religious experience, and the answer proves illuminating. For that answer we may turn to a manual written by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick [4] which, for more than a quarter of a century, has enjoyed so wide a popularity among educated religious people that it must be regarded as an accurate expression of their own experience. Dr. Fosdick’s answer is not that such experiences are mystical and require a special type of mind, a special spiritual culture or a special saintliness. It is, he says, rather that people tend to begin the practice of prayer with the wrong attitude, and finding it unsatisfactory give up prayer without learning to cultivate the right attitude. The wrong attitude, he says, is the begging attitude, in which prayer is thought to be a means of securing divine favor, even in material things. This is a survival from primitive religion and from childish ideas of God. Disappointed with its results the supplicant loses faith in the practice. Sometimes he keeps it up simply as a” spiritual exercise,” but in the absence of the development of the right attitude finds this of little [ p. 100 ] value. The right attitude, says Fosdick, involves belief in a “Presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts,’’ and the practice of “conversation” with that Presence as a friend.
To understand the significance of this statement we must recall what we have already learned of the origin of man’s belief in God — the divided self, the self-conscious ego, and its discovery, rooted deep within the self, of another and higher will that seeks in and through each person the good of all. This is the “Presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts.” No one could find it while his mind was occupied with petitions for divine favor. Neither could one find it who regarded prayer as a religious exercise to be performed for self-improvement. And when, with the fading of belief in a personal God, prayer has become simply meditation, and meditation is pursued for the purpose of spiritual self-culture, it, too, tends to remain self-centered and so fails in its purpose. That is probably the reason why people who give up belief in a personal God usually do not, in spite of the exhortations of humanists and ethical culture societies, give much time to any kind of religious exercise. Meditation, if it is to constitute a genuine spiritual exercise broadening the stream of the deeper spiritual life and strengthening its power over the ego,[5] must bring the ego face to face with a spiritual reality more fundamental and more worthy than itself. And it must bring the ego to glad acknowledgment of the existence and worth of that other and higher will — which means that the ego must in all humility acknowledge that that disinterested will to the good is indeed both other and higher than itself.
This may sound as though we have given a naturalistic psychological explanation of the most sacred and beautiful [ p. 101 ] thing in religious experience — the sense of communion with God. Perhaps we have. It all depends upon whether the naturalist can carry the explanation one step farther and give a nontheistic explanation of the origin and activity within man of a will that reaches out, not merely to seek the good of the organism within which it is found nor even of the tribe or race or species to which that organism belongs, but rather to realize the greater good, wherever it may be and whatever the cost to the individual within whom that will is found. It is such a will that tends to confront the religious man when he practices what he calls “communion with God.” The naturalist may find it through meditation, and without the stimulus that comes from belief in its abiding presence and constant availability in an eternal Spiritual Reality in which he lives and moves and has his being. It must be admitted that, hitherto, not many have learned to find it in that way. But that does not prove that their theory of its ultimate nature is wrong, for people of many creeds have found it and interpreted it differently.
It is only in religious thinking at its clearest and best that the full scope of that will to universal good is recognized. But its factual existence cannot be doubted. Its otherness from the system of appetitive impulses and habits directed to the individual’s own welfare and pleasures is obvious. Its superior moral validity is everywhere acknowledged. In the course of man’s religious development its persistent presence has increasingly made itself felt; its true nature has gradually been more fully revealed, more adequately understood. In communion with it, when communion is attained, man rightly feels that he has fellowship with a spiritual power that is more than what he ordinarily conceives himself to be — his interests focused on and rooted in his own private organism. Traditionally he calls it God, and has usually believed that it is, in some still more significant way, independent of and [ p. 108 ] greater than himself. Whether he is right in this view we have yet to inquire. But even at this stage we must recognize that there is reason in the traditional view. And we can appreciate also the reason why the religious man has cherished those forms of worship and tradition which have enabled him to set aside the limitations of his narrower and lesser self and enter into communion, within his own soul, with this Presence that he calls divine.
