Henry Sloane Coffin - Some Christian Convictions
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Henry Sloane Coffin >> Some Christian Convictions
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10 SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS
OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE CREED OF JESUS AND OTHER SERMONS
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS
HYMNS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD EDITED BY H.S. COFFIN AND A.W. VERNON
_The Same for Use in Baptist Churches_ REV. CHARLES W. GILKEY, Co-editor
IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING (Second printing)
UNIVERSITY SERMONS (Second printing)
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH A CHRISTIAN APPLICATION TO PRESENT CONDITIONS
Some Christian Convictions
A PRACTICAL RESTATEMENT IN TERMS OF PRESENT-DAY THINKING
BY HENRY SLOANE COFFIN
MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY
_Non enim omnis qui cogitat credit sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et
credendo sogitat et cogitando credit_.--AUGUSTINE
COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published, 1915 Second printing, 1915 Third printing, 1916 Fourth
printing, 1920
TO D.P.C.
SOCIAE REI HUMANAE ATQUE DIVINAE
PREFACE
Bishop Burnet, in his _History of His Own Time_, writes of Sir Harry
Vane, that he belonged "to the sect called 'Seekers,' as being satisfied
with no form of opinion yet extant, but waiting for future discoveries."
The sect of Sir Harry Vane is extraordinarily numerous in our day; and
at various times I have been asked to address groups of its adherents,
both among college students and among thoughtful persons outside
university circles, upon the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Some
of my listeners had been trained in the Church, but had thrown off their
allegiance to it; others had been reared in Judaism or in agnosticism;
others considered themselves "honorary members" of various religious
communions--interested and sympathetic, but uncommitted and
irresponsible; more were would-be Christians somewhat restive
intellectually under the usual statements of Christian truths. It was
for minds of this type that the following lectures were prepared. They
are not an attempt at a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine,
but an effort to restate a few essential Christian convictions in terms
that are intelligible and persuasive to persons who have felt the force
of the various intellectual movements of recent years. They do not
pretend to make any contribution to scholarship; they aim at the less
difficult, but perhaps scarcely less necessary middleman's task of
bringing the results of the study of scholars to men and women who (to
borrow a phrase of Augustine's) "believe in thinking" and wish to "think
in believing."
They may be criticised by those who, satisfied with the more traditional
ways of stating the historic Christian faith, will dislike their
discrimination between some elements in that faith as more, and others
as less, certain. I would reply that they are intentionally but a
partial presentation of the Gospel for a particular purpose; and further
I find my position entirely covered by the words of Richard Baxter in
his _Reliquiae_: "Among Truths certain in themselves, all are not equally
certain unto me; and even of the Mysteries of the Gospel, I must needs
say with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever men pretend, the subjective
Certainty cannot go beyond the objective Evidence: for it is caused
thereby as the print on the Wax is caused by that on the Seal. I am not
so foolish as to pretend my certainty to be greater than it is, merely
because it is a dishonour to be less certain. They that will begin all
their Certainty with that of the Truth of the Scripture, as the
_Principium Cognoscendi_, may meet me at the same end; but they must
give me leave to undertake to prove to a Heathen or Infidel, the Being
of God and the necessity of Holiness, even while he yet denieth the
Truth of Scripture, and in order to his believing it to be true."
In preparing the lectures for publication I have allowed the spoken
style in which they were written to remain; several of the chapters,
however, have been somewhat enlarged.
I am indebted to two of my colleagues, Professor James E. Frame and
Professor A.C. McGiffert, for valuable suggestions in two of the
chapters, and especially to my friend, the Rev. W. Russell Bowie, D.D.,
of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Va., who kindly read over the
manuscript.
CONTENTS
Introduction--Some Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Which
Have Affected Christian Beliefs 1
Chapter 1. Religion 23
Chapter 2. The Bible 49
Chapter 3. Jesus Christ 78
Chapter 4. God 118
Chapter 5. The Cross 140
Chapter 6. The New Life--Individual and Social 160
Chapter 7. The Church 181
Chapter 8. The Christian Life Everlasting 205
SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS
INTRODUCTION
SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED
CHRISTIAN BELIEFS
When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stone
was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe nor
any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectual
beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to house
their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of
materials they found already prepared by other movements of the human
mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of the
quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand the
construction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear in
many minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than a
century; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet been
exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but new
openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot be
certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear an
identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of the
principal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of the
temple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit of
the Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out of
the thought of each age.
_Romanticism_ has been one rich source of material. This literary
movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the
opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by
the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English
Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer
expression to all the elements in human nature. It brought a new feeling
towards nature as alive with a spiritual Presence--
Something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for them
miraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and sent
writers, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the pages
of historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an inner
Reality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle,
who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken in
words," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols of
the ineffable God.
To the output of this quarry we may attribute the following elements in
the structure of our present Christian thought:
(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct,
that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely in
feelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize and
express. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of this
movement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was like
finding names for your feelings."
(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "from
within" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, but
penetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Him
as breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, to
us He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the five
thousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be more
startling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them with
bread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to speak
of Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that were
joined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of the
Almighty," and Christ is not so much God _and_ man, as God _in_ man.
(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to more
parts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnell
entitled an essay that still repays careful reading, _The Gospel a Gift
to the Imagination._ One of our chief complaints with the historic
creeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in which
religious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose,
rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process.
Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol or
sacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formula
of logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition in
geometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who have
experienced contact with the living God through Jesus.
A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and from
which later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, is
_Humanitarianism_. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its struggle
for the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, setting
free the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war and
cruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, and
devoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier.
