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A LETTER lies before me from a man who never has imited with the Christian church. He cannot believe one of the highly philosophical doctrines on which he imderstands the churches to insist. He is reverent, spiritually minded, essentially religious, but he thinks that he must stay outside the church. To be sure, Jesus never mentioned the doctrine which constitutes his difficulty. It did not emerge in the form which my correspondent finds indigestible until centuries after Jesus lived. Nevertheless, wanting to join the fellowship of Christian people, where his sympathies are naturally at home, he remains outside the church.
This case, typical of more people than one likes to think, illustrates the peril which vital religion faces in the very organizations that at first were intended to express it. Religion at its source is personal adventme on a way of living. A new idea of life’s spiritual meaning, [ p. 2 ] incarnate in a leader, summons men, and they cut loose from old entanglements and try the challenging venture. By the time religion has been thoroughly organized, however, it commonly loses that daring quality and becomes instead a stereotyped system of doctrine and institution to be passively accepted and
This tendency, illustrated wherever religion exists, is unmistakable in Christianity. Christianity began in a great adventure. In those first days when the Master was presenting his way of* living to the acceptance of men who had vision and courage enough to try it, disdpleship to him was a costly spiritual exploit. In the New Testament it never loses that quality. The life -to which Jesus pmmoned men required insight and bravery to undertake and fortitude to continue. Who at first could have dreamed that it ever wquld become in the eyes of multitudes a stiff and finished system to be passively received?
This development in historic Christianity from vitality to rigidity is clearly reflected in the changed meanings of the word ‘faith-’ Faith in the New Testament was a matter of [ p. 3 ] personal venturesomeness. It involved selfcommittal, devotion, loyalty, courage. If one arranges the New Testament in the chrono- ‘ logical order of its documents and thus enters the book by way of some of Paul’s epistles, he feels a thrilling quality in the movement w’hieh there had gotten under weigh. It was the most influential uprush of spiritual power in human history, and all the participants in it would have ascribed their inspiration to their faith. But it was not faith in formal creeds, for no creeds had yet been written; it was not faith in the New Testament, for the New Testament was not yet in existence; it was not faith in the church, for the church was as yet inchoate and unorganized. That primary faith which launched the Christian movement antedated creeds, book, and chimch. It was a personal relationship with Christ and what he stood for. It had not yet been formalized. It was vital and dynamic.
How different are the meanings that ‘faith’ soon acquired in Christianity! It ceased being primarily a daring thing — a moimtarn-mover, as Jesus said, or the victory that overcomes the world, as John called it. It was increasingly [ p. 4 ] drained of its more vital elements, it was stereotyped and systematized until it tended to mean ‘ the acceptance of creedal and institutional finalities long worked out and awaiting only the credence of the faithful. The climate sadly changed between the New Testament and the classic formulations of the church’s doctrine. Who can imagine Jesus facing a formula like this about himself : “Consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; . . . Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence?”
One does not mean that any one is consciously to blame for thus systematizing and organizing life’s experiences, squeezing the adventure out of them, translating them into formulas, and leaving them dessicated and unreal. [ p. 5 ] This is the fate of every lovely thing that human life creates. Music has its Beckmessers who, if they could, would let no Walther sing the Prize Song. Art suffers as religion does, and even courtesy can be imprisoned in a stately mannerism and need to be delivered like a sleeping princess from her castle.
One does mean, however, that when this fate befalls spiritual values indispensable to man’s well-being, the time for reformation has arrived. And this fate has befallen religion in America to-day. Organized, institutionalized, creedalized, ritualized — ^religion has become for multitudes a stuffy and uninteresting affair. The Beekmessers are ruining it by the very means they take to preserve it. They are hiding from this new generation the arresting fact that teligion is the most thrilling adventure that life offers.
The one utter heresy in Christianity is thus to believe that we have reached finality and can settle down with a completed system. That is the essential denial of the living God, who cannot have said his last word on any subject or have landed his last hammer-blow on any task. It is strange that in religion we so desperately [ p. 6 ] cling to static, settled, authoritative finality as though that were our safety and our strength. In no other realm should we dream of such an attitude. Says Froude, the historian, “If medicine had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth’s physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found.”
Why should we suppose that the fortunes of religion in the mind and experience of man are under a different set of psychological laws than the fortunes of medicine or art or music ? In all realms, religion included, human life is creative. It spontaneously wells up into new insights and endeavors. It outgrows its old formulations as a child its early clothes. Continuity in any realm of human interest is not to be found in its formulations but in its abiding life. Health is a permanent problem and medicine goes on. Beauty is a deathless interest and art abides. The spiritual life of man in its relationship [ p. 7 ] with the Eternal is an uneseapable human interest and religion is indestructible. But it is an adventure both of life and thought. All its formulas, summarizing experience up to date, are sign-posts, not boundary-lines ; and when Christianity forgets that, becomes preservative instead of creative, rests in assumed finalities instead of daring new sallies of the spirit, retreats into supposed citadels instead of taking the open road, it not only is false to its historic origin in Christ, who did the very opposite, but by psychological necessity it dooms itself to stagnation and decay.
