| X. The Historical Religions and the Religion of the Future | Title page | XII. The Bible and the Religion of the Future |
[ p. 102 ]
Attention has been directed to the notion that some one of the historic religions will supersede all the rest and so become the religion of the future. The utter futility of this expectation was admirably expressed by the brilliant and lamented Hindu, Vivekananda. Asked if he believed that any one of the seven great religions would eventually supplant all the rest, he replied: “If anybody hopes that any one of the Great Religions will triumph over all the rest and become the universal religion to him I say: Brother, yours is an impossible hope. If anybody dreams of the survival of any religion and the destruction of all the rest, I pity him from the bottom of my heart.” Yet this dream is still cherished by many a devoted of each of the [ p. 103 ] great religions. For instance, Dharmapala, the distinguished Buddhist of Ceylon, said in my hearing, “The marvel of Buddhism is its incontestable capacity for expansion and this saves it from ever becoming outgrown.” The lamented Jeneghier D. Cola, who represented Zoroastrianism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, told me that he considered the expansive power of his religion “literally boundless.”
But our concern is more especially with Christianity. What may be said for it? There are those—notably Professor Eucken in Germany, M. Loisy in France, Dean Inge in England, Dr. Fosdick in the United States—who hold that Christianity is destined to survive all other religions because it has “an inherent expansiveness,” fitting it to be forever identical with the best ethical thinking of every age. Yet a candid examination of this and all the other historic faiths reveals the fact that for each of them there is a limit beyond which it cannot “expand” and at the same time retain its identity. Well enough for Dr. Fosdick [ p. 104 ] to maintain that the Christianity of Augustine advanced upon that of the apostle Paul, that of Luther upon Augustine’s, and Beecher’s, in turn, upon the Christianity of Luther. But the progressive professor of Union Theological Seminary seems to think that this process of advance can go on indefinitely without loss of Christianity’s identity. Nay, running through all these historic Christianities from the first century to our own time is a common thread of belief, namely, that Jesus differed from all other human beings not only in degree but also in kind and that He is the sole Savior of mankind. As long as that thread remains the religion continues to be Christian. In other words, there is a limit beyond which Christianity cannot vary and remain Christian, just as in the evolution of life forms there was a limit beyond which reptiles could not vary and remain reptiles. When the anatomical creeping structure became, by “natural selection,” a flying structure, then that which was reptile became bird and was therefore no longer called reptile but [ p. 105 ] bird. So in the evolution of liberal religion when a man surrendered his belief in the specified uniqueness of Jesus and in him as the sole Savior of mankind, he ceased to be a Christian and was in duty bound to adopt a different descriptive name for himself. By a like process of inquiry it could be shown that there is a corresponding “limit” in each of the other six great religions, a limit beyond which it cannot “expand” and retain its identity. Assuredly is this notion of continuous expansiveness illusory, as illusory as the rapid movement of the landscape to the passenger looking out from the window of the “express” on which he rides. Whatever progress any one of the great religions, as such, can achieve is inevitably conditioned by the retention of that cardinal, differentiating characteristic without which the identity of the religion would disappear. Thus, the “inherent expansiveness” attributed to each of the great religions by earnest representatives is no guarantee of its survival, for, under the influence of modern thought it might so expand as to be beyond [ p. 106 ] recognition and thus require a new name, the raison d’etre of the original name having disappeared in the expanding process. Every religion owes its name to a particular belief touching the person of its founder or some characteristic of its devotees. Let the progress of religious thought compel the surrender of that belief and, of necessity, the original name of the religion becomes a misnomer.
A contributor to the Methodist Review has recently propounded an entirely different basis than that of “inherent expansiveness” to justify the dream of Christianity’s triumph over all other religions. He writes: “The further I proceed in my study of the world’s religions the more deeply is the impression borne in that the Christian religion alone has reached the goal. No wonder our religion is called Christianity. We have found God in Christ; the followers of other faiths through no fault of their own have never had the privilege of this experience.” [^1]
How truly naive is this notion that God [ p. 107 ] has vouchsafed to one-third of the human family knowledge of Himself and allowed the remaining two-thirds to live without this supreme privilege, cutting them off from it, “through no fault of their own,” granting to a minority of His children that which the innocent majority is mysteriously denied. Nor has it occurred to this Methodist minister that there are Parsees who hold they have “found God” in Zoroaster, and Hindus who have found Him in Krishna, not to mention devotees of other religions who testify to a like spiritual experience and who feel the same sense of pity for unprivileged Christians that the Methodist writer expressed for “the followers of other faiths” deprived of the Christian experience “through no fault of their own.”
