[ p. 227 ]
THE central characteristic of Christianity is not belief in God, but belief in Jesus Christ. It accepts the universal quest of man for a creative reality beyond himself, and interprets this in the light of a definite and historical set of facts, viz. those relating to Jesus and those comprising the creative experience which is called the Church. This procedure is entirely scientific, and may be compared with any testing of a hypothesis by suitably chosen experiment. But in this case the hypothesis must be adequate to explain the whole range of personal facts. Science may use sub-personal hypotheses within its restricted range. Christianity, the scientia scientiarum, cannot.
This one central hypothesis is what men call God. Christianity claimed inheritance from Judaism, but its actual preaching to the Greek world was a preaching of Jesus. Thus the Christian claim is that His life was crucial for the interpretation of reality. This claim rests upon a value- judgment which psychology can neither justify nor criticize.
The claim involves the interpretation of reality by human categories. These may be inadequate, but sub-human categories are even less adequate. And abstract or negative categories are the least adequate of all.
Thus the revelation in Jesus has two aspects :
(1) His unique Filial consciousness is something more than the mystical experience or the divination of the numinous. His Reality is capable of intimacy. Thus He reveals that Reality as a God of love. Further, His intimacy is a reference of the whole of life to the Father. Thus He reveals a God who is the Other not only in special providences, but in all human experience, so far as it is personal.
(2) He reveals God as acting upon and through humanity, not simply among human relationships, but in them. This is the [ p. 228 ] essential basis of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and its link with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The revelation came through Friendship and Forgiveness, and these are still the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Thus the love of God and the love of man are one, and it is through our human friendships and in the human community that we come through Christ to God.
[ p. 229 ]
Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. i John iv. 9, 10.
Truly the Soul returneth the body’s loving
where it hath won it … and God so loveth the world . .
and in the fellowship of the friendship of Christ
God is seen as the very self-essence of love.
Creator and mover of all as activ Lover of all
self -expressed in not-self, without which no self were. [1]
Ax the close of The Testament of Beauty the late Poet Laureate has stated the fundamental thesis of these lectures in terms so apt that he has covered in six lines all the essential points of an exposition of Christian theism. For Christianity began with Christ, and is Christ. In Christ was found friendship. In that friendship the fellowship was born. In the terms of that fellowship the hypothesis which men have called by many names, and which, very usually, in our English speech men label ‘ God,’ has been interpreted anew. To say that God is Creator and mover of all is still to speak in terms of a logical hypothesis, the conceptual climax of a cosmological argument. To identify His creative energy with an activity of love is to pass beyond the concept to a claim upon the Universe of Being. It is in the fellowship of the friendship of Christ, and there alone, that the claim is made in all its fullness of meaning, and therein is the whole substance of Christian faith. The great edifice of [ p. 330 ] Christian doctrine, whether it be the metaphysical definition of the Trinity in Unity, or its practical application in the ecclesiastical ordering of the fellowship, is entirely interpretation. That is no doctrine of the Trinity which loses sight of love. That which denies the fellowship of Christians is no Church of Christ.
This, then, is the thesis which we are now to maintain in the light of the psychological criticisms with which we have been occupied. And it is at once apparent that the criticisms have very little indeed to do with these central positions of religion. The attacks that have real weight are attacks upon outposts, and when we came to investigate it appeared that many of these outposts were no true concern of Christianity at all. But if we analyse our opening statement we find two and only two elements involved. As to one of these psychology has nothing whatever to say, and as to the other we are entirely ready to take up any challenge which may come from that quarter.
The first element is the plain historical fact from which Christianity traces its origin. That this fact is highly complex does not affect the essential point, which is that it is history and not fantasy. Like all facts of history it has an inner structure, due to its immediacy at a time that is past and to its enduring interweaving with the present, as the present moves on. The Gospels clearly record the life of an historical person, and in the main outline their account gives a sufficiently clear impression of a human life so astonishing, yet so self-consistent in its simplicity and its exaltation, that it has held the attention and drawn the love of men ever since they were written. The Church, again, is a living tradition, going back indubitably to that same Jesus, of whom the Gospels speak. But the New Testament and the Church are not merely witnesses to something that happened. They are themselves facts, bound up inseparably with the fact of Christ. In all this there is [ p. 231 ] nothing open to psychological criticism. For psychology, like any other science, must start from facts, assuming as facts both the record itself and the certainty that there was a fact to be recorded, whatever the accuracy of the record may be. No record, however improbable or fantastic, takes its rise in nothing at all. And if Christianity does precisely this same thing, there is here no matter for dispute. It is only when Christians claim, as sometimes they have done, a special inerrancy in the record, or special modes of insight and interpretation, thus seeking to solve their historical problems at the outset without the discipline of a true historical method, that the scientist has any cause for complaint.
