[ p. 30 ]
Some anxious inquirers are in difficulty about their religion because they insist on starting their religion at the end farthest away from them. They strain after a cosmic theory, a belief in God as an hypothesis to explain the universe, and often they have a desperate time getting it. One may feel keenly the importance of such an inclusive cosmic faith and yet may see the necessity, in some puzzled minds, of being willing to start at the near end of the religious question if the far end proves at first too difficult. In some cases, if a man is having trouble endeavoring to say, “I believe in God,” he may get light starting closer home and endeavoring to say, “I believe in man.”
This affirmation is a basic article of the Christian faith if the Founder of Christianity is to be taken seriously. Indeed, it was this emphasis in Jesus’ ministry which to his contemporaries seemed unique and challenging. They were disturbed little, if at all, by his [ p. 31 ] teaching about God. When he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven,” he upset no current orthodoxies, WTien he told them that God could be interpreted in terms of human fatherhood at its best, or pictured God as sending rain upon just and unjust, no one objected. He could have gone on through a long and peaceful lifetime saying what he pleased about God, but he was hated and crucified because of his attitude toward man.
In his first recorded sermon he raised tins crucial issue and he never stopped raising it. When in his home synagogue at Nazareth he preached for the first tune, and for the last time too, he laid bare the immorality of the current racial attitude. He pomted out that, with many’ widows in Israel, Elijah had served especially a widow of Sidon and that, with plenty of lepers at home, Elisha had healed a Syrian. On the threshold of his ministry he made explicit his impatience with contemporary racial exclusiveness and his intention to consider man as man “for a’ that and a’ that.” They nearly killed him for the heresy. They would not have been disturbed by his teaching about God, [ p. 32 ] but his teaching about man awakened all their slumbering ire.
It was this aspect of Jesus’ message which always angered his enemies. The three most familiar parables he ever told, those of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, were a spirited defense of Ms attitude toward man. The outlawed publicans and sinners were gathering about him and the officials of organized religion were complaining, “This man receiveth sinners,” when he told those stories and, popular misinterpretation to the contrary notwithstanding, they are not primarily pictures of God at all. The housewife who would not stop her search for the lost coin, the shepherd who would not cease Ms quest for the wandering sheep, the father who waited with uuadiseourageable welcome for the prodigal are all pictures of the attitude of Jesus himself toward neglected and forgotten men. The three stories are Ms vivid and passionate defense of his own attitude.
Always this was the center of the controversy which swirled around him. His first commandment, about loving God, awakened no question, but his emphasis on the second, [ p. 33 ] loving one’s neighbor as oneself, at once brought on discussion and in the end brought down on the young lawyer who started it the crushing story of the Good Samaritan. As that lawyer turned away with “Go, and do thou likewise,” ringing in his ears, it is evident that he was not upset by Jesus’ teaching about God but that he was anxiously upset by Jesus’ teaching about man.
When at last Jesus began courageously unfolding the latent implications of this attitude, when he explicitly insisted that even the sabbath — ^most sacred of institutions — ^was made for man and not man for the sabbath, and that no sabbath law would keep him from serving man, the storm broke. This teaching and not his the’ology was the crux of his offending. He even said that at the judgment seat no technical, ecclesiastical reasons for perdition and salvation would obtain, but that human ser’dce to the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned would prove the one passport to the favor of the Eternal.
In the end they crucified him because of this uncompromising humanitarianism and the conflict [ p. 34 ] which it involved with their traditions. I often wonder how a clear and unmistakable statement about that came to be left out of the official formulations of Christian faith, as though they could be genuinely Christian without it.