In his latest play, entitled “The Next Religion,” Zangwill makes the physician say to the church rector, “Is not Christ’s religion the next religion; what have we found more beautiful and uplifting than the teachings of Jesus?” Ex-President Eliot of Harvard University, [ p. 108 ] writing in the Atlantic Monthly on “The Religion of the Future,” falls in with Zangwill’s physician, declaring that “Jesus will remain the supreme teacher in religion,” the context clearly conveying the conviction that Christianity, as the religion of Jesus, will be the religion of the future. Let me hasten to acknowledge the truth and beauty and uplifting power of the teachings of J esus, more especially those in which he advanced upon the ethics of the Old Testament and of the Apocrypha. Yet must it be frankly confessed that the teachings of Jesus arc insufficient for the needs of the modern world even as were the teachings of ancient Judaism insufficient for Jesus’ day. Just as Jesus was driven beyond the so-called Mosaic Law, so modern ethical thinking has been driven beyond the ethics of Jesus, daring to supplement his teaching as he dared to supplement that of his revered predecessors. He respected the authority of Moses but he did not regard it as infallible or final. Hence he dared to advance upon the ethical precepts transmitted [ p. 109 ] from Sinai. He, therefore, is most like Jesus who in this respect follows his example, daring to differ from or advance upon him as did he upon older masters. Just here permit me emphatically to remark and with deep earnestness and intensity of conviction, that I will be second to no one in my admiration and reverence for the person and work of Jesus, yet I hold we can no more tie to the ethics of Jesus as the complete and final code that orthodox Christians regard it than the Chinese can tie to the ethics of Confucius now that rehabilitation of the empire has been established. To an ever larger number of unprejudiced scholars, caring only for the truth, whatever it may be, it is apparent that Jesus’ teaching did not cover and was not intended to cover the whole of the moral life—social, national, and international—but only the ethics of personal life, his one and all absorbing concern being the moral preparedness of his people for entrance into the new order of society which God would shortly usher in through his Messiah. Pray do not imagine [ p. 110 ] that this view of the limitation Jesus set himself for his ministry is held only by ethical leaders. An Episcopalian professor writing in the Hibbert Journal frankly commits himself to the very same view. I quote his precise words: “Our Lord carefully refrained from expressing an opinion on political and economic problems which were beyond the scope of his mission. His concern was not with the state, but with the citizen, not so much with humanity as with man.” This wise restriction of his teaching to the problems of the personal life explains the silence of Jesus on questions social, national, and international that baffle and perplex us to-day.[1] Consider, for example, that problem which did not exist in Jesus’ day, the problem of the right relation of employer and employees in big business, a problem that originated about 1760 when the old domestic system of industry gave place to the factory system, machinery took the place of tools, and the long-established close relation between master and men was broken and the “wage [ p. 111 ] system” ‘was introduced. How shall the lost relationship be restored? How shall a fair return be secured to both employees and employer for their respective parts in the process of production? What is a fair wage? These are ethical questions for which the Gospels furnish no adequate answer because they lay outside the scope of teaching which Jesus marked out for himself in response to the one thing needful in his time and place. As another illustration, take the problem of the state in its relation to mergers and trusts— an economic problem indeed, yet bristling with moral implications and by no means solved despite the moral help provided in the teachings of Jesus. To what extent should the state act as a moral functionary in dealing with these combinations? Be just, be generous, be compassionate, love one another, return good for evil—these Christian maxims, excellent and of imperishable worth as they are, do not help us here. We need to supplement them with more specific formulas, born out of new moral experience in the field of the problem.
[ p. 112 ]
Again, consider the need that just now is making itself felt more poignantly than ever, the need of an international morality, an ethical code of international relations, an essential prerequisite for world peace. Such a code is not furnished by either the Old Testament or the New; it has yet to be worked out. Certainly, in the ethical outlook of Jesus, international relations had no place and for the excellent reason that the question had not even an academic interest for anybody in his day. Palestine was then at peace, there had been no war for ninety-six years; it was a normal time. True, the Roman government taxed the Jews heavily, but they felt this would be for only a little while because Jesus, like his forerunner John the Baptist, had taught that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and with its advent there would be an end of all injustice and oppression. It does not surprise us, therefore, to find that Jesus was silent on the subject of international morality and confined himself to morality between man and man, the paramount moral issue of his day.
[ p. 113 ]
The religion of the future, then, while gratefully acknowledging and reverently cherishing the excellence and permanence of the general maxims of Jesus will seek to supplement these even as did Jesus himself supplement an ethical code thought to be complete and final by his orthodox contemporaries. For, moral truth, like scientific truth, is progressive. With the progress of civilization involving the rise of new conditions, new problems appear, and for the solution of these more light is required than any of the historic guides has furnished. Hence the religion of the future will deem it treason to the infinite moral ideal to pronounce any inherited ethical code complete and final. Moreover, it will deprecate and condemn as altogether intellectually immoral the prevailing practice, witnessed, not within the confines of Christianity alone, but in other religions besides, of doing violence to the clear and unmistakable meaning of general scriptural precepts in order to make them cover specific moral situations, such as have been cited, but for which those precepts do not provide a solution and were not intended [ p. 114 ] so to do. The religion of the future, repudiating this pernicious practice, ethically unwarranted and intellectually confusing, will point to the Righteousness beyond the righteousnesses made known to us in the scriptures; a Righteousness “the plenitude of whose being has never yet been revealed, the radiance of whose glory has never yet been uncloaked; a Righteousness of whose ineffable light our highest visions are but feeble rays,” the Righteousness that “shineth more and more unto the perfect day” and to be endlessly approximated. Truly do we pursue a fleeing goal. The ideal flies ever before us and is often most passionately pursued when it seems furthest away. The ideal grows as we climb to it. The climbing path never ends because ever and anon new summits come into view. So “fearfully and wonderfully” are we humans made that we can never be permanently satisfied with anything short of the infinite. Any statical heaven, however finished and fine, could be at best but a temporary resting place; once rested and refreshed we would wish to resume the upward way.
| X. The Historical Religions and the Religion of the Future | Title page | XII. The Bible and the Religion of the Future |
[^1:] Methodist Review, May, 1921.
See the Standard, November, 1914, p. 95. ↩︎