The second element in the Christian claim is in effect simply the assumption that man’s universal search for a creative reality beyond himself is no idle quest, and that we have a right to use in that quest such facts as seem most relevant and most likely to lead us to our goal. That, when we have made this assumption, we take as our cardinal fact the fact of Christ is entirely legitimate as scientific procedure. But the assumption itself may be held to require some defence.
At point after point in our general discussion we have noted in a series of observations the impact of external reality upon man’s life. The instincts are called into activity by stimuli appropriate to their structure. The emotions are built up into the dispositions or sentiments which constitute character in a system of personal relationships. In the healing of the sick, or the sinner, the essential principle appeared to be the acceptance of a new pattern or ideal, [2] which imposes itself with the authority of the external and given. And the analysis of the social group seemed to show that its genesis cannot be explained from within. Its origin may be adventitious and accidental, or it may exist [ p. 233 ] to serve some purpose of secular continuance and import. In every case we seemed to be brought into touch with driving forces, of curiously creative quality, in that Other, that Beyond, which is the background of all experience. And it was in complete agreement with these facts that we found faith a basic element in personality, not merely in the more formal aspects of religion, but wherever personal life revealed itself, whether in normal and healthy growth or in disorder and renewal. But faith always has reference to that which lies beyond. And faith is always personal.
For these observations a hypothesis is clearly necessary, if we are to study them at all, and this is as much a need for psychology, or for any other science, as it is for religion. The hypothesis, further, must be one, and it must be adequate. No science can possibly proceed if its fundamental laws are liable to change, or if they do not cover the facts. An apparent breach of the laws at once involves their revision and restatement, in terms which brings the exception within their scope. Psychology is no exception to this rule, and the psychologists who challenge the Christian hypothesis must clearly be prepared with an alternative hypothesis of their own. And since their subject is human personality, and not biology or any partial study of human nature, we have a right to ask that their hypothesis shall be adequate to all that personality involves.
It is almost startling to find how completely our question remains unanswered in those systems of psychology which find no room for God. With psychology of the classical type, as we meet it, for example, in Ward, we have no quarrel, for here the facts of personal life are taken honestly and fully into account, whether explanations are offered or not. But when we turn to Behaviourism we find such fundamental facts as consciousness and freedom treated as mere irrelevances. The central hypothesis appears to be [ p. 233 ] that of the statistical validity of laws of averages, based on superficial and external observation. And it does not at all appear how, upon his own principles, the Behaviourist could ever have become aware that such laws existed. It is the ancient difficulty of all experimental science, that the laws which control its experiments and interpret them cannot be given by the science itself. But while the experimental scientist has a perfect right to work within limits of his own prescribing, and his results have a value exactly proportioned to the recognition of those limits, the Behaviourist can only claim this right if he is prepared to renounce all judgment upon the significance of life and the meaning of the personality which he pretends to study. These things stand clearly outside his self-imposed limitations. He must not ask that we should accept his limitations too.
When we pass from Behaviourism to the other psychologists with whom we have been chiefly concerned we find a much more adequate recognition of the facts, and an almost complete absence of any intelligible hypothesis for their explanation. Leuba, for example, appears to hold the mechanistic conception of man and of the world. There must be no interference with physical causation, and any God who intervenes therein must go. [3] Man must replace his ‘ illusory belief in such a God by a more accurate understanding of the causes of whatever effectiveness is possessed by that belief.’ [4] Yet at the same time he wishes to conserve religion, emancipated from its God, as a system of ideals. ‘ It is not a replacement of the religious spirit by science which is indicated here, but the inclusion into religion of the relevant scientific knowledge. The hope of humanity lies in a collaboration of religious idealism with science the former [ p. 234 ] providing the ideal to be attained, and the latter, so far as it can, the physical and the psychological means and methods of achievement. ’ [5] How a unified scientific or practical principle is to emerge from all this does not appear. Causation and ideal cannot be treated thus departmentally, and all history bears witness to the immense efficacy of the ideal as itself a cause. Leuba’s reality seems to be so utterly cleft in sunder that only the God whom he has banished can ever mend it. It appears, indeed, that it is really only a special aspect of God that moves his wrath. He cannot allow a God of special providences. Perhaps a God more completely Christian might serve his turn, a God at all times and in all things :
Creator and mover of all as activ Lover of all.