So far is this from being disturbing, that only through a clear apprehension of it are we likely to regain anything resembling the thrill, liveliness and ardor of apostolic Christianiiy which so daringly struck its tents and ventured into new kinds of thought and action- Certainly, it is the lack of this which in part caus^ the dangerous alienation of the yoimger generation from organized Christianity. Many a young man and woman to-day who is not a [ p. 8 ] Christian would like to be one. But often the churches do not help. Preachers have a way of thinking of Christianity as a whole, of taking it en bloc. They treat it as a carefully articulated system of beliefs and practices. They present it as it has stiffened into settled finalities. They come to youth with this sum total of Christianity and plead with them to accept this system of thought and practice and become Christians. Some preachers even say explicitly that the whole complex affair stands or falls together and that one must take it all or have nothing.
Many a youth, however, who may wistfully desire to be a Christian, finds such an approach impossible. He cannot start with wholesale acceptance of a finished system. He cannot begin by believing what he does not yet perceive the truth of. It is as psychologically absurd to expect a youth as precedent to becoming a Christian to accept this institutionalized and creedalized bloc called Christianity as it would be to demand credence of the whole curriculum before a boy could become a Preshman.
Jesus’ first followers were called disciples, [ p. 9 ] learners; and a learner begins where he is. When Jesus met a man like Zacehaeus he did not foist on him a system of theology and institutionalism, both because he did not have one and because Zacehaeus would not have imderstood it if he had. He dealt with men one at a time. Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, the rich young ruler, Peter, James, John — ^to no two of them did he give the same prescription. He had no predetermined mold into which he tried to run them all. He had no system to which all had to subscribe before they could follow him. He invited each, starting where each was, to begin a spiritual adventure in a hitherto-untried way of living.
The first disciples started thus by living imder the mastership of Jesus and came to a theory afterward based on their experience. We often go at the matter from the opposite end. We call on men to believe some orthodox interpretation of Jesus, insisting that only in holding this philosophy concerning Jesus is there salvation or motive power for Christian living. That method of approach is psychologically false. It asks men first to accept a formula instead of summoning them to undertake [ p. 10 ] a life. It has led to endless unreality and hypocrisy. It is responsible for multitudes of people holding a theory and mistakenly supposing that thereby they have achieved a life. It has issued even in some who insist that all bom- fide goodness springs from holding their theory and is dependent on it, whereas any one can see that plenty of people who hold another theory altogether or, it may be, none at all, have more sweetness and light in their characters, more high-mindedness, integrity, usefulness, and essential Christianity than the strict theorists have touched the fringes of.
As one who himself holds a high interpreta-’ tion of Jesus and sympathetically understands’ what the Nicene fathers were driving at when they lifted their victorious cry that “true God of true God” has come to us in him, I should like to hear more Christian preachers addressing youth to-day somewhat as follows:
We want you to be genuinely Christian. But as precedent to that it would not occur to us to demand that you should believe even about Christ what we believe. What we see in Christ is not the question. The question is. What do you see in Christ? Surely, you do not mean that you see [ p. 11 ] nothing to challenge jonr - conscience, rebuke jonr life, summon your devotion! Will you start with that, follow that as far as it carries you, and then go on if you see more? , Interpose no objections based on your disbelief in this theological theory or that. No one is’ asking you just now to believe them. Start where you are and follow what you do see. Christianity is an adventure. Like friendship it is capable of being intellectually formulated, but primarily it is an experiment in living to be tried- If the Master himself saw you perceiving in him no more than you do perceive but wanting to try the venture of following him and applying his principles to life, he would rise on you like the sun in his encouragement, saying. Start where you are.
All experiences, when they have been tried out,’ explored, enjoyed, tend to get themselves expressed in formulas. We precipitate a living thing into the shorthand of an abstract statement. Even love has its creeds, although, happily, they have been expressed in poetry. Read the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and see. But a man need not postpone love until he can subscribe to that finished expression of perfected experience. He never will subscribe to [ p. 12 ] it with vital understanding if he does postpone the experiment itself. Love is an adventure.
So is prayer, loving one’s enemies, being sincere. So is discovering spiritual resources which we can tap and thus be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” So is repentance, forgiveness, restitution, and inward moral conquest. So is practical working faith in God and love for all sorts and conditions of men. So is the application of the principles of Jesus to racial, industrial, and international problems. Christianity is a stirring and costly adventure in personal character and social relationships. Theological theories can help. They can justify, clarify, direct, and extend the adventure. But they do not come first; they come last. They are the intellectual formulations of the adventure, not its primary cause, and whenever they grow stiff and intractable, become obsolete and deterrent, no longer help the ventures of the spirit but hinder and confuse, they must give way to other forms of thought that will illumine and guide. For at all hazards the adventure of spiritual living must go on. That is indispensable [ p. 13 ] to man’s real life. That is genuine religion. And the tragedy of organized religion is that so often this adventure has to face, not only natural enemies in human carnality and skepticism, but artificial enemies in the petrified expressions of religion itself. Like a river dammed by its own ice, religion is held back by its congealed formulations.
This is the raison d’être of that movement in Christianity to-day which is seeking an “inclusive church.” We are not careless of intellectual statements of faith. We suspect that soon enough — perhaps all too soon — ^we are hkely to get formulations of religion in modern terms which our children, to use Phillips Brooks’ figure, vsill have to beat back again like crust into- the batter. Our formulations will be no more final than our fathers’. But in the meantime our churches ought to welcome all who have faith enough to try the spiritual adventure of Christian living. The exclusive features of the denominations, almost altogether non-spiritual as they are and remote from any influence on moral character, are a burden on the religious life of the nation. It [ p. 14 ] never can be altogether well until they are gone and the churches become once more the natural home of all those in the community who in the spirit of Jesus wish to treat life seriously in terms of spiritual vision and valor.