It found itself at odds with current theological opinions at a number of
points. Preachers of religion were emphasizing the total depravity of
man; and humanitarians brought to the fore the humanity of Jesus, and
bade them see the possibilities of every man in Christ. They were
teaching the endless torment of the impenitent wicked in hell; and with
its new conceptions of the proper treatment of criminals by human
justice, it inveighed against so barbarous a view of God. They
proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ's death the
expiation of man's sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in
McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England, the
Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men's consciences,
as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates
a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God,
who bears His children's sins, as Jesus bore His brethren's
transgressions on the cross. They were insisting that the Bible was
throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel's
enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by
vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and
Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good
than it was trying to produce in men on earth. These men of sensitive
conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the
Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral:
"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and
he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _Theaet_.
176c).
From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:
(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.
(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty
to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively
reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it
is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood
at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.
A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out
most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the
temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,
not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings of
things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, _The Origin
of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself
appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominant
everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer
and miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into nature
exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the
things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.
The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in
the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the
writers of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed a
constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many
attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle was
due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and a
religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either
attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I do
not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Both
physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" as
something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and
what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all the while to new
stimuli, and the title of a recent book, _Creative Evolution_, indicates
a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.
From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian
convictions, with much else, these items:
(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of
insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of
the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the
mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole
creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they
made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate
districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the
supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to
truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response
to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it
must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our
labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of
working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal
fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding
His new and completer entrances into the world's life.
(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which
religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and
grow in a changing world.
(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and
attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find
in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now
is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.
And not from nature up to nature's God,
But down from nature's God look nature through.
(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes
that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various
writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.
(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more
complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to
light.
A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this
scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the
Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,
but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church,
and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined
the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch,
pronounced the _Books of the Chronicles_ less accurate historically than
the _Books of the Kings_, considered the present form of the books of
_Isaiah_, _Jeremiah_ and _Hosea_ probably due to later hands, and
distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less
moment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, and
suggested Barnabas as the writer of the _Epistle to the Hebrews_. But
the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the
Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to
which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery
of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the
Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of
the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they
profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.
We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian
thought to these scholarly investigations:
(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that
falls in with the idea of development or evolution.
(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,
science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience of
which it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.
(3) An historical rather than a speculative Christ. We do not begin
(however we may end) with a Figure in the heavens, the eternal Son of
God, but with Jesus of Nazareth. This method of approaching Him
reinforces the emphasis on His manhood which came from Humanitarianism.
Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antaeus, has always drawn fresh
strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the
Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His
figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in
the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces
are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact
with the Jesus of history.
Still another opening in the scientific quarry is _Psychology_. The last
century saw great advances in the investigation of the mind of man,
which revolutionized educational methods, gave new tools to novelists
and historians, and threw new light on every aspect of the human spirit.
Psychologists turned their attention to religion, and have done much to
chart out the movements of man's nature in his response to his highest
inspirations. They have altered methods of Biblical education in our
Sunday Schools, have shown us helpful and harmful ways of presenting
religious appeals, and have given us scientific standards to test the
value of the materials employed in public worship.
We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them:
(1) The normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been
regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human
spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed
personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You
may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease
to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great
quantity of _Varieties of Religious Experience_, and he deals with all
of them respectfully.
(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience. Man "wills to
live," and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are
dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any
he can find in his world. He "wills to believe," and discovers an
answer to his faith in the Unseen. This is a reaffirmation of the
definition, "faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test
of things not seen." And the student of religious psychology has now
vastly more material on which to work, because the last century opened
up still another quarry for investigation in _Comparative Religion_. An
Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and
false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less
developed. Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many
striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief. It is not possible
to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is
light, and within the rest all is darkness. Everything that grows out of
man's experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or
practice that has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human
being is without significance. Our own faith is often clarified by
comparing it with that of some supposedly unrelated religion. Many a
usage and conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to
something in our Bible. The development of theology or of ritual in
some other religion throws light on similar developments in
Christianity. The widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our
assurance of the reality of God. "To the philosopher," wrote Max Mueller,
"the existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of
the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought." Under
varied names, and with very differing success in their relations with
the Unseen, men have had fellowship with the one living God. It was this
unity of religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving
to express when they wrote, "Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni;
sages name variously Him who is but One."
This study of comparative religion has gained for us:
(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity,
and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its
answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.
(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go
not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing
religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made
some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith
He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is
to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God
in Jesus Christ.
A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value
to faith than any of those named, is the _Social Movement_. In the
closing years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on
as voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals, which
had not existed in the original "state of nature" where all men were
supposed to have been free and equal. The closing years of the
Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism, and
talking of "social evolution." This conception of society altered men's
theories of economics, of history, of government. Nor did these newer
theories remain in the classrooms of universities or the meetings of
scientists; they became the platforms of great political parties, like
the Socialists in Germany and France, and the Labor Party in Britain.
Men are thinking, and what is more _feeling_, today, in social terms;
they are revising legislation, producing plays and novels, and
organizing countless associations in the interest of social advance. We
are still too much in the thick of the movement to estimate its results,
and we can but tentatively appraise its contributions to our Christian
thought.
(1) It has given men a new interest in religion. The intricacies of
social problems predispose men to value an invisible Ally, and such
prepossession is, as Herbert Spencer said, "nine-points of belief." The
social character of the Christian religion, with its Father-God and its
ideals of the Kingdom, gives it a peculiar charm to those whose hearts
have been touched with a passion for social righteousness. A recent
historian of the thought of the last century, after reviewing its
scientific and philosophic tendencies, makes the remark that "an
increasing number of thinkers of our age expect the next step in the
solution of the great problems of life to be taken by practical
religion."
(2) It has made us realize that religion is essentially social. Men's
souls are born of the social religious consciousness; are nourished by
contact with the society of believers, in fellowship with whom they grow
"a larger soul," and find their destiny in a social religious
purpose--the Kingdom of God.
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