We have referred to the idea of communion as one of the two most important conceptions underlying the practice of sacrifice. But usually the more prominent of these two concepts is that of atonement. The worshiper believes that he has in some way offended the deity and so cut himself off from communion or favor. The sacrifice is an effort to rectify this situation, to secure an “at-one-ment,” a restoration of the proper relationship, “to get right with God.” The reason why this belief in the need for atonement plays such a large part in religion becomes obvious when we reflect upon what we have discovered concerning the birth of religion in the individual and the race. Moral experience acquires its religious character in the conflict between the ego and the altruistic will, when the demand of the latter is felt or thought of as more than merely one of the individual’s own desires; i.e., as having a distinct authority such as does not belong to the mere expression of one’s own will. But this experience becomes impressive only when the conflict is sharp and the cleavage deep. It is when the ideal of disinterested devotion to the good holds its place firmly above and beyond the aims of the ego, and the ego strains against it, that the altruistic will begins to appear as a will that is other and higher than one’s own. In brief, it is through conviction of sin that men become convinced that they have found God. Thus the situation in [ p. 103 ] which the religious consciousness becomes primarily and most profoundly impressed with the transcendent reality of the divine being is also one that impresses the individual with his personal separation from and opposition to his God.[6] The same circumstances that produce in the individual the distinctive religious belief in God tend to convince him also of the need of atonement.
This does not mean that it is the person who is in fact most egoistic and whose conduct is most contrary to general moral ideals who becomes most strongly impressed by a belief in a transcendent God. It is not by sinning that people come under conviction of sin, but by hungering and thirsting after righteousness. It is the pure in heart who see God, because the finer and nobler a person’s conduct becomes in actual practice, the more sensitive does he tend to become to moral distinctions and the higher grows the reach of his ideal. We do not catch up to our ideals by practicing them. They have a way of growing by geometrical progression while practice advances by arithmetical progression. It is not that way that people become morally smug and self-satisfied, but rather through lowering their ideals to a so-called “practical” level, easily maintained by their socially instilled habits.
Thus there arises an inevitable cleavage within the religious consciousness. It begins with conviction of sin. This is deepened when the moral ideal is interpreted as the expression of a divine will. The religious consciousness thus early develops a sense of separation from God. Yet its satisfaction requires the cultivation of a sense of communion. This is rightly sought in the effort to bring moral practice into harmony with the moral ideal. But the more successful this effort in moving upward toward the ideal, the more does the ideal itself tend to rise beyond the achievement. As the apostle Paul [ p. 104 ] found, the most meticulous keeping of the law brought no sense of spiritual peace. It only deepened the sensitivity of his conscience and created a profound sense of the insufficiency of the righteousness that is of the law. Paul’s experience is not peculiar. It is rather typical of every mind that is really in earnest on moral questions. The more one strives to live up to the moral ideal, the more clearly conscious one becomes of how far short of the highest ideal one falls. Thus, when the ideal is thought of as the will of God and its attainment is thought necessary to true communion with God, that sense of communion becomes a goal that forever eludes the seeker’s grasp. The assurance that comes, as William James says, through the firmer grasp of religious realities must therefore be found, if it can be attained at all, in some other way. Atonement (which is an at-one-ment) cannot be achieved through “the works of the law.”
It is for this reason that historic religion has always striven to present some other way or ways of atonement; and these, when offered, have usually been readily accepted because so much easier than the hard and unsatisfying way of obedience to the moral law. Commonest of them have been the sacrifices of atonement. The social, commercial and legal analogies of gifts, payments and fines naturally suggested the practice and made it seem rational. Its psychological efficacy depends upon the power of suggestion and is, of course, greatly assisted by elaborate ceremony and mass participation. But wherever religion has attained a high ethical tone some of the finer spirits have seen through the subtle self-deception of such practices and risen up to protest against them. Thus Gautama rejected the elaborate Brahman rituals, and Micah and other of the great Hebrew prophets rose up in protest against the sanguinary ceremonies of the priests. " What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” [7]
[ p. 105 ]
But this is the kind of ethical purification of religion that takes away a fiction which, though a moral hindrance, has had a certain psychological value. It is moral advance at the cost of mental peace and satisfaction, for it does nothing to meet the need that the fiction formerly supplied. The protests of Micah and his peers therefore went almost unheeded, and the followers of Gautama found new ways of atonement. So long as righteousness is conceived in legalistic terms and God is regarded as a lawgiver, there seems to be no way in which the sensitive religious consciousness can persuade itself that it has made its peace with God save by penances and sacrifices of atonement. The only real escape is to sweep away the whole legalistic conception of righteousness. This, as we shall see later,[8] is what Jesus did. But his followers, while they preserved his teaching, failed to grasp the revolutionary nature of his insight.