The psycho-analysts are no better. Freud, despite his recognition of the love-life, and his strange and unexplained ideal that all men, in some future age beyond our seeing, should live together as brothers, [6] is purely determinist, applying his unbending canon of law to mind as well as matter. But determinism is a dead, or at least a dying creed to-day. It leaves too many of the facts out of account. If freedom were no more than a dream we should still have to explain so fair and terrible a dreaming. Jung and Adler, abandoning determinism, give us in its place, as Bergson does, a creative chaos, with hints of individual purpose here and there, but no intelligible goal or guiding principle in the whole, unless indeed the crudest biological ends of the individual or the species may be held to suffice. The absolute dominants of a highly hypothetical racial unconscious [7] are a poor substitute for the creative reality of a God who can be loved.
From such confusions as these it is a relief to turn to science proper on the one hand or to Christianity on the [ p. 235 ] other. For in either case the fundamental assumptions are clearly defined. Science, according to its particular interest and purpose, may make what use it pleases of subpersonal hypotheses. The chemistry of the human body is, for example, an entirely legitimate and a very necessary subject of study, and its hypotheses are obviously those of chemistry and not of personal freedom. But Christianity cannot reduce the divine tragedy of Hamlet to a mere chemical transmutation of Shakespeare’s breakfast. [8] Man has always sought, in the real world about him, or veiled behind it, an explanation of his being and an end less transient than the mere satisfaction of his momentary need. Christianity accepts, as its first assumption, the view of the universe that this implies. Reality itself is creative and purposive, and this purpose is not a mere chaos of conflicting ends, but is one.
So far our procedure is scientific enough, though our hypothesis is vague in the extreme and difficult to apply generally. Very many of the facts of life seem to show little sign of this creative purpose, and evil and suffering cut directly across it. Christianity therefore passes on, again on strictly scientific lines, to single out a particular group of facts, which have as their centre the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and to make these the test of its assumption. It has again and again happened in scientific enquiry that a single carefully chosen experiment has involved the reinterpretation of a whole series of apparently well-established observations. So in physics the Michelson-Morley experiment, whether the observations made in it were finally accurate or not, opened the way for Einstein’s transformation of the theory of space. In chemistry the careful study of radium has completely destroyed the ‘ small incompressible spheres ’ [9] of the older atomic theory. In history the crucial [ p. 236 ] case stands obvious for our choosing. Jesus of Nazareth holds a place unquestionably supreme, and we make no unnatural choice when we see in Him the test-experiment, by which we may hope best to read the full significance of our human life, and its relation to that creative reality, from which, as we must needs suppose, we have sprung.
Such, then, is the substance of the Christian claim. If in its interpretation we soon find ourselves speaking the language of theology, that, despite the distaste of a world rapidly becoming unused to theological idiom, is natural enough, since theology arose to provide an accurate terminology whereby these matters might be discussed without confusion. As to the creation of an appropriate jargon, as he is sometimes pleased to term our speech, no scientist pot need complain of the theological kettle.
And if, before beginning our interpretation, we have to admit an act of faith at the very outset of the way, that faith is no more irrational than the faith of the scientist, who devotes his life to the study of some group of, let us say, snails or flies, in the belief that they are worthy of his attention, and in the belief that there are definite laws and methods appropriate to his science. But these beliefs are not given by scientific reasoning. The high devotion of the scientist is one in principle with the faith of the Christian. Even flies and snails may lie, for some, about the pathway that leads to God. Yet at least we may claim that in choosing to read the ways of God through man, and through man at his highest, we are choosing for our study and devotion that which is most likely to lead us furthest towards the truth. And, in sheer fact, no science leads anywhere that does not lead to man as its goal. It is the science which forgets this that, as it fondly imagines, has no need for God.
In its historical beginnings Christianity did not put [ p. 237 ] its claim in this indefinite but far-reaching way. The early Christians did not talk cautiously about a creative reality. They spoke in plain terms of God. They did not think of Jesus of Nazareth as a crucial experiment. They knew Him as Friend and Master, and they flung their whole being into the enthusiasm of His friendship and service. Their preaching was the good news about Jesus. [10] They assumed that men already meant something when they spoke of God, and, without challenging the inheritance which they received from Judaism they set side by side with it the Jesus whom they had known living, and dead, and alive again. They had been through much more than a time of inexplicable miracles, healings, and voices, and a strange mastery over Nature itself, and at the end a conquest of death. If they had told the world, and us, these things alone, they would have been believed. Such stories have always found a hearing. And men would still have known nothing more of the meaning of God. [11] But their experience had been one of such a Friendship as man had never known, of disastrous failure and a forgiveness beyond all believing, and of a new, a free, a creative life. Nothing of all this was of their own achievement. They knew that they were men remade, and they knew that the mode of their remaking was love. This was a providence, a deliverance, greater and more significant than anything that the Jew had ever claimed for the Creator-God. Yet they could not think of it as other than His work, since God, as all their national tradition taught, is One. It interpreted for them, as we might put it in our more cautious way, the creative reality to which they, with all men, had looked with uncertainty and even with fear. Henceforth the central hypothesis which men call God was known as love, and everywhere He was made manifest just in so far as love had passed out from Christ to the fellowship of the Christian community.
[ p. 238 ]
‘ Every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.’ [12] All was not yet plain. The world still lay in darkness, and the powers of evil were strong. The human heart was deceitful and desperately wicked. But still by the witness of love, ever new-born and creative in their hearts they knew that they held the key of the mystery. ‘ God is love.’ [13] ‘ We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one.’ [14] And in the end all shall be well, and all made plain in love, for ‘ God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.’ [15]
The full exposition of this faith and hope of the early Church, and of its attempts to find words to fit the Person of Him through whom it came, would carry us far beyond the proportion and scope of our present task What concerns us here is that Christianity is rooted firmly not in fantasy but in fact. That it is concerned with God is in part an inheritance from Judaism, in part a recognition of what under various names, is a general presupposition of human life. Man has never been able to believe that what he sees is the whole meaning and truth of his experience. And certainly, whatever Jung might expect us to claim, [16] Christianity has never held that its certainty of God is of the same order as the experimental certainty of the senses. For ‘ no man hath seen God at any time,’ even though it is true that ‘ the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him,’ [17] And when the first Christians went to the Greek world it was not with the Jewish God, but with the story of Jesus, written in lives upon which His own victorious life was evident for all to see. St. Paul at Athens was ready to take his cue from the altar to an Unknown God, but his message is the message of the Resurrection. [18] At Corinth he surrenders even this narrow contact with Greek thought. ‘ I determined,’ he [ p. 239 ] says, ’ not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ [19]
We have said that it is strictly scientific to choose a test case or experiment by which to examine a particular theory, and that such a single experiment, accurately made and interpreted, may be sufficient in itself for proof or disproof. But the experiment selected by the scientist in such an enquiry is not chosen at random. A scientist can give good reason for his choice and his reasoning is that appropriate to the methods of his science. The MichelsonMorley experiment was constructed, with immense care and precision, to confirm a particular theory of the ether by measuring a variation in the relative speed of light, which the experiment ought, upon that theory, to have revealed. The failure of the experiment was, in this case, its success. The theory which it was intended to vindicate had at once to be remodelled to fit this unexpected observation.
The Christian, seeking a meaning for this world more profound and more inclusive than any principle of physics, chooses, amid a multitude of facts relevant to his problem, the fact of Christ. Can he, too, give reasonable grounds for his choice ?
We have at once to admit that Christians have very often answered this question wrongly, or, at least, incompletely. Many of the objections to Christianity are very reasonable objections not to its essence, but to the ways in which it has been stated and defended. To say that we believe in Christ, so that we find in Him the key to all existence, because He was foretold in prophecy, or because He worked miracles, or because He rose from the dead, or simply because the Bible bids us believe, is to argue within one or other of a series of circles. For, if we really take the trouble to analyse our attitude towards the Old Testament, we only find prophecy where we look back to it from a fulfilment [ p. 240 ] in Jesus. Many things in the Old Testament might have been prophecy, and are not. [20] Or, again, we may or may not believe in miracles, but if we do so believe it is because they take meaning and become humanly bearable in Him. No man’s faith is the stronger for unaccountable and irrational happenings in his universe. Even a resurrection gave no assurance to men when it was a return of Nero for which they looked. And a direct and uncritical belief in the letter of the Bible is mere fetichism unless it rests upon a belief in Him of whom it speaks. Scripture cannot be its own warranty, and the search for archaeological facts to vindicate its accuracy is a futile quest if it is supposed that the results of such a search can either confirm or render void its authority.
The reasonable defence of the Christian choice of Christ as the revelation of the mystery of the universe is simply that in His life we see the problems of our own lives wrought out in an achievement of personality incomparable and complete. There is no avoidance of the dreadful, irrational realities of evil and death. There is suffering, and temptation, and the shadow of failure. Yet all these things are so portrayed in the Gospel narratives that they form a self-consistent picture of One who was completely master of His own soul. We know, as we read the story of His life, that this is humanity at its highest level, and, though such heights are utterly beyond our attaining, we know that He has revealed the purpose and possibility of our own immeasurably less effective lives. We claim, therefore, that here, if anywhere, it should be possible to discover the secret of personal being and therewith the secret of that reality within which persons have come to be.
[ p. 241 ]
But though this is reasonable, as a defence of Christianity, a critic of our position may still ask us to vindicate our choice of Christ as the highest human type. We have, after all, only said that we know that this is true. But what of Nietzsche, who saw in Him a weakling ; of Binet-Sanglé, [21] who was prepared to certify Him a paranoiac ? How shall we answer the challenge of one who offers us Gautama, or Socrates, or Napoleon instead ? This is the point at which we have no answer. We have made, and can defend, a reasonable claim. The assured place of Jesus in human history will carry us as far as that. But the Christian goes much further than reasonableness. He affronts the world by being sure. He does not commit his faith to the arbitrament of evidence and of logic. He knows the truth, and bids men disagree with him at their peril.
Certainty of this kind does not depend upon the ordinary processes of observation and logical judgment. It bears no resemblance at all to our certainty of the conclusion of a mathematical proof, or of a scientifically observed fact. For these are certainties which we cannot reject, while yet they demand proof if we are to accept them. But the Christian certainty lies beyond proof, and is obviously not outside the possibility of our rejection. If the ground of this certainty is to be stated in terms of reasoning at all we must use Ritschl’s formula, and call it a judgment of value rather than a judgment of fact. But this language, as the difficulties of Ritschlianism have shown abundantly, creates a whole series of problems of its own. And just as it is no matter of salvation that the Christian should be capable of understanding the intricacies of abstract logic, so is his faith something at once more simple and more fundamental than a proper appreciation of the fine points of a philosophy of values. Whatever else it may be it is not the conclusion of a syllogism, but a basic and unresolved response, personal [ p. 242 ] and direct. The nearest parallel to it in ordinary life is friendship, in which the element of personal assurance stands out clearly, and it is significant that both in the Old Testament and in the New the supreme vision of the possibility of man’s approach to God is stated in terms of friendship. In all the Hebrew tradition there was no figure like that of Moses, with whom the Lord spake ‘ face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.’ [22] And the memory of the discipleship of Jesus recalled no greater moment than that in which He said ‘ Ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you. No longer do I call you servants ; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth : but I have called you friends ; for all things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you.’ [23]
In the last analysis a response of this kind underlies all experience, and not only that in which there is a direct awareness of some person. We are aware of impersonal things too, and this primitive and simple awareness is the central fact of all consciousness, a fact as indisputable and necessary to Behaviourism as to any other psychology, and to psychology as to personal being itself. It is this fact which, as we saw, links religious faith to a principle elemental in all human life, as distinguished from the mere material continuity of thinghood and its wholly external interactions. In the child playing with the toys by which he learns to handle the greater toys of life, in the scientist caught and held by the intense and living interest of some object of his study, in the financier powerless in the grip of the deadly craving which money has the power to excite, we see the crude unshapen or distorted impulse of love and faith. We see too that there is a scale or system of levels in value or worth, which is something fundamental and quite distinct from anything which can strictly be called a judgment. When [ p. 243 ] value becomes valuation it has utterly changed its character. Our joy in a picture may bear some relation to its price in a catalogue, but it is not the same thing. And so it is in life. We know, without hesitation or proof or the possibility of defending our knowledge, that the love of a friend is more than the love of the glories of nature or the creative beauty of art, and that both stand higher than the love of the meat that perisheth.