Jesus’ attitude toward human personality can be briefly described as always seeing people in terms of their possibilities. He habitually looked at men in terms of what they might become. We often do that with children, but the marvel of the Master was that he did it with most unlikely people. He saw prodigals in far countries and women taken in adultery, and thought of them in terms of their moral possibilities. A disciple might cry, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” but Jesus answered, “Come ye after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” People might grow bad, like the woman of Samaria, or encrusted in tradition, like academic Nicodemus, but Jesus thought of what they might yet grow to be. As the Fourth Gospel put it, he was constantly [ p. 35 ] giving to those who would receive him “power to become,”
To be sure, he was no sentimentalist. He could not well have been a sentimentalist in his attitude toward men in view of what men did to him. Enduring the contumely and public brutality visited upon him, Jesus could have been under no illusions as to human nature. He condemned hypocrisy and cruelty with scathing words and cried, “Beware of men.” But like fresh springs beside the sea which rise renewed after the salt tides have gone over them, the Master’s confidence in the potential worth of human personality was ultimately undiscourageable. In this realm he has been the supreme seer.
Indeed, this attitude of Jesus toward personality is one of the major springs of Western democracy. Democracy is not simply politics, election by a majority, government by a parliament. It is also the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people and that if the doors of opportunity are thrown open wide enough surprising consequences will come fspom unlikely sources. We must not let the eugenists, with their lurid and needed warning [ p. 36 ] about our folly in killing off the best breeds and multiplying from the worst, blind our eyes to this other, hopeful fact. Shakspere was the son of a bankrupt butcher and a woman who could not write her name. Beethoven was the son of a consumptive mother and a father who was a confirmed di’unkard. Schubert was the son of a peasant father and a mother in domestic service. Michael Faraday was born over a stable, his father an invalid blacksmith, his mother a coimnon drudge, and his education began by selling newspapers on London’s streets. In France they selected by popular vote the greatest Frenchman who ever lived — not Napoleon, but Louis Pasteur, maker of modern medicine, the son of a tanner. Democracy is not simply a political system; it is a moral movement and it springs from adventurous faith in human possibilities. With all its futilities, blimders, and tragic ineptitudes, we must everlastingly believe in it, for imsuspected possibilities in common folk do appear when the doors of opportunity are opened wide.
In a real sense, this insight was Jesus’ specialty. His estimate of human personality, its divine origin, its spiritual nature, its supreme [ p. 37 ] value, its boundless possibilities, has been rightly called his most original contribution to human thought. And, in consequence, we know by a sure instinct that wherever a man holds this estimate of human worth and lives as though it were true, he is a man whom Jesus would approve. There are many places in modern Christianity where one wonders what the Founder would think. In great conventicles of worship with elaborate liturgies and gorgeous ceremonies, one sometimes wonders what Jesus would think. In ecclesiastical assemblies where men rally aroimd partisan standards and grow enthusiastic over sectarian shibboleths, one wonders what Jesus would think. When Christians malign Christians about divergences of theological opinion that never yet made any difference to character, one wonders what Jesus would think. But there is one place where uncertainty vanishes. Wherever a man cares for men, gives himself in service to them, sees beneath forbidding exteriors hidden possibilities, wherever in any church, or in none, comes the spirit of St, Francis of Assisi and Father Damien, of John Howard, David Livingstone, Horace Mann, General [ p. 38 ] Booth— there one is certain, what Jesus would think.
So basic is this faith in man in the religion of Christianity’s Founder that there is no road to his view of God which does not start with his view of human personahty. It is usually put the other way; believe in God, accept the church’s faith in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and as a natural and spontaneous consequence you will take right attitudes toward men. Familiar as that approach is, it is fundamentally false.
Historically, it breaks down. The contemporary enemies of Jesus believed in God and in their most bigoted and inhuman deeds thought that they did God service. Any day they would have faced martyrdom for their faith in God, but they took no such attitudes toward humanity as Jesus did.
Experimentally, this approach to altruism by way of theology breaks down. We all know people who believe in God, who would no more be thought atheists tihan anarchists, but who in [ p. 39 ] their human relationships are among the most undesirable citizens in the community. Hard as flint, arrogant as Lucifer, they walk among us believing in their God.