The gist of the matter is this: God, as conceived by Jesus, receives and forgives the sinner, not for the purity gf heart and life he has actually attained, but for that which he penitently and faithfully strives to attain. Jesus had so profound a conviction of the love of God and so deep a sympathetic understanding of the weakness of sinners that he declared that God receives sinners as sinners, providing that they are aware of their sinfulness and strive against it. The essential insight is that the attitude of penitent faith in itself constitutes a harmonizing of the will of man with the will of God, for the attitude of penitent faith is a will to the good that persistently, though falteringly, pursues an ideal which moves ever ahead of it.
The most influential of the disciples of Jesus was Paul. He was keenly conscious of the futility of the pursuit of spiritual peace by “works of the law,” and recognized that in the teaching of Jesus faith had superseded the law. Yet he could not entirely rid his mind of legalism. Conceiving morality as a [ p. 106 ] matter of obedience to a divine law, and religion as a life of penitent faith led by people who, in spite of their best efiEorts, constantly fall short of the demands of the law, his problem was to see how a divine Lawgiver could justify himself in forgiving sinners merely because they were penitent. Paul solved the problem by seeing in the death of Jesus a paying of the penalty for all mankind.[9] To a legalist in ethics the problem was a real one and the solution ingenious. But when moral worth is interpreted, as it was by Jesus,[10] in terms of personal orientation and effort rather than mere external conformity with a moral law, the problem disappears. But since, through most of human history, morality has been conceived in external and legalistic terms, the theory of a substitutionary atonement has served to mediate the transition of thought from the conception of sin as a breaking of the law that must needs be punished by the Lawgiver, to the conception of the life of faith as the humble effort of an imperfect soul to walk with God. Whether God be conceived as merely immanent or also as transcendent, it is to this latter conception of the religious life that our analysis of religious experience points.
For all the higher religions the fact of physical evil has always constituted a problem. The higher religions tend to exalt their conceptions of both the goodness and the power of God. But how are these beliefs to be reconciled with the facts of disease and death, storm and drought? The forces of nature mingle so much harshness and niggardliness with their benefits that it is hard to believe them uniformly well disposed toward man. It must be admitted that the belief that they are ordered by an intelligent being for the good of mankind [ p. 107 ] is a belief held in spite of the facts rather than a natural inference derived from them. Our ignorance is such that it is always possible to argue that every evil may, if only we knew the whole truth, be seen to be a blessing in disguise. But such a contention is an assertion of faith in spite of the evidence, rather than a conclusion validly inferred from experience.
This situation has never been more cogently presented than it was by David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume allows the skeptic, Philo, to be convinced by the argument from the evidences of design in the cosmos “that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.” He points to “the uniformity and steadiness of general laws” as refuting the suggestion that this superhuman cause of order may be only “finitely perfect; though far exceeding mankind.” Nevertheless, he argues that this “original source of all things . . . has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold,” citing the manifold physical and moral evil of the world as proof. The conclusion is that the moral qualities of the deity do not even remotely resemble those of man. So the one conclusion of speculative theism, established by the argument from design, is reduced to a proposition of no practical significance, for, as one of the other debaters observes, “to what purpose establish the natural attributes of the deity while the moral are still doubtful and uncertain?”
It may be admitted that, when the question of theism is approached from the purely nonreligious standpoint of metaphysical speculation on the origin and order of the world, Hume’s conclusion is reasonable. But these speculations, as we have seen, are not the real source of religious faith. That lies in the moral and religious experience of man’s inner self — in the discovery therein of a will that” seeketh not its own.” If we call this God then there is no question of His [ p. 108 ] goodness. The only question is whether this good will is operative only in man or whether its operation in man is but a part of a larger process of good will. The good will, as manifest in man, is essentially a creative or constructive will. Its essential nature is that of a constructive activity responsive to distinctions of value that enter into experience, and ready to pursue its creative purpose directly, or indirectly through others, as opportunity for the greatest good occurs. And this striving to realize the good is always an effort made in the face of more or less difficulty. It would contradict the very nature of this experience of the divine will as immanent if we were to suggest that, in its character as transcendent, it could accomplish those aims immediately by its own omnipotent fiat. Metaphysical speculations based on inadequate scientific knowledge (such as Hume’s form of the argument from design) have been chiefly responsible for exaggerating the notion of divine power to the point where it has created for theism the problem of evil. If the interpretation of the idea of God had been based entirely on the reflective analysis of moral and religious experience, that problem would never have risen. Among religious thinkers of the present day, however, there is a strong tendency to rectify this hoary error by recognizing that the facts of physical evil indicate some limitations upon the power of God to control the physical universe.[11]
If our interpretation of the origin of religion is correct then the divine being was not first thought of as creator or even as controller of the forces of nature, but as the source of the spiritual power felt in religious ceremonies. The trouble began when the idea of this mysterious, intangible and invisible power was used to explain all the mysterious phenomena of nature which were so extraordinary that primitive man felt they called for some special explanation. Thus the sort of [ p. 109 ] power felt as a moral and beneficent influence in the religious ceremony came to be thought of as responsible also for much that was evil in the physical universe. This constituted no logical contradiction to the primitive, for the different natural phenomena thus explained were thought of as so many different gods, some evil and some good.
With the growth of the early civilizations, reflective thought on the moral order of human society and the physical order of the natural world led gradually to the conception of a supreme deity as ruler of the universe, and eventually to monotheism. It was at this stage that the facts of physical evil began to appear as a serious religious problem. Polytheism had readily attributed human suffering to the malice of evil deities or to specific punishments for human offenses against the gods. The divine power was from the first felt as a moral agency, and it was natural to regard it as defender of the mores, and so to interpret many physical inflictions as just visitations for breaches of taboos and other sins. The unjustifiable suffering of the righteous could be attributed to ill disposed deities against whom their own deities had failed to protect them. But this explanation could not be adopted when the world was believed to be in the control of one supreme being.
In the earlier stages of Hebrew monotheism the problem was solved by retention of the notion of collective responsibility. Primitive man has everywhere been inclined to hold the tribe, family and o,her groups responsible for the behavior of their members. If one member of such a group committed a crime the group as a whole was punished. Blood revenge is often regarded as satisfactorily executed if visited upon any member of the offender’s group, whether that member was individually implicated or not. This notion was appealed to by early Hebrew monotheists to explain the problem of evil. The Lord, in the first place, made the world entirely good and placed man in a beautiful garden. But the first man and [ p. 110 ] woman sinned and their punishment was a curse placed upon them and all their descendants. Jehovah is so rigorous and just a judge that he visits his punishments upon offenders to the third and fourth generations. Thus it was easy to interpret every calamity as a punishment for sin. A pestilence, for example, which carried off good men and bad alike, was a punishment for the sins of the people in general; an accident that took the life of an honest man, while a rogue escaped unscathed, was a judgment inflicted for the sins of the honest man’s relatives.
Against this doctrine Ezekiel and others among the great prophets protested.
What mean ye that ye use this proverb . . . saying. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not any longer have occasion to use this proverb in Israel. . . . The soul that sinneth, it shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.[12]
This was a great moral advance. But it left upon the hands of the believer in monotheism a very serious problem. It was no longer possible to explain all suffering as a punishment for sin. However, as far as could be, the notion was still retained, being used to explain suffering as far as possible and to hold over the sinner the threat of divine wrath. Job’s comforters still held that physical evil is divine punishment, and since they had given up the notion of collective responsibility they insisted that the unfortunate Job, in spite of his good reputation, must really have been a secret sinner, else such suffering would not have been visited upon him. In the time of Christ the idea still persisted. It is pathetically revealed, together with a lingering thought of the possibility of collective responsibility, in the question presented by his disciples to Jesus: [ p. 111 ] “Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?” [13]
Jesus repudiated the imputation of the question and denied that the man’s blindness was a punishment for any person’s sin. In this he was following the teaching of the book of Job, which is a dramatic poem discussing, pro and con, the problem of physical evil and ending with an emphatic repudiation of the notion that it is a form of divine punishment. However, neither Jesus nor the writer of Job was able to offer any positive solution of the problem. Lacking the modern scientific concepts of evolution and natural law they could not but regard the course of nature as controlled in some supernatural way, and being monotheists they had no choice but to attribute this control directly to God. These beliefs set the problem of evil before them in its severest form. Yet, though not seeing any logical way out, neither would surrender his faith in the goodness of God, a faith grounded in the moral consciousness. They and their followers after them gave the only answer that could be given by a monotheist until modern science had shown how the existing order of animate and inanimate nature has come into being and is maintained without direct divine control. They said one must still believe in the goodness of God in spite of all appearances, and that one can be sure that he does the will of God if he seeks to overcome evil with good.[14]
For our analysis of religion this history of thought on the problem of evil is of special significance as pointing to the real grounds of man’s belief in the existence of God and of his thought about the divine nature. If man’s beliefs about God were chiefly derived from a contemplation of external nature, the logical conclusion would be that pointed out by David [ p. 112 ] Hume. He would conclude that “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence,” but that “the original source of all things has no more regard to good above evil than to heat above cold.” Instead of this we find, from earliest times, a conviction that the divine is moral. When, with the rise of monotheism, this conviction presented logical problems to the believer, one explanation after another was offered. If we were to trace the discussion of this problem through the history of religious philosophy we should find extraordinary ingenuity exercised in its solution.
But however difficult the problem became there was one solution that the religious consciousness could never accept: it could never question the conviction of the goodness of God. Obviously this conviction did not rest upon the contemplation of external nature. Nor was it a product of wishful thinking on the part of man, fondly persuading himself of a friendly universe. This latter suggestion is repudiated by the fact that men have believed that God is good and for that very reason have stood in awe of him as one who would punish their sins. The root of the belief lies deeper. It lies in the very nature of the religious consciousness as the discovery within the self of a will to the good that is higher and better than that of the ego and which demands of the ego that it make its own will subservient to the good of others.
Only three of the world’s great religions are genuinely universal in their outlook. They are, in order of antiquity. Buddhism, Christianity and Mohammedanism. The others are content to be hereditary or national in their scope. Primitive religion is merely tribal. The reason for this we have already seen. Religion arose in the concern of the individual for [ p. 113 ] group welfare. It was always altruistic. But in its beginnings it was a narrow altruism. All too often concern for the welfare of the group involved opposition to rival groups. The belief in a superhuman power was molded chiefly by the power that was felt in group ceremonies. It therefore took on the character of those ceremonies. Thus the god of the primitive was necessarily a god of battles and his moral interests were those of the tribal group. Even- when tribal gods became identified with objects of nature that, like the sun, are objects for all tribes they did not lose their tribal character. So long as man’s ethics were tribal his gods had to remain tribal too. And we must sadly confess that even civilized man has not yet everywhere outgrown tribalism in his ethics and religion.
In India the primitive tribalism of the Hindus passed over into the caste system. The invading light-skinned Hindus strove to maintain their racial distinction from the darkskinned Dravidian people they had conquered. Thus they persuaded themselves that their gods were interested in maintaining the distinction. In spite of all efforts a considerable fusion of blood and culture took place in the course of centuries, and the distinctions of caste became more a matter of social class and vocation than of race. But the religious emphasis on caste remained and gradually deepened and multiplied the caste divisions. The idea of reincarnation lent itself to the reinforcing of the distinctions, for it suggested that every man’s class status at birth was a part of his reward or punishment for his past deeds.
The spiritual genius of Gautama, founder of Buddhism, rejected the distinction. But his teaching was a religion for an order of monks rather than for the common people.[15] It was also unduly pessimistic and impersonal. For a few centuries it made great progress. But these inherent weaknesses eventually undermined it and, in spite of its superior ethic, a revival [ p. 114 ] of Hinduism swept it out of the country of its birth. Thus India returned to its nationalistic religion and the caste system became more firmly riveted than ever before. Buddhism, with its fine universalistic message, found new homes in lands beyond the borders of India, from Ceylon to Japan. There it has given solace and guidance to millions, though on account of its pessimism and monasticism it can hardly be regarded as a completely satisfactory answer to man’s religious needs. It is a way of individual salvation that fails to direct attention to the solution of the pressing social problems of the day. Thus, though it claims to show a way of salvation open to all and teaches kindness toward all, it interests the individual primarily in his own salvation. Though it teaches that all men are brethren, it does not teach that every man is his brother’s keeper and can find his personal salvation only in fulfillment of that trust.[16]
Among the early Hebrews, Yahweh (or Jehovah) was at first merely a tribal god who led them in their conquests and thereby showed his superiority over the gods of neighboring countries. Being a simple, pastoral people they were, for some centuries after their settlement in Palestine, frequently attracted by the cults of the more sophisticated peoples whom they had partially displaced. But the fertility rituals and extravagances of the agricultural and city people of Canaan disgusted the best elements among them, and there arose a succession of prophets to plead with the people to be true to their own god and the wholesome and simple mores which, according to the tradition, he endorsed. As the nation acquired unity and power in the days of David and Solomon, they exalted their conception of their god. And as social evils appeared in the days of decline that followed, Amos and other [ p. 115 ] prophets came forward to protest and to teach a high conception of social responsibility in the name of the Lord.
In the calamitous centuries during which the country was frequently invaded and conquered by its stronger neighbors, Hebrew religion took a unique turn. Most peoples in similar circumstances have concluded that their own god was weak and unable to save them, and have thereupon turned for protection to other gods. But the’ Hebrew prophets were convinced (and rightly so) of the moral superiority of their god to all the neighboring deities. Therefore, to their eternal credit, instead of concluding that he was too weak to help them they held to their conviction of his greatness and took the blame upon themselves as a nation. They had been false to him, they said, and he was justly punishing them. Their enemies were merely scourges in the hands of their own God, who thus showed himself powerful enough to use even other peoples to fulfill his purposes. If they would repent he would save and restore them. More than that, he had a great mission for them to fulfill. They were to be his instruments to teach and establish the high moral truth of his holy law among all peoples.
This was the beginning of Hebrew monotheism and ethical universalism. It was only a beginning, for the conviction still persisted that though Yahweh was God of all the world yet the Hebrews were his specially chosen people. It was through them, and in particular through a prince of the house of David whom Yahweh would some day raise up among them, that the blessings of the divine law were eventually to be brought to all the world. In the time of Christ the Jews were ready to recognize that Gentiles might be admitted to many, though not all, of the privileges of the worshipers of Yahweh, but only by undergoing a severe ceremonial whereby they became Jews. It was in Christianity that Hebrew religion became, for the first time, genuinely universalistic. This, together with the [ p. 116 ] passion for brotherly love and human kindness that marked all the teaching of Jesus, gave to Christianity its distinctive moral message. Inevitably, it soon ceased to be a Hebrew sect and grew into a world religion. It was the world’s second religion with a universalistic ethic. But it was the first to couple that ethic with a primary emphasis upon the ideal of a whole-souled devotion to common human good. “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets,” [17]
The teaching of Jesus pointed his disciples to a way of personal salvation, but it is a gross misapprehension of that teaching that seeks to separate individual salvation from social salvation. The mind of Jesus was immersed in the Old Testament prophets, and their conception was first of national salvation and second of general salvation through the mission of the Hebrews. The doctrine of individual responsibility modified but never overthrew this conception. Jesus gathered up the concepts of national, general and individual salvation in the universalistic conception of the “Kingdom of God.” The individual and the nation were to find their salvation by participation in, and service of, the universal divine society. They should come from east and west and north and south to sit down in the Kingdom of God. The law and the prophets were summed up in the commands to love God and love one’s neighbor. Even the hated Samaritan, heir of centuries of racial and religious prejudice, was to be neighbor to the Jew. Even the enemy was to be loved and forgiven. The sinner was to be sought and brought by his repentance into the Kingdom, To the poor the good news was to be preached, and riches were to be regarded, not as a sign of divine favor but rather as a burden upon the spiritual life. Women were treated as the peers of men. The slave was the equal of his master in the Kingdom of God.
[ p. 117 ]
The spirit of that Kingdom was to be “within” its members, domiijating their relations with their fellows even while they lived in a world where the political and economic order fell far short of it. It represented the will of God, and the disciples were taught to pray, “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” They were taught, too, to devote their lives to the extension of that spiritual Kingdom and its realization in the affairs of men. And in that cause they were taught to be ready to pay the price, if need be, of making even the supreme sacrifice as their Master had done.
Of all the lessons that Jesus had to teach, the hardest for his immediate disciples to learn was that of the equality of Jew and Gentile in the Kingdom of God. They sacrificed their possessions when there was need, even to a complete sharing of goods. They recognized the spiritual equality of women and slaves with freemen and, in spite of the difficulties created by a necessary adaptation to the social and economic order of their time, they expressed the spirit of this doctrine to a considerable extent in practice. But they found themselves divided over the admission of the spiritual equality of Gentiles. Their efforts at preaching the doctrine of the Kingdom were at first confined to Jews.
The story of the first preaching to the Gentiles is told in the tenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. This writing is so human and psychologically so natural that it can almost certainly be regarded as essentially historical. Peter had apparently been worried over the fact that, hitherto, they had not welcomed Gentiles into the new movement. Prejudices die hard and Peter was repressing the conviction that the attitude of the disciples was contrary to the spirit of Christ. But, as Freud has taught us, repressed convictions have a way of expressing themselves in dreams. Thus Peter had a dream in which he saw a great sheet let down from heaven full of [ p. 118 ] all sorts of living creatures. A voice said, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But he, seeing no meat there fit for a Jew, replied,” Not so. Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” This was repeated three times. Shortly after waking Peter received a request to come and present the teaching of Christ to a group of Gentiles. He interpreted the dream as a special injunction to cease treating the Gentiles as unworthy of the message he had to give. He preached to them, and baptized them into the Kingdom without demanding any preliminary Jewish ceremony such as circumcision. The apostolic council at Jerusalem endorsed his action, and the Christian gospel of the Kingdom entered in practice upon its program of establishing a brotherhood of all mankind.
Thus there appeared for the first time on earth a religious movement with an ideal that was a full expression of the disinterested will to the good. Its golden rule taught the individual to devote himself to the good of others equally with his own. Its concepts of human good cherished the full range of human values, as expressed in the personality of a leader who rejected all asceticism,[18] never refused an invitation to a feast, and is reported to have said, “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.”[19] Its concepts of human relations asserted the spiritual equality of all mankind. There was to be no distinction of priests and monks from laity, no distinction of caste or race or sex. All were” kings and priests unto God” [20] and, in the words of the apostle, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”[21] Even the distinction of righteous and sinner was broken down, for the saint was taught in all humility to recognize his shortcomings and the [ p. 119 ] sinner was welcomed in the name of Christ to share the Christian fellowship in penitence and faith.
It is true that the church has, in its teaching and practice, fallen far below its ideal. Yet the ideal has persisted and gained increasing recognition within the church and without. It is the ideal toward which the logic of dispassionate, reflective thought inevitably tends; for it is that disinterested will to the good that is the ultimate source of man’s moral and religious life, come to self-conscious realization of its own nature and purpose. If this will is God in man, then this ideal is the culmination of the progressive self-revelation of God to man — a self-revelation made possible as man’s intelligence has become able to grasp the greater good, the more distant good and the finer shades of good, and as his will has responded to cast aside, at each successive stage of his development, the individual and racial habits and institutions which have served a more or less useful purpose at the earlier stage, but which at length have come to hamper the movement into a larger and fuller life.
Ancient evils survive and ancient goods become present ills. Habits and institutions there needs must be. But they must change, for life must move and grow. And in difficult times of readjustment, such as that through which we are now passing, it is vitally important that man’s consciousness of the ideal in which his religious development has culminated should not be lost. For that ideal is man’s self-understanding of his own spiritual nature. To that ideal, therefore, man’s habits and institutions must progressively conform if his spirit is to be free to grow.
Koran, Sura 96, 3-5. According to tradition this was the first revelation Mohammed received. His call to preach came later. The Lord “who taught by means of the pen” was, of course, the God who revealed the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, for this, to the illiterate Mohammed, was a very impressive fact. ↩︎
The philosophic writings of religious teachers of the time. ↩︎
J. H. Breasted: The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933) . ↩︎
The Meaning of Prayer (New York: Abingdon Press, 1915) . ↩︎
The reader should remember the special definition of this term given on pp. 54-55 ↩︎
Note how far this is removed from the theory that belief in a transcendent God is due to wishful thinking. ↩︎
— ↩︎
Chap. 11. ↩︎
The clearest statement of this Pauline theory is in Rom. 3:21-26. ↩︎
For a further discussion of the teaching of Jesus on sin and righteousness sec chap. 11. ↩︎
Notable among the leaders of this movement in religious circles are Dr. Hastings Rashdall in England and Professor £. S. Brightman in America. ↩︎
Ezek. i8;2, 3, 20. ↩︎
John 9:2. ↩︎
Eg., Job 13:15: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him”; and Rom. 1221: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” ↩︎
He accepted the validity of caste for the laity. ↩︎
An excellent and sympathetic account of Hinduism and Buddhism as living religions is to be found in Faiths Men Live By, by John Clark Archer (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1934) . ↩︎
Matt. 7:12. ↩︎
Matt. 914: Luke 7:33-34 ↩︎
John 10: 10. ↩︎
Rev. i;6. ↩︎
Gal. 3:28. ↩︎