It is at this point that we pass beyond the judgment and the criticism of psychology. The descriptive analysis of behaviour, even when it takes the ends and purposes of life into account, cannot by its very nature provide any estimate of its inherent worth. When we assert that love is more than self-regard, that humanity has a dignity utterly other than that of Nature and the living wonders of her making, that ‘ the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath,’ [24] we make statements upon which psychology has no right to an opinion. And this incompetence of psychology, as of science in general, does not mean that no opinion is possible. It only means that the methods and categories of science, admirable in their proper sphere, are not the sole and final arbiters of reality. We make no claim different in principle from the claims of science when we ask that the certainties of faith and love should not be ignored, and find them a more satisfying guide to life and its problems than the laws and systems of even the most accurate empiricism.
The psychologist himself, indeed, makes exactly this same claim, at once truly religious and scientifically indefensible, in his devotion to the study of man. He would not and could not engage in that study unless it had worth for him, and that worth must lie either in himself or in those whom he studies. His world is after all a world not of facts only but of personal values, and apart from the [ p. 244 ] personal values it would go ill with the facts. Among his facts, again, and involved in their analysis at every point, he finds that basic thing which reveals itself most clearly as love. For him, just as for the Christian, love remains primary and unexplained. Even when he reduces it to terms of sex he still leaves unresolved the primary and allsignificant fact that in an act physically and biologically determinate spirit and spirit meet, and that this strange masterful impulse is perhaps never, for man, without some touch of the sacramental. And we may press him further back still, to those earliest beginnings in which the object demands and obtains the attention of the subject, thereby awakening it to life and growth. Even here we find the primitive ego-other relationship, fundamental and irreducible. It is the whole task of psychology to describe its effects, but the relationship itself is not so to be analysed away.
Thus psychology demands, and Christianity claims, the interpretation of reality by human categories. The parallels with animal instinct and with the curious possibilities of bio-chemistry do not in the least suggest that the secret of life is to be found in a more careful observation of our less successful competitors in the race of life, or in a more skilful manipulation of reagent, crucible and retort. These things might avail if psychology could stand without the psychologist, if there could be a system of religion which had its essence in something other than the living, quivering, naked soul of man. It may be true that human nature bears all the marks of incompleteness and inadequacy. At every point we find the free and the creative interwoven, as warp crosses woof, with the determinate thinghood in which, to our bewilderment, it is manifested. Yet this bears witness at least as clearly to possibilities inherent in the so-called physical or material world as to limitations and sub-rational explanations of the personal, the creative, and the free. [ p. 245 ] The Christian appeal to Christ is in its essence simply the claim that man is for man the only measure whereby his universe may be measured. And amid the world of manhood we choose Christ because in Him manhood stands revealed with a fullness unique in human history. Here, if anywhere, its adequacy as a hypothesis is likely to be revealed.
No real rival to this claim is to be found in the artificial and relative postulates of science, which are of positive value only within the restricted and particular fields of scientific enquiry. These fields may be satisfying enough to those content to graze therein. Yet sometimes, perchance, even the cattle may gaze over the hedge and wonder, as once ox and ass stood patient and astonished by a manger where man, their ancient lord and master, lay in the weakness and glory of rebirth.
But it is another matter with the wide negations and abstractions of metaphysics, a pasture as unprofitable for science as it is barren for faith. Here at least we have the claim of a way of thought which leads us past the transient and the occasional, and seeks to find categories wherewith man may gain some hold upon that which lies beyond. But ever the philosopher grasps a shadow, and the reality eludes him. For the terms which he uses are bound by their content to this solid world of sense and of experience, and he cannot escape save by abstractions which empty them of all meaning. [25]
This deadly but inevitable philosophical tradition has been the greatest difficulty of Christian theology. Ever since the time of Plato, with his identification of the Good with Not-being, the tendency of philosophy (as of mysticism) has been to create words adequate for its purposes by negation of their positive and limited content. This was the disastrous heritage which Greece left to the Fathers of the [ p. 246 ] Church, with the result that they strove to describe God either by such negations, as in the four great negatives of the Chalcedonian formula, or by words so inclusive that they have lost all contact with ordinary human thought. Such terms as the ‘ Absolute,’ the ‘ Summum Bonum,’ the ‘ Ens Realissimum ’ are nothing more than question marks whereby man’s problems are indicated. They contribute nothing to the solution of those problems save an emphasis upon the problem itself which prevents man from treating it as negligible. And to speak of God negatively as infinite, ineffable, impassible, or positively as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, is to involve theology in a use of words each one of which is too vast for human thought and too indefinite for the elusive Reality which it strives to grasp. The language of philosophy has, indeed, a certain appearance of spaciousness, yet space itself may be a terror to one who loses touch with all landmarks. And if science, with its restrictions, afflicts the Christian with claustrophobia, philosophy with its abstractions may well result in an agoraphobia no less destroying to his peace. Throughout these lectures we have spoken, for purposes of discussion, of the ‘ ultimate reality ’ or ‘ creative reality,’ but such phrases, however valuable for an argument in which nothing is to be assumed, will not suffice us in the end. We do not at the last want a Reality, but a God. We do not want to know that He is almighty, but that He is strong to help us. We do not want to know that He is omnipresent, but that He is at our side. The broader terms of philosophy are valid enough. Doubtless the Absolute and God are one. But it is only through the direct and positive concepts which the Christian faith in Christ supplies that these wide abstractions of philosophy can be made safe for human thinking. The cosmic spaces are well enough, but man must dwell where there is air to breathe.
And so we return to Christ, that we may interpret our [ p. 247 ] world through Him. We leave on one side as secondary those things which, as the psychologists have shown us, may perhaps be due to our need and our imagining. It may be that our need will be supplied and our imagining draw near to truth, but we must not start our interpretation at this point, lest we be told that our theology turns about in a circle of our own devising. Our argument will move more securely if we take the direct facts of His life as the records stand, and think of Him in the first place not as Saviour but as Man. And with Him we must look to those whose lives He has changed, to the living history and fellowship of the Church which sprang into being through Him, and to the strangely vital and creative records in which His story is told.
At once we see that humanity, as revealed in Him, has two aspects, each of them inexplicable as fantasy.
(i) In Him that ego-other relationship, of which we have spoken so often, attains a fullness and a finality without any parallel. His claim to know God was no prophetic proclamation of a new theology, but a living and personal intimacy with the unseen reality, so close and so direct that, as the writer of the Fourth Gospel tells us, the Jews sought to kill Him, because He ‘ called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.’ [26] We are not now concerned with the interpretations which the Christian Church, rightly, as we believe, has put upon this fact, but with the fact itself. In Christ we see man at his highest and best, and the manhood there revealed has its centre and the source of its being in that which lies beyond all manhood. This is no case of an ego-ideal resting upon the home or the social environment, for the ideal of Christ at once fulfils and challenges every ideal that has ever arisen within human life. There is no explanation of such a life save in that unique Filial consciousness which the Gospels record. He looked to the [ p. 248 ] unseen with the freedom and directness of the son in his father’s house, and His sinless perfection is the complete response in manhood to the creative and ultimate reality which draws all being upwards to itself.
This is something far higher and yet far simpler than the mystic’s experience of union in which all sense of self is lost. Nor is it the occasional and non-rational divination of the numinous of which Otto speaks. It is a life yielded utterly to the creative impulse which streams in upon it, and so yielded it displays that creative impulse in an intimacy wholly free and wholly personal. It reveals reality in terms of what in ordinary human experience could have no other name than love, and the formula ‘ God is love,’ in which it is expressed, is the shortest and the most adequate Christian creed, as it is the profoundest postulate of any positive metaphysic.
His life shows, further, that this creative power of love is not active only in special providences. The God of Jesus is no departmental deity, claiming for Himself some part of human life, revealing Himself in this experience or in that. So it may seem to us, in our imperfect response to Him. It is only in part and dimly that we recognize Him in certain aspects and occasions of our life. But for Christ the whole of life has as its background, its Other, the God whom He knows as Father. The world of things and the world of personal being is real enough, but their meaning and being are seen in the light of the God from whom they came and to whom they go. It is thus that He views and transforms the problems of evil and suffering and sin. There is no denial of their terrible significance and power. They are faced and faced to the death. And yet the key to the mystery is love.
For us, with our imperfect response to God, these problems are problems still, and there is no answer to their urgency in terms of theory, whether it be for scientist, or [ p. 249 ] for psychologist, or for theologian. We cannot, in our incompleteness and imperfection, see as Christ saw, and no one of us can face the Cross as He faced it. So far as we face it at all it is in a power of love that flows from God through Him, and not in any power that rises up within ourselves. Yet we make no irrational and no fantastic claim when we take His solution as our own. The deepest and richest things in our own experience are those that seem most akin to Him. And even though much in life as we know it must remain unexplained, faith and reason may well walk together, for the guidance of reason alone is vain enough.
(2) The completeness of Christ’s intimacy with the Father is not something separate from and other than His love for man. His life was one of the fullest human intercourse and friendship, with its climax in forgiveness, and it was through the personal relationships into which He entered that His own conception of God became possible to others besides Himself. He revealed the Father, not, like all other great religious leaders, by pointing to a truth or fact beyond and other than Himself, but simply and directly in His own life of friendship and service. And so He showed that the way to God is not some separate way, apart from men, but that it is in and through one another, as it was through Him, that we come to God. The love of father or mother, husband, wife, or child, may not be something other than the love of God. If ever we set it in contrast or opposition to that love it loses its own true character. In Christ, and in Him alone, we see it as an expression of the fundamental truth of all being, God making Himself manifest in His world. This is the essential basis of the doctrine of the Incarnation and its link with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The revelation did not come to human souls in isolation, but through the direct and human way of friendship and forgiveness. In these Christ lived and still lives, [ p. 250 ] and still He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In these we see that the love of God and the love of men are not two but one. And ever more clearly we see how deeply this power of love is the one power strong enough to build up the life of men and the life of nations. And if we do not as yet find love everywhere and in all things creative and triumphant, love is very patient, and it may be that one day when, in God’s good time, we see Him face to face, faith and knowledge shall be one again, and God, who is very love, be all in all.
Our happiest earthly comradeships hold a foretaste
of the feast of salvation and by thatt virtue in them
provoke desire beyond them to out-reach and surmount
their humanity in some superhumanity
and ultimat perfection : which, howe’er 'tis found
or strangely imagin’d, answereth to the need of each
and pulleth him instinctivly as to a final cause.
Thus unto all who hav found their high ideal in Christ,
Christ is to them the essence discern’d or undiscern’d
of all their human friendships ; and each lover of him
and of his beauty must be as a bud on the Vine
and hav participation in him ; for Goddes love
is unescapable as nature’s environment,
which if a man ignore or think to thrust it off
he is the ill-natured fool that runneth blindly on death. [27]
Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, iv. 11. 1436-1441. ↩︎
See p. 123. ↩︎
Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, passim, e.g., ‘ It is necessary that man should entirely give up the belief in personal, superhuman causation. Divided responsibility works no better in religion than in business ’ (p. 329). ↩︎
Op. cit. p. 323. ↩︎
Leuba, op. cit. p. 332 ; cf. pp. 326 f. ↩︎
See p. 52. ↩︎
See p. 54. ↩︎
This sentence is based upon a phrase used, I believe, by Ingersoll. ↩︎
The phrase comes from Clerk Maxwell’s poem quoted above, p. 39. ↩︎
Mk. i. 1. ↩︎
Lk. xvi. 31. ↩︎
I Jn. iv. 7. ↩︎
I Jn. iv. 8, 16. ↩︎
I Jn. v. 19. ↩︎
2 Cor. v. 19. ↩︎
See p. 55. ↩︎
Jn. i. 18. ↩︎
Acts xvii. 23-31. ↩︎
I Cor. ii. 2. ↩︎
A good example of this retrospective discovery of prophecy is the use in Jn. xix. 36, 37, of Exod. xii. 46, and Zech. xii. 10. The point can be illustrated by a study of Ps. xxii. with its astonishingly close parallels to the Passion narratives, mingled with verses which cannot be interpreted literally in that connection. ↩︎
Binet-Sanglé, La Folie de Jesus, ii. 509 f. ↩︎
Exod. xxxiii. n ; cf. Deut. xxxiv. 10 ; Jer. xxxi. 34. ↩︎
Jn. xv. 14, 15. ↩︎
Mk. ii. 27. ↩︎
Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 199 ff. ↩︎
Jn. v. 18. ↩︎
Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, iv. 11. 1408-1422. ↩︎