Moreover, this familiar formula which makes one’s humaneness dependent on one’s theology breaks down Biblically. Shall we say that a man first loves God and then spontaneously will love his neighbor well? But the New Testament reverses the order. “He that ioveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen.” Shall we say that a man first is forgiven by God and then naturally overflows into magnanimous relations with his fellows? But the New Testament puts it the other way around. “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Shall we say that the worship of God comes first and love of man inevitably follows? The New Testament takes pains to state the contrary. “If, therefore, thou art oflfering thy gift at the altar, and there reraemberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer [ p. 40 ] thy gift.” Shall we say that a right attitude toward Christ is the precedent condition of a right attitude toward men? But the 'New Testament says that it is impossible to take a right attitude toward Christ without taking an unselfish attitude toward men. “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it imto me.” We may think as we please about the matter, but there is no question as to what the Bible thinks. In the New Testament there is no road to the heart of God that does not lead through the heart of man.
With Jesus, in particular, no other highway except this one, which Seeley long ago called his “enthusiasm for humanity,” brings one to his idea of God. We may deduce God from the vastness and order of the external imiverse; we may philosophize about God until we are intellectually convinced that theism is true; we may accept the creeds of Christendom as supernaturally deposited ; but in no such way shall we reach Jesus’ characteristic idea of the Divine. Like Millet, the painter, who picked up Normandy peasants that nobody had thought worth painting and in his Angelus and [ p. 41 ] Gleaners made them strong and beautiful so that we cross the sea to look at them, so Jesus habitually treated human personality. Let a man start with that spirit and then rise from his care for men and his faith in them to think of the Eternal as the Good-will behind his goodwill, the Purpose behind his purpose, and thereby he has gotten at the distinguishing attribute of Jesus’ God. To God through love for man was the road by which the Master reached his unique heights of spiritual vision. He explicitly described it himself: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven!”
To be sure, the other side of the matter is true also : a vital faith in God so experimentally attained reacts powerfully on life. Religious faith in this regard is like scientific faith. A physicist in some special realm proves the uniformity of law and then moves up from his limited area of experiment to the comprehensive faith that the whole universe is law-abiding — a proposition which cannot be proved. Returning, then, with that inclusive conviction about the nature of the universe, he finds all [ p. 42 ] his work illumined, and is sustained by his cosmic faith when, in this area or that, he cannot find the law or is baffled by apparent lawlessness. So a Christian rises in his thought through man to God and returning brings with him a conviction about the nature of the moral universe which sustains and steadies him. But he must go through that door of human sympathy and not climb up some other way if he is to understand Jesus. He who tries to say, “I believe in God,” without knowing what it means to say, “I believe in man,” has not come within reaching distance of the Christian God. An agnostic who reverently shares Jesus’ attitude toward man has a fairer claim to the name Christian than a baptized pagan, with a correct theology, whose human relationships are imtouched by the spirit of the Master.
When, therefore, men say that Christianity has not been tried, they are speaking truly. Many imitations have been tried but, except in limited areas, not this kind of Christianity, and a large part of our Western civilization to-day [ p. 43 ] is an explicit and organized denial of it. The critical struggle for the dominance of Christian principles lies in this realm. The present protagonists of orthodoxy are locating A.ntichrist in the wrong place. To change one s forms of thought as new knowledge comes, to see the creative activity of the Eternal in terms of evolution instead of fiat, or to make the spiritual quality of Christ, not a miracle of supernatural birth, one’s reason for reverencing him — such things are not Antichrist.
The real Antichrist is to be found in another place. All irreverent treatment of human personality in individual relationships or social institutions — that is essentially Antichrist. That is an utter denial of the Christian God and of Jesus as his revealer. Racial prejudice, social pride, ’industrial cruelty, war, personal selfishness and lust— -these are the real sins against the real God, and they have one common quality: they treat human personality with contempt.
To be a Christian is a searching matter and it stairts close at home. If a man is having difficulty in beginning his religion at the far end, let him not use that as an excuse for irreligion. [ p. 44 ] He can at least begin at the near end. Celsus, the pagan, in the third century attacked Christianity’s excessive valuation of the human soul and the idea that God takes special interest in man. That attack shows real insight. That is touching the nerve of the matter. That pagan knew Christianity better than many Christians have known it. Eliminate his scorn and the rest is true: the root of Christianity is reverence for personality and faith that God must care for the spiritual values